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For the first time, Maxwell saw true shock on Kurt’s face. “Baby—”
“And stop calling me that!” Maxwell strained forward in vain, screaming in Kurt’s face with all the fury that had eaten at him for years. “I am not yours. I don’t need you. This is your fault!”
Kurt cracked the back of his hand across Maxwell’s cheek. “I’m fucking saving you, you ungrateful little bitch.”
But Maxwell could barely feel the physical pain over the emotional agony raging through him. He spat the blood gathering in his mouth onto Kurt’s shirt. “You did this to me.”
“You did this to yourself,” Kurt sneered.
“No.” Maxwell shook his head. “No, you made me afraid of everyone. You made me feel like if I ever got close to anyone, they would ruin me. Just like you did.”
“You were already ruined when I found you.” Kurt grabbed his chin. “You were sad and alone and always would have been if I hadn’t found you.”
“No.”
“Yes.” Kurt shook him. “Did you fucking forget what you are? Who else do you think could ever fucking look past that? Who else do you think could ever love you?”
Maxwell already knew, and the answer was out before he had the chance to consider the consequences. “Garrett.”
The change stole across Kurt’s face slowly. The sneering, pitying, frustrated anger that Maxwell realized he was so used to after all those years together gave way in one smooth transition to a malevolence that looked far more honest than any one of Kurt’s many other calculated displays of anger.
Maxwell had gone too far. He’d flipped a switch in Kurt that he’d always known on some level was there but had never actually considered. And he wasn’t going to be able to flip it back off.
When Kurt finally spoke again, his voice was quiet and confident without any of the passion or emotion he wielded so potently. “You foolish little slut.”
Maxwell swallowed but found his throat dry. He saw Kurt’s eyes trace across his face, and he knew what Kurt saw across his new qeshian skin: that inky blackness of pure terror.
“You let him fuck you, didn’t you?” Kurt slid his hand around to the back of Maxwell’s neck and brushed his thumb along the scab of the cut that led straight to Maxwell’s center of consciousness. When Maxwell didn’t answer, Kurt scratched the scab away with his thumb and dug the tip into the cut, and Maxwell gasped at the pain. “You think because he stuck his cock in your frigid little hole that he loves you.”
Maxwell fought to keep the pain from showing on his face as Kurt dug into Maxwell’s wound, but he knew the colors racing across his skin gave him away.
“You little idiot.” Finally, Kurt pulled his hands off him and stood tall. “Thank god you have me.”
Kurt pulled a long knife from his thigh holster, and Maxwell’s eyes flew wide.
He tried to kick his chair back. “N—”
Kurt slammed his hand across Maxwell’s mouth in an instant. He brought his knife up to Maxwell’s neck and tapped the tip against his throat. “Keep your mouth shut, sweetheart. I don’t want to cut up your pretty new skin any more than I have to.”
Sebastian would have already killed him.
Maxwell found himself thinking the thought with a fresh batch of frustration and self-loathing. Kurt held himself right in front of Maxwell’s face, with his hand just inches from Maxwell’s pincers. Sebastian could have taken that opening, ripped through Kurt’s skin, crushed his consciousness, and walked out of this room whistling.
But Maxwell had never learned how to do that. He’d given himself over to the fear of leaving the comfort of his own body. To the fear of exposing himself. And so he’d never learned, and now he was trapped. Even now, he didn’t dare cut himself out of the qesh, too certain he’d end up on the floor and crushed by Kurt’s steel-toed boots.
“Good boy,” Kurt murmured when Maxwell didn’t move. Then he pressed a kiss to Maxwell’s forehead and sliced through the zip ties holding Maxwell’s wrists to the chair. “Let’s get you out of here.”
The blood flooded back into Maxwell’s fingers with a tingly pain, and he massaged his palms as Kurt knelt between his thighs—his knife too close to Maxwell’s femoral artery for him to consider moving. But he didn’t slice Maxwell open to bleed out, only sliced through the zip ties and pulled Maxwell up to standing.
Maxwell stumbled as he was suddenly forced to put weight on his blood-deprived feet, but Kurt caught him and turned him to press his back to Kurt’s chest. A cold line of metal appeared at the nape of Maxwell’s neck, and all of Maxwell’s awareness zeroed down to the thin line of pain.
“Don’t make me do it, sweetheart.” Kurt pressed his lips to the shell of Maxwell’s ear. Even in Maxwell’s long, qeshian body, Kurt still stood over him. “Just be good, okay?”
Maxwell licked his lips and didn’t dare nod with only a thin barrier of skin and the slightest of muscles between the honed edge of Kurt’s knife and his body nestled into his brainstem. “Okay.”
After one last kiss to Maxwell’s temple, Kurt walked them to the door and knocked on it.
The Cartel member opened it up and then backpedaled when he saw Maxwell. “What the fuck?”
