"I told you what would happen if you came back." His voice carries no heat. No anger. "I told you we'd drop you in the monster lands and let you fend for yourself. You thought I was bluffing."
Peter's eyes dart between the brothers lining the walls. "You can't—my father will—"
"Your father's lawyers don't practice in the monster territories. His money doesn't spend there. His name means nothing to the creatures who live beyond the border." Knox stands. "Garrett. Finn. Load him up."
Garrett lifts Peter out of the chair with one hand. Peter kicks and screams and threatens lawsuits that no one in this room will ever hear about, because the van idling outside the compound gate isn't heading toward any courthouse.
"Knox." I step forward. Not to stop him. He turns to me, and I hold his gaze. "What about the other two?"
He looks at the Humans First men, then at Sheriff Garden's cruiser parked at the gate. "Those two go to the chief. Arson, breaking and entering, assault. Let the system deal with the ones who'll talk." He turns back to the van where Garrett is shoving Peter inside. "The one who won't stop coming for my family—we deal with ourselves."
The van pulls away. Peter's muffled screaming fades into the trees. No cops this time. No restraining orders, no bail hearings, no daddy's lawyers making it all disappear. This time, the van heads north toward the border, and Peter Mitchell disappears into the monster lands where his money and his name and his father's connections can't reach him.
He won't be coming back.
Diesel sits on the bottom step with an ice pack pressed to his forehead, his pride taking more damage than his body. "I went down like a sack of potatoes," he mutters for the third time, and Rex claps him on the shoulder hard enough to make him wince. "Stop beating yourself up, kid. You took a taser through a window. Nobody saw that coming."
"I should have. I'm supposed to protect this place."
"You did your job." Knox's voice carries from the edge of the compound where he leans against the fence, arms folded. "You held your post. You stood between danger and the people inside this building. That's what a brother does. The rest is bad luck and good aim."
Diesel looks up at him, something raw and grateful in his young face, and nods once.
Jess cleans the cut on my arm with sure hands, her focus locked on the wound. The edges have already started closing, new skin knitting together at a speed that makes her raise both eyebrows.
"Orc bond perks," I tell her.
She tapes the bandage in place. "Remind me to ask Knox about the full medical implications of this thing when he's done looking like he wants to eat someone."
Knox pushes off the fence and walks toward us, and the last of the violence drains from the bond, replaced by something quieter. Relief. Protectiveness. Love so fierce it makes my breath catch even now, standing in the wreckage with blood on my arm and dust in my hair.
The brothers gather around us as the sky lightens. Finn pours coffee from a thermos. Rex starts making calls about the school—the fire is out, the damage contained to one wing.
I stand in the ruins of the clubhouse door with my family around me and my mate walking toward me through the morning light, and I breathe.
That night. We're on the couch in the great room, the hole in the wall covered with a tarp that Garrett nailed into place. Knox has one arm around my shoulders and his free hand resting on my belly the way it's rested there every quiet moment since we saw those two pink lines. I'm half asleep against him, wrung out and sore.
His phone vibrates on the coffee table. He reaches for it without shifting me.
"Yes." He listens. The bond goes still between us. "When?"
I sit up. Watch him. The firelight from the woodstove plays across his features as he listens, and I see the exact moment the information lands—a flicker in his jaw, a slight exhale through his nose, his eyes dropping to mine.
He listens for another minute. Hangs up. Sets the phone face-down on the table.
"Garrett." He takes my hand, his massive palm folding around my fingers. "Peter didn't survive the crossing into the territories. Heart gave out somewhere on the mountain pass." He pauses, his thumb tracing a slow line across my knuckles. "It's done."
The words land and I wait for something—grief, or guilt, or the tangle of emotions you're supposed to feel when the person who terrorized you stops existing.
Instead, something releases. A band around my chest I've carried so long I forgot it had a beginning. Three years of flinching at footsteps. Three years of sleeping with one eye open.
"It's over." My voice breaks on the second word.
Knox pulls me closer, tucks my head beneath his chin. "It's over, little human"
"It's really over. He can't—he's never going to—" The words tangle and fall apart and I can't finish the sentence because the truth of it fills every space inside me that used to belong to fear.
"Sha'keth va'run." He pulls me against his chest and his arms close around me, solid and warm and permanent. "My heart, my home. You're free, Sarah. No one is coming for you. No one is hunting you. That part of your life is finished, and it will never touch you again."
I cry. Not the quiet tears I learned to hide from Peter, muffled into pillows so he wouldn't come back for more. I cry with my whole body, ugly and raw, soaking Knox's shirt while he holds me and presses his mouth to my hair and runs his hand up and down my back in slow passes that anchor me to the present.
Home. Imperfect and loud and held together by love and stubbornness and orc-grade studs.
I press my face against Knox and listen to both our heartbeats—his strong rhythm, my own answering pulse, and somewhere beneath them both, faint as a whisper, a third.
Our baby. Our future. Our everything.
I'm alive. I'm loved. I'm home.
