He turned the dryer off and laid it on the bed beside him. He bunched my curls in his hands, settling them in some order that made him happy. I sat and blinked. I had seldom cared less about what my hair looked like than right now.

I heard the door open behind us. I didn’t turn around. It didn’t seem important enough. Then I smelled coffee. My pulse sped a little, and I sat up and realized just how much I’d been huddling in on myself. I forced myself to sit straighter, shoulders back, spine straight. I would not hunch like a dog that had been kicked once too often; the fact that that described how parts of me were feeling was neither here nor there. My emotions felt kicked to hell, but I could not let it make me look like I’d been kicked.

Richard was in front of me shirtless, in a pair of jeans so faded they had white patches here and there, as if there’d been some sort of bleach accident. Richard threw out jeans when they looked like that. He was barefoot, too.

“Sorry all your clothes got wet,” I said. My voice didn’t sound right, as if there were an echo between what I was saying and the inside of my head.

He held a red coffee mug down to me. It was one of the new mugs that went with the new dishes that Nathaniel had picked out for here. Just like back at our house, he had picked two contrasting colors of plain, heavy dinnerware. For our house it was green and blue, but for the Circus he’d picked red and black. The dishes sat in the newly installed kitchen that had gone in at the same time as all the new bathrooms. Good thing nothing went this wrong when we’d had all the workmen in here.

Richard knelt in front of me and held out the mug. “Coffee. You need it.”

I nodded but made no move to take it. All I could think of was that Nathaniel was down the hall with doctors and Micah to hold his hand. I was waiting to get my shit together before I went down to see him. There was a quiet part of me that kept repeating, “Haven tried to kill Nathaniel. He meant it to be Nathaniel lying there with his brains all over the floor.” Then I’d shove the thoughts away and try to stop thinking about anything.

“Do you not want the coffee?” he asked.

“It smells good,” I said, and my voice sounded as numb as I felt.

Richard touched my hand where it showed around the edge of the blanket and wrapped my fingers around the handle of the mug. “Drink it.”

My hand started to shake as I raised the mug, so I had to use my other hand to steady it. Two hands were better. I took a moment to smell the aroma: rich, dark, good coffee. Nathaniel had been doing my coffee shopping for me. He was the only one who always got what I wanted.

“How’s Nathaniel?” I asked.

“As I’ve answered before, ma petite, he is fine. He will be fine. He is hurt, but it is not permanent.”

“Drink the coffee while it’s hot, Anita,” Richard said.

I sipped the coffee and it was good. There wasn’t quite the right amount of sugar in it, but Richard didn’t know that I’d started putting in more sugar. He hadn’t been around enough to know that I’d changed anything.

“How do we keep everyone safe?” I asked, and I wasn’t sure who I was asking.

“We will meet with the tigers when you are ready,” Jean-Claude said.

I shook my head. “I don’t mean from Marmee Noir, I mean from things like what just happened. I thought Haven and I had worked things out. I thought it was safe.”

“We all did,” Richard said.

Jean-Claude sat down behind me, so he could curl his body against my back. His arms slid carefully around my shoulders so that he didn’t jostle the coffee, but he could still hold me. “You could not have known, ma petite.”

“That Haven was a bad guy? I knew that, and him beating them almost to death showed he hadn’t changed.”

He laid his head against my hair. “There are bad men among Rafael’s rats, but they would never have behaved so. It is not his past that made this happen. It is not that he spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law that made this happen.”

“Then what? Why?”

“Do not ask this now, ma petite. Please, let it rest until you have had more time.”

“No,” I said, “if you know why this happened, then tell me, because I don’t understand it.”

“Take the coffee, Richard,” he said.

Richard took it and sat back on the floor, his hand finding my fresh jeans under the blanket. I had clothes to change into no matter how many times I ruined them. I had my whole damn wardrobe here. So I could keep changing after every bloodbath. Richard rubbed my leg through the jeans. I let him.

“Jean-Claude, tell me,” I said.

He wrapped his arms around my shoulders, his face next to mine. “I believe that he had never been in love before, perhaps not truly loved anyone ever before in his life before you, ma petite.”

I frowned, putting my hands on his arms. “So what does that mean? If I was the first love he’d ever had, why did he try to kill one of the other people I love most?”

He held me tighter, and I knew whatever he was going to say I wouldn’t like, but I needed to hear it. I needed to try to understand what the fuck had gone wrong.

“I am told he answered the question of why he had done it, ma petite.”

I nodded. “He said, because I loved all the other men more than I loved him.”

“A certain type of man, when he loves for the first time, his love is not really love, it is possession. Possessions don’t have rights or feelings; they are something to be owned and controlled. He had spent more than a year trying to do just that, and failing.”

“So when he attacked Micah and Nathaniel the last time we were all at my house, that was sort of a last-ditch effort to try to, what, own me?”

“When you fought on their side against him, he couldn’t understand it,” Richard said quietly.

“He hurt people I loved. I don’t let that happen.”

“But he was stronger than they were; he could have won the fight if you hadn’t sided with them. I think if he’d been willing to really hurt you physically, you might not have won then.”

I nodded, holding on to Jean-Claude’s arms, leaning in against the solidness of him. Richard kept rubbing my leg over and over. “He was willing to hurt me today.”

“Maybe,” Richard said, “but it wasn’t you he wanted to bloody. Even in the fight he didn’t actually bloody you, did he?”

I stared down at him. “What do you mean?”

“He didn’t want to hurt you physically, even at the end.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” I asked.

“No, I mean, yes. Shit.”

“Are you saying Haven wouldn’t have hurt me? That I didn’t have to kill him?” My voice was rising, almost yelling.

“No,” Richard said, “no, he had to die. He was too dangerous.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Richard put the coffee mug carefully on the bedside table and knelt in front of me, his hands on my knees under the blanket. “I’m saying he didn’t want to hurt you physically, but he wanted to hurt you, Anita. He just wanted to hurt you the way you’d hurt him.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Jean-Claude spoke with his face next to mine. “It means, ma petite, that he knew who to kill to break your heart the most.”

I turned so I could see his face. “What?”

“You love me, I know that,” he said, “but the thought of Nathaniel dead and gone, the thought of how close you came to losing him today, that is the thought that turns your skin cold and makes you unwilling to feel.”

I opened my mouth to tell him he was crazy, but I closed my mouth and tried to think. I shook my head. “I don’t know what to say to that. I’d feel just as bad if it were one of you wounded in the other room.”

Richard laid his head on my lap. My hand came down automatically to touch the foamy waves of his hair. “I know you care for me, Anita, and maybe if I stop being such an ass you’ll love me again, but I had my own bad moments watching you fall in love with Nathaniel and Micah. Micah I got. He’s Nimir-Raj. He might be too small to win a fistfight with me or one of the larger dominants, but he’s a good leader, better than me, better than Haven was. We both recognized that, and respected it, but Nathaniel—it took me a long time to understand why you loved him.” He spoke with his head in my lap, his tall, bare upper body bowed so he could fit his head and some of those broad shoulders in my lap. I could only see the side of his face as he talked, and he couldn’t see mine at all. Was that on purpose?