Page 97 of Brutal
She does.
My mother steps between my father and me and settles one hand lightly on my shoulder. Her touch is not force. It’s not warning. It’s simply there. Calm where everything else in the room is about to become something else.
“Look at me, Samson.”
I do.
Her eyes are steady. Green. Beautiful. Loving.
“Did you mean to break it?”
“No.”
“Then don’t act like you did.”
My father stops a few feet away. He towers over both of us.
His expression is probably unreadable to anyone else. But not to me.
My mother doesn’t move aside. “Power,” she says quietly, her gaze still on mine, “means you have a choice. You don’t have to do something just because you can.”
The words don’t make sense yet.
Not really.
But I remember the way she says them.
Like they matter more than the broken glass at our feet.
More than my father standing there, looking down at me with contempt.
I straighten hard, breath lodged too high in my chest.
My father taught me about power. My mother taught me about choice.
I didn’t choose restraint with Delaney.
That’s the problem.
Not that I lost control. That I didn’t want to choose it.
A knock sounds once.
I don’t answer.
The door opens anyway.
Nate steps inside and closes it behind him. He takes one look at me and knows enough. That’s what I hate about him. Not that he sees. That he enjoys it. He always envied my physical power, which is why he loves seeing me battling with myself.
I push away from the desk and move to the sideboard. I pour a bourbon but don’t offer him one.
“She walked into your world,” he says. “That should have ended the matter.”
“It did.”
“No,” he says. “It didn’t.”
I take a swallow and set the glass down harder than necessary. “I’ve told you a dozen times that I’ve handled it.”
