Final.
Silence returned, thick and absolute.
Vale wiped his blade on the dead man’s shirt, eyes already on the girls.
“Hey,” he said quietly, dropping to a crouch that put him level with them. “You’re safe now.”
They didn’t move. They didn’t trust that they weren’t the same kind of monsters.
Titus holstered his weapon and stayed where he was—between the door and the room. “Vale.”
“I’ve got them,” Vale said. He shrugged out of his jacket and wrapped it around the smallest girl, careful, deliberate. “We’re going to walk out. No running. No noise. Follow me.”
One of the girls shook her head, tears spilling.
Vale held her gaze. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She believed him.
They all did.
As Vale guided them toward the corridor, he paused and looked back. “You coming?”
Titus shook his head once. “Someone always comes back. Abusers run in packs.”
Vale understood. “Don’t take long.”
“I won’t.”
Vale disappeared with the girls, footsteps swallowed by the corridor.
Titus turned back to the room and waited.
It didn’t take long.
Boots hit concrete—fast, irritated. Voices followed, sharp with entitlement. The door swung open, and a man stepped through, already mid-complaint.
Titus shot him.
The second man reached for his waistband. Titus closed the distance and put him down before the weapon cleared leather.
A third froze in the doorway, eyes wide.
“This wasn’t part of the deal,” the man stammered.
“No,” Titus said, voice calm. “It was always the end of it.”
He fired once.
When it was over, Titus stood alone in the quiet, breath steady, hands clean of tremor.
His brothers had taken lives to protect monsters.
Titus took lives to end them.
The difference mattered.
He crouched beside one of the dead men—a city official, recognition settling with a slow, sour certainty—and pulled the phone from his pocket. He held it up to the man’s face until it unlocked, then scrolled through the contacts.
