The words settled like ash in the still air.
Bev’s mouth opened and closed. No sound escaped. Her jaw trembled once, a fish gasping for air. The flickering light caught the wet sheen on her split lips, making her look less like a woman and more like a cracked porcelain doll someone had decided to melt.
Archer leaned toward Mac. “Nowthatwas dramatic.”
Mac’s quiet chuckle was out of place, but not unwelcome. Even now, levity was their armor.
The room’s temperature seemed to tilt. Beneath the animal was a metal brazier, fire-safe, the perfect amount of kindling just waiting for a spark. Thomas could already smell the faint trace of accelerant, a ghost of smoke and oil, that familiar promise ofcombustion. Asa’s hands never left Zane, one braced across his chest, the other cupping his hip, a human barricade.
Aiden snapped on heavy gloves and tested a hatch along the bull’s flank. The hinges groaned, a deep, resonant sound that echoed off the steel walls like something alive.
August drifted closer, eyes incandescent. “Airflow inlets here?” he asked, delighted. “You compensated for thermal expansion along the hinges?”
Aiden gave him a bland look. “Always.”
Mal crouched, fascinated by the ventwork along the jaw. “And the bellowing, acoustic chambers?”
“Precisely measured,” Aiden said. “The pitch will modulate as the temperature rises.”
“God, that’s beautiful,” Mal breathed, not about the math, but the art.
Thomas couldn’t disagree. There was a kind of perverse beauty in precision. The same meticulous devotion Aiden poured into engineering, now channeled into something ancient and terrible.
“So, is this a thing you guys do a lot?” Jordan asked the other boys.
Arsen arched a brow. “Roast the elderly?”
Jordan snorted. “I meant gathering the family to kill people, but yeah, I guess that too?”
“We don’t really discriminate by age,” Cree said, studying Jordan. “You don’t seem very disturbed by this.”
“I don’t know her. Why should I be upset?” he asked.
Levi frowned. “’Cause she’s a human?”
Nico scoffed. “Debatable.”
“She seems like a super shitty person. Thomas and Aiden are cool. I can’t see them doing this for fun. They must have their reasons.”
That simple faith settled somewhere deep in Thomas’s chest, a small, surprising ache. Jordan’s matter-of-fact acceptance was a strange kind of validation that bringing Matty—and by extension, Jordan—into the fold was the right thing to do.
Jordan was a good kid. He and Matty had grown up together. Matty didn’t think he and Aiden knew about his and Jordan’s extracurricular activities…the ones that had occurred before they moved to be closer to them. Thomas was content to let him think that. Aiden was happy to have his brother close by even if he was twice Matty’s age. Though they had different moms, Thomas could see Aiden in Matty’s personality. He remembered the hostile, beautiful boy Aiden had been when they’d first met, ready to fight the world.
He found it fascinating that both of the Kendrick children had taken whatever twisted genetics given to them by Marshall Kendrick and used it for good instead of evil. Thomas also held a bit of smug satisfaction knowing that Matty had agreed to change his last name from Kendrick to Mulvaney. Each time one of them claimed the name, it felt less like expansion and more like evolution.
His family was growing bigger by the day. He absently wondered about the possibilities of having Matty and Lake as a couple, further solidifying the bond between Jericho’s boys and the rest of the Mulvaneys. It was probably best to stay out of it. He was far too old to concern himself with college romances. Still, he couldn’t help picturing the quiet stability of Lake beside Matty’s volatility—the kind of symmetry that made sense in his world.
Though he couldn’t deny that Jordan and Cree also made a striking couple. Maybe there was something to that as well.
“I can practically hear you scheming,” Aiden murmured softly. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Thomas promised.
Nico hovered beside Arsen and Levi. “I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,” he whispered.
Thomas turned slightly, catching the whisper in the charged quiet. He believed it. This was what came of cruelty. Justice wasn’t always poetic. Sometimes it was crude, violent, grotesque even.
Arsen shrugged, his accent thickening with fatigue. “Zane deserves to feel safe, and sometimes the only way that happens is if the person threatening that safety is dead.”
