I don’t even know what I’m thinking anymore. I just know I have to go there.
The walk from Under the Line takes about fifteen minutes, but I cover it faster. Their house is hidden behind a large garden, completely cut off from view by a tall fence. I hesitate at the gate for half a second, knowing buzzing would be pointless. Desperation wins. I climb over and move toward the building as quietly as I can.
Just as I reach the door, loud laughter drifts from somewhere around the corner.
Remembering that alphas hear better than dogs, I circle the house, sticking close to the wall and stepping carefully around the bushes. I crouch low and peek around the corner.
The Tanner brothers are stretched out on lounge chairs. Three of them in total, though only two are here now, along with two other alphas I recognize by sight. Low-level thugs, their regular muscle. The kind who harass omegas outside clubs, promising easy money for a quick porn clip.
I listen with my breath almost held, straining to make sense of their conversation. At first, it sounds like nothing important, just noise, but I stay put. I don’t move.
Then the topic shifts.
"We need to catch a new little fish," one of them says.
"Yeah," another replies, laughing. "That last one was so cute it made me want more."
The rest of them burst out laughing, and suddenly the words start to connect. I catch fragments, pieces of sentences, enough to paint a picture that makes me shiver. They laugh and cackle, talking about how he screamed, how he begged, how hechoked as Danny Tanner was finishing him off, how his body arched.
They never say a name. Just some ‘cute omega’.
My hands start to shake. A horrible thought, a terrifying suspicion, is spreading through my bones.
"Danny really put the sweet thing through hell. He went all in this time. I’ve never seen him like that before," one of them says.
"Exactly. Looks like he finally found his calling. Full beast mode," another adds, almost impressed. "I almost felt bad for the tiny thing."
"Almost," the third one chimes in, and they laugh again, absolute scum.
Then the youngest of the Tanners says something I don’t quite catch at first, his voice muffled, but then it comes through clearly enough. "…brother’s been asking around the whole neighborhood. We should lean in and tell him to keep quiet, or we’ll come for him too. Been a while since we ground up a beta."
"Yeah. He might draw attention, and that’s the last thing we need. Cops sniffing around," someone replies.
"Danny should take him to see what’s left of Senu. That ought to shut him up."
And just like that, everything stops.
His name.
What’s left of him.
My breath shatters in my chest, and dark spots bloom in my vision. I drop back on all fours and scramble away along the wall, barely aware of my own movement, then circle around to the front of the garden and haul myself over the fence.
Darius’s house is only about seventy yards away.
I don’t make it that far before I throw up.
My head feels wrong, like it’s not fully mine anymore, like I’m moving through a trance I can’t break.
I climb the fence at Darius’s place and smash a window. There’s no one home. He lives alone, and I know exactly what he keeps upstairs in the storage space. He showed it to me once, even taught me the basics of how to handle it. He always said it was better to know than not to know. Simple rule. You can never be sure when something might come in handy.
I open the locker and find the AR-15 he got from his uncle, a former commando, given as a very specific kind of gift. I grab two magazines and don’t bother closing anything before I bolt from the room.
My jaw is locked tight, rage boiling so hot it drowns out any remaining sense. Reckless, past the point of reason, I leave Darius’s house and vault the fence, sprinting straight back toward the Tanners’ place. For a second, I think I see a man walking a dog on the other side of the street, but I don’t slow down. I don’t care.
After clearing the fence, I flick the safety off and run around the house with the rifle in my hands. I don’t ease into it, I don’t hesitate. I step out from the corner and open fire.
Two of them are drunk and sprawled on something like a couch, boots up on a garden table. The other two are stretched out on rattan loungers, and they’re the first to take the burst.
