“Then how about if you hadn’t taken it, you’d be laying in bed needing Jenks’s help to use the bathroom?”

I pulled my head up and took a breath. “That helps. But I’m still not taking any more.”

She gave me a short-lived close-lipped smile, and I watched her face go as empty as the dark street. I didn’t want to get up yet. I was tired, and it was the first time we had been together alone since—since the bite. Returning to the motel room with Jenks, Jax, the kitten, and Nick to make my peachy-keen illegal charms and black curses had all the appeal of eating cold lima beans.

A station wagon passed us, the muffler spewing a blue smoke that would have earned the driver a ticket in Cincinnati. I was cold, and I hunched into my coat. It was only eleven-thirty, but it looked like four in the morning. “You okay?” Ivy said, obviously having seen me shiver.

“Cold,” I said, feeling like a hypochondriac.

Ivy crossed her legs at her knees. “Sorry,” she whispered.

I lifted my gaze, finding her expression lost in the shadow from the streetlight behind her. “It’s not your fault I didn’t bring my winter coat.”

“For biting you,” she said, her voice low. Her attention touched upon my stitches, then dropped to the pavement.

Surprised, I scrambled to put my thoughts in order. I’d thought I was going to be the one to bring this up. Our pattern had always been: Ivy does something to scare me, Ivy tells me what I did wrong, I promise Ivy not to do it, we never bring it up again. Now she wanted to talk?

“Well, I’m not,” I finally said.

Ivy’s head came up. Shock shone from her dark eyes, raw and unhidden. “You said on the phone that you’d done some thinking,” she stammered. “That you were going to make smarter decisions. You’re leaving the firm, aren’t you? As soon as this run is over?”

Suddenly I saw her depression in an entirely new light, and I almost laughed in relief for my misunderstanding. “I’m not leaving the firm!” I said. “I meant smarter decisions on who I trusted. I don’t want to leave. I want to try to find a blood balance with you.”

Ivy’s lips parted. Turned as she was to me, the streetlight glinted on her perfect teeth, and then she snapped her mouth shut.

“Surprise,” I said weakly, my pulse fast. This was the scariest thing I’d done in a while—including standing down three Were packs.

For six heartbeats Ivy stared at me. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said firmly, resettling herself to face forward and put herself in shadow. “You don’t understand. I lost control. If Jenks hadn’t interfered, I would have killed you. Jenks is right. I’m a danger to everyone I care about. You have no idea how hard it is to find and maintain a blood relationship. Especially if I leave you unbound.” Her voice was calm but I could hear panic in it. “And I’m by God not going to bind you to me to make it easier. If I do, everything would be what I want, not what we want.”