"You're stretching my shirt."
"I don't care about your shirt." She pulls me into a hugand her belly gets there first, hard and enormous between us, forcing us into an awkward sideways press. Eight months of orc baby turns a simple hug into a logistical problem. Her ankles strain against her boots, swollen past the laces, and the heat rolling off her skin tells me her blood pressure needs checking before the day ends."I'm so happy for you both."
Finn's warmth spreads behind my ribs, amusement layered with a tenderness that makes my throat tight.
I lean into it. Let myself have this.
The good feeling lasts forty minutes.
A prospect named Danny jogs up while the brothers unload chainsaws in the clinic lot. Young, wiry, rain-soaked boots tracking mud across the concrete. He pulls Knox aside, but I catch the words from six feet away.
"Crates at the gate, Pres. Showed up before the storm. Nobody touched them—they've been sitting out in the rain."
Knox coils. Every muscle locks.
Finn's arm tightens around my waist. The bond floods with dread, anger, and an older, sadder ache that has no name. His heartbeat kicks harder beneath mine.
Knox turns. Meets Finn's eyes. Neither of them says a word.
"Let's go," Knox says.
The clubhouse compound sits ten minutes north, behind a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The storm ripped a section of fencing loose and scattered trash across the yard, but the main building stands intact, a converted warehouse with the Feral Sons skull painted across the garage doors.
Five wooden crates sit stacked at the gate, rain-darkened and warped but holding together. They're massive—the smallest one reaches my hip, the largest comes up to Finn's chest. Hand-built from heavy timber, reinforced with iron bands etched in markings I can't read.
Knox pries the first one open with a crowbar. Inside, packed in oiled cloth: a war axe. The blade spans wider than my shoulders, blackened steel carved with clan symbols that catch the light. The handle wrapped in worn leather, stained dark with age and use.
The second crate holds armor. A chest plate, shoulder guards, greaves, all etched with sigils in a script I've never seen. Hand-forged metalwork, the detail intricate enough that it must have taken years.
The third, a carved wooden chest. Inside, jewelry. Rings set with dark stones, a heavy torque of twisted silver, and a necklace, delicate for orc craftsmanship, a fine chain holding a pendant shaped like two mountain peaks joined at the base. It catches what little light filters through the clouds and throws a warm amber glow across Finn's palm when he lifts it from the chest.
His hand trembles.
At the bottom of the largest crate, a scroll. Sealed with dark wax stamped with a sigil I don't recognize.
Knox breaks the seal and reads it. His face locks down, every muscle, every line of expression wiped clean. He passes the scroll to Finn without a word.
Finn reads aloud, translating the old orc script into English for my benefit, and his voice thins with each sentence. "These are your birthright. The seat of your ancestors waits. Come home before it is too late. Your father commands your return."
The bond carries his war into my chest. Resentment and grief. And buried deep enough that I almost miss it, longing. Raw andconfused and threaded through with guilt, like wanting a thing you've trained yourself to believe you don't deserve.
Knox doesn't hesitate. He grabs the war axe by its handle and carries it to the fire pit behind the clubhouse, the brick circle where the brothers burn pallets and scrap wood. He throws the axe in. Goes back for the armor. The chest plate crashes against the brick, the shoulder guards land on top, the greaves follow. He stacks everything with the focus of a man building his own wall, piece by piece, shutting a door he refuses to walk through.
The brothers gather at the edges of the yard. Garrett, Rex, Colt.Garrett stands apart from the others, seven feet of minotaur with his filed-down horns, arms folded across his chest. He watches Knox feed the fire and says nothing, but when a burning ember kicks sideways toward Sarah, he shifts his body to block it without looking down.They say nothing. Sarah hangs back near the garage,both hands braced against the small of her back, her belly straining the front of Knox's flannel shirt,watching her husband burn everything.
Knox lights it.
The fire catches slow in the morning damp, then roars as the oil-soaked cloth ignites, flames licking up the armor, curling around the axe handle, consuming centuries of orc heritage in smoke that rises black and bitter against the gray sky.
Knox turns back toward the jewelry chest.
Finn steps in front of it.
"The axe and armor are Father's." Finn's voice holds steady, but his body blocks the chest like he's bracing for a hit. "Burn them. But the jewelry is Mom's."
Knox stares past Finn at the carved wooden chest. His nostrils flare. For a long moment, neither brother moves, the firepopping and spitting behind Knox, Finn rooted in front of the only pieces of their mother that survived twenty years and a hurricane.
"Yeah, okay, we'll keep them," Knox says. He walks away.
