Avi stood grinning, the kind of grin men wore right before they did something they could never take back. There was that wild spark in his eyes—half genius, half lunatic—that made Enzo’s stomach knot with something between awe and disgust. He wanted to tell him to stop smiling like that. He wanted to tell him not to enjoy it. But telling a psychopath to act more human seemed a useless pursuit.
“You see it?” Avi called, his voice echoing off the rafters, far too bright for the room it lived in. Enzo had overheard him telling Asa earlier he was naming itTeeth Therapy.He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. The thing explained itself.
It was a ramp—old, salt-gnawed metal climbing up from a shallow basin of stagnant water into a waiting mouth of shadow. The sides were high to keep their catch in the machine’s relentless jaws. The teeth—God, they really did look like teeth—were rusted blades welded at uneven angles, jagged enough to catch the meager light and throw it back in cruel, fractured gleams. At the base sat a square pit, the water inside thick and black as oil, trembling whenever the wind breathed through the holes in the walls.
Enzo’s throat felt dry as he took it in. The smell of brine and blood clung to the air. Seven’s blood. It soaked into their clothes.It soaked into Enzo’s psyche, whispering a million different what-ifs. What if the bullet had been just a millimeter closer? What if Seven had missed? Would he be clinging to three dead bodies? His pulse was loud enough to drown out the machinery starting to hum. He tightened his hold on Seven, grounding himself in the weight of him—warm, breathing,alive—and decided he didn’t care what the others did next. Not tonight.
Enzo had no idea what that pit had once held, but whatever it was had been joined by three gallons of gasoline from his trunk. The fumes curled through the air so thick his eyes burned, a sting of heat and chemical rot that coated the back of his throat. Cans and warped crates lined the walls, and chains hung from an overhead rail, swaying slightly every time someone walked by. The whole set-up looked rehearsed, like some insane fever dream of theater and torture, and everyone knew their cues except him.
“Enzo?” Seven groaned, his head rolling weakly against his chest as he fought to look up.
Enzo’s pulse spiked so fast it made his vision blur. For a second, every other sound—metal, waves, muffled whimpering—disappeared. “I’m here, baby. How do you feel?”
“Like someone dragged me across the pavement by my hair,” Seven muttered, voice hoarse and raw. “What happened?”
Enzo shot a glare towards the sweaty man with his greasy ponytail. “That stupid fuck, Caesar, shot you.”
Seven’s head snapped downward, like he could assess the damage by instinct.
“It was a stray bullet,” Atticus said from where he sat on the lowest stair riser, voice calm, clinical. “Caught your cheek and ear. You’re probably gonna have a scar, and you’re missing part of your earlobe.”
Seven sagged against Enzo’s chest with an exhausted breath. “Is that all?” he asked, relief bleeding into the words. “Is everyone else okay?”
Atticus nodded, but Enzo’s jaw flexed. “No, that’s notall.You’ve got a ruptured eardrum, a concussion, and probably a few cracked ribs from falling down the stairs.”
His hand never stopped moving, tracing small circles against Seven’s arm, like he could keep him here just by touch.
Seven grimaced. “That explains why it feels like somebody went at me with a baseball bat.”
Avi appeared in front of them, all grin and mania, his eyes practically glowing. “Perfect timing,” he said to Seven. “Just in time to watch me knock another thing off my bucket list.”
Felix and Zane traded uneasy glances but stayed quiet. Atticus just huffed, the corner of his mouth twitching, like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be horrified or impressed.
Seven tried to sit up straighter, squinting toward the monstrous contraption at the center of the room. “What is it?”
“What is it really?” Avi asked, tilting his head with a smirk. “Or what’s myvision?”
Seven blinked. “Both?”
“Near as I can tell, this used to be a fish descaler,” Avi said proudly. “See those grater-like things on the ramp? They’d drag the fish across to scrape off scales before dumping them in the pool.”
Seven leaned forward, his nose wrinkling as the sharp, metallic scent of gas hit him. “What’s in the pool now?”
“Itwasstagnant water,” Avi said, grinning wider. “Now, it’s water and gasoline.”
Seven stared at him. “You had ‘run a dude over a cheese grater into a vat of gasoline’ on your bucket list? That’s oddly specific and weirdly coincidental, even for you.”
“No,” Avi said, scandalized. “I once heard this Weird Al song?—”
“Who?” Seven interrupted.
“Before your time.” Avi waved him off. “Anyway, he wrote about diving into a swimming pool of double-edged razor blades rather than spending another minute with his girl. And I thought,that’s art.But I knew I could improve on it.”
“Lunatic,” Atticus muttered, but his tone carried reluctant amusement.
The tension in the room pulsed like a heartbeat, laughter and horror tangling together, the smell of gasoline cutting through it all. Enzo smoothed his thumb over the edge of Seven’s jaw, feeling the dried tack of blood beneath the bandage. Seven was breathing. That was all that mattered. The rest of the world could burn.
“As I was saying,” Avi called, louder than necessary, punctuating each syllable. “I knew I could do it better. What if, instead of diving into razor blades, they could, like,slidedown them and land in lemon juice or alcohol…or, since we’re improvising…gasoline.”
