“Clear,” he said, but I could hear the doubt in his voice.
The rest of the brothers flooded in, filling the space with heat and sweat and the smell of fear.
I kept Bo locked to my side, hands running up and down his arms, trying to get him to ground.
“He was here,” Bo repeated, quieter now. “He was looking through the window. I saw his face.”
Knox moved to the window, looked out, then shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, but he kept the gun up, eyes never leaving the darkness outside.
Ransom checked the closet, then under the bed. “All clear,” he said.
But Bo wouldn’t calm. He clung to me, breath coming in short, desperate bursts. “You believe me?” he said, and the rawness in his voice made something inside me twist.
“Always,” I told him, and it was true.
Quiad took up position by the door, Harlow moved to the window. Knox, for once, looked at me like maybe I was the only person who could fix this.
I held Bo tighter, letting my words be the anchor. “He’s not getting to you,” I said, over and over, until the shakes slowed and the color came back to his face.
The family closed in around us, a living wall, and for the first time, I saw what it looked like from the inside.
Unbreakable. Furious. Loyal to the bone.
I met Knox’s eyes, and he nodded—just once, enough to say: I trust you now.
Outside, the night was alive with possibility and threat. But in here, with every brother standing guard, I knew what side I was on.
I was home.
And no one—not Westbrook, not the whole world—was going to take Bo from me again.
Chapter Fifteen
~ Bodean ~
The first scream didn’t even sound real. Just a thin, high whistle that could’ve been a kettle going off in the kitchen, or a rabbit dying under an owl’s claws. But something in me recognized it, even before my body did. I was halfway out of the room, feet on the cold hallway floor, before I could name it.
It was Ma.
She never screamed, not for pain, not for surprise, not even when Ransom tried to drop a running chainsaw into her lap on a dare. So when it came, sharp and wet and ending in a kind of gurgle that punched straight through my chest, I froze like a sapling in deep winter.
For a split second, the house was so quiet I could hear my own pulse, frantic in my neck. The old wood creaked under the weight of memory—of every fight and laugh and midnight feast that’d ever happened here. I stood at the bedroom door, bare feet numb on the rug, while the rest of the world rushed at me.
Then the brothers went off like a fuse line. Heavy boots hit the floor, the sound doubling in the narrow hall.
Knox’s voice cut through everything: “Move. Now.”
Ransom was a step behind, then Quiad, then Harlow, barreling past me like I was part of the wallpaper.
But I didn’t move.
Instead, I pressed my forehead to the windowpane and saw the yard lit up by the porch lamp, the grass silver and black. In the center of the light, a half-circle of bodies moved like a single, breathing animal. Five—no, six—bikers in cuts and helmets, ringed around something I couldn’t see until the tallest of them yanked Ma forward and clamped a knife to her throat.
Time didn’t just slow; it stopped, then backed up, then started over again at twice the speed. My brain flipped throughevery memory I had of Ma—baking bread, crying at old movies, her callused hands on my cheek the day I broke my arm and tried not to cry. And then: the image of her, wild gray hair in a net, mouth a tight line, feet dragged through the gravel, eyes as bright as the harvest moon.
She was looking right at me.
No, not at me—through me. Past my coward skin, into the spot where the last of my fear had pooled, shallow and mean. I wanted to run, but there was nothing to run from that wasn’t already inside the house.
