Page 368 of Wicked Brutal

Tobias studies him. “You’re crying.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Ryan wipes his face. Then he reaches out and fixes Tobias’s crooked green cape, taking a second to get his voice back.

“You know what, Toby? I don’t have a fancy word for what I’m supposed to be to you.” Tobias waits. Ryan’s voice cracks. “But I can tell you the part I do know.”

He gets down all the way, so he’s eye to eye with him. “I love you.” Tobias goes still. “I’ve loved you since you were little enough to ride around on my shoulders and pull my hair. You’re not my sort-of anything. You’re mine. And your sister’s. And I’m gonna be right here — every single day — loving you and taking care of you for as long as you’ll let me.” His eyes are streaming now and he doesn’t bother wiping them. “And that defective baby your sister’s growing.”

“Hey,” I say, laughing and crying at once. Tobias giggles wetly.

Ryan smiles through the tears. “So you can call me Ryan. You can call me your sort-of dad. You can call me the idiot who lives upstairs. I don’t care what the word is.” He touches the tip of Tobias’s nose. “The part that matters is that I love you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s a lot of words,” Tobias says.

“Yeah, it was.” Ryan huffs a wet laugh. “The short version is: I love you, and you’re stuck with me.”

Walter laughs once behind us, broken.

Tobias reaches for him. Ryan doesn’t even get the chance to prepare. Both arms wrap around his neck, and Ryan folds — eyes squeezed shut, arms locked around him, face buried in that stupid green cardboard crown, and he cries.

“I love you too,” Tobias says into his shoulder, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Then he pats Ryan’s back. “It’s okay.” That only makes Ryan cry harder.

Behind them, Cassandra turns into Walter. He wraps his arms around her, but he’s staring at his son — crying too, like maybe he’s watching eighteen years happen all at once. His baby. Holding Mom’s baby. Promising to stay.

I crawl into them. Ryan catches me with one arm without letting go of Tobias. For a second, it’s just us. Me. Ryan. Tobias. The baby. With Walter and Cassandra right behind us — the people Mom chose six years ago to keep us safe if she couldn’t. The people who somehow ended up doing exactly that without ever knowing she’d asked.

Then Xander’s voice comes from behind us. “Your Majesty?” Tobias lifts his head. Xander holds up the green marker. “The frog escaped.”

Penny’s eyes go wide. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Tobias gasps. “GET HER!”

He tears out of Ryan’s arms, snatches his crown off the grass, and charges after Penny.

Xander takes off behind him. “FOR THE FROG KING!”

“XANDER!”

Cassandra laughs through her tears. Walter puts an arm around her. I lean into Ryan. He wraps an arm around me and presses a kiss to my temple, still wiping his face with the other hand, laughing and crying at the same time. We watch our six-year-old Frog King chase a screaming Penny across the yard while Xander, still covered in green marker, supplies battle cries.

Walter and Cassandra stand behind us. Mom chose them. I chose Ryan. Tobias gets all of us.

Good chaos. Safe chaos. Home.

There are ten people in the guest house. Eleven, if I count the baby under my hand.

Ally is curled into my side on the couch, shoulder tucked against my chest, her fingers threaded through mine over the little curve of her stomach. Every so often her thumb moves across my knuckle. Every time it does, mine moves over her stomach. Neither of us mentions it.

Everyone else has been here for hours. Walter and Cassandra took Tobias to the park after lunch, which means the guest house is temporarily safe for conversations involving prom, sex, and whatever the fuck Xander has decided to tell everyone.

Across the room, Cat is sideways in Kaiden’s lap, stealing pepperoni off his slice while her own sits untouched.

He catches her wrist on the third one. “You took all the pepperoni off yours.”

“I changed my mind.”