His voice cracked like a whip, anger in every word, and each one seemed to hit me right in the chest.
It was the first time Bishop had ever yelled at me. Even when he’d hated me, even when he had despised me for my father’s actions, he had spoken to me in smooth, controlled tones. The sound of his fury fixed me in place, silent and unmoving.
But Bishop wasn’t frozen like I was. He stalked forward, his voice rising, his hazel eyes flashing.
“Don’t you fuckin’ get it? This shit is bigger than Flint—and, hell, after everything that happened with Flint, why are you still poking your nose where it doesn’t belong? Why are you still insisting on trying to help your father? You were almost raped and fuckin’ killed—”
“You think I don’t know that?!” I couldn’t let him keep going on. Couldn’t let him keep telling me what I already knew. “You think I don’t consider every day what might have happened to me? About what Flint would have done to me? Do you really think I’m that stupid, Bishop?”
He scoffed, tossing the book away from him.
“I’m beginning to question your intelligence and your sanity, given how little you seem to care about your own safety, Princess.”
The word had the same harsh quality it’d had when he and the others had first started calling me by that nickname—back before it was an endearment of any kind.
Anger rose up, mixing with my guilt and fear in a hurricane of emotions that threatened to drown me.
“You have no right to tell me what to do about this,” I gritted out. “No right at all! Not when you’re running around breaking and entering and stealing and doing who knows what else in your spare time. You don’t get to lecture me about my family, Bish. Especially not about this.”
He shook his head, the movement dangerous and slow, like a bull about to charge.
“Cora, this isn’t a game. You seem to keep treatin’ it like it is, like if you keep pokin’ and proddin’, eventually everything is just going to fall in line for you. But that’s not how the real world fucking works. It’s not, never has, never will, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. I don’t know what the fuck I need to do to make you see that—”
“You can’t make me do shit, Bishop Madigan!” I snapped, my emotions overriding common sense.
He had every right to be mad at me—and he was mad, I could see it in every tense line of his body—but at this moment, I was mad too. I was angry at the whole damn world, furious at Flint for betraying my misplaced trust, pissed at whoever had put my father behind bars and set this whole fucked-up chain of events in motion.
I was sick of feeling helpless and powerless, of going through life constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I couldn’t keep the boys safe.
I couldn’t keep my father safe.
I couldn’t even keep myself safe, and I hated that feeling more than anything.
Bishop’s expression hardened, his body going too still. “You don’t think so, Princess? You don’t think I can stop you if I want to?”
The look in his eyes ignited an instinctual impulse in me, a prey animal’s urge to run when a predator gets too close. But I fought down the urge to bolt, keeping my back straight and glaring up at him.
“I don’t think you will.”
With that, I moved to shove past him, but quick as a snake, his hand whipped out and wrapped around my upper arm. He pulled me back against him, the warm strength of his body overwhelming mine as my back pressed against his chest. “You’re wrong as hell about that,” he muttered, his voice dark. “Did you forget our agreement? You’re ours. That means this isn’t your fuckin’ decision to make.”
“I never agreed to that!” I yanked my arms out of his grip, and the second he released me, I whirled on him, shoving at his chest with both hands. “I never agreed to let you run my whole fucking life!”
“No, you just agreed to fuck the three of us and let us save your life when you threw yourself headfirst into danger,” he growled, catching me by the wrists.
My heart stuttered in my chest, the crassness of his harsh words slicing through me like a blade. It made me think of my mother’s accusations, her insistence that my relationship with the Lost Boys was the same as her fucked up affair with Mark Jemison.
I struggled against Bish’s hold, glaring up into his hazel eyes as I panted for breath.
“Well, if your current acquisition is such a pain in your ass, why don’t you just find someone else to control and stop worrying about what I do?”
“Because I don’t want anyone else!”
The words exploded out of him, and he wrestled my arms behind my back, holding them there as he pinned me against the counter.
We were chest to chest, both breathing hard, as the air around us seemed to pulse with electric energy.