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The three of us walk out into the afternoon light, and for the first time in six months, I don’t feel like I’m hiding. I feel like I’m finally doing what I should have done all along.

Going to claim what’s mine. What’s ours.

9

NOAH

The coffee in my cup went cold an hour ago, but I keep sipping it anyway. Something to do with my hands. Something to pretend I’m not sitting in this parked car like a fucking stalker, watching the diner window like it’s the only thing in the world worth looking at.

She’s in there. Third booth from the left, refilling ketchup bottles between tables. I can see the top of her head, that blond ponytail she keeps yanking tighter when she’s stressed. She’s been pulling on it all night.

My phone buzzes. I don’t look at it, knowing it’s one of my brothers, with another warning about Dad, or something I should care about more than whether Fawn’s had a chance to eat something in the past eight hours. The girl runs on stale diner coffee and whatever scraps the cook lets her take home. I’ve watched her for so long. I know her rhythms better than my own heartbeat.

The diner sign flickers, neon-pink letters spelling out Rosie’s in a script that hasn’t been maintained since the nineties. Fawn moves past the window, carrying a tray piled with plates, and even from here I can see how her shoulders curve forward, braced against the weight of everything. The exhaustion. The constant fucking exhaustion that nobody her age should be carrying.

Several minutes pass, and the diner door swings open, and Fawn steps out into the parking lot.

She’s wearing that same faded jacket, the one with the tear in the left sleeve that she’s never bothered to fix. She tugs the jacket tighter and starts across the lot toward that shitbox Honda she drives, the one with the dented bumper and the check engine light that’s been on since March.

I should start the car. I should drive away before she sees me, before this goes any further, before I do something that breaks every promise we made.

I don’t move.

Two men step out from behind the dumpster at the edge of the lot.

My hand is on the door handle before my brain catches up. They’re big guys, thick through the shoulders, dressed in dark jackets that don’t look cheap. One of them has a shaved head and a neck tattoo I can’t make out from here. The other is saying something to Fawn, stepping into her path, and I can see her freeze—that slight hitch in her step, the way her hands come up in front of her like she’s ready to catch something as it falls.

I don’t hear what they’re saying. I don’t need to. I know what men like that sound like when they corner a girl in a parking lot. I’ve heard that tone my whole life. I’ve even used it.

The difference is, I never used it on her.

I’m out of the car before the shaved-head guy reaches for her arm.

My boots hit the asphalt, but I don’t run. Running makes you predictable. I walk, loose and easy, the same way I walk into every room where I know I’m about to hurt someone. The guy with the shaved head turns first. He sees me coming, his hand dropping from Fawn’s wrist, and there’s a moment—a split second of calculation—when he’s deciding whether I’m a threat or just some idiot who doesn’t know what he’s walking into.

He decides wrong.

I hit him in the throat before he gets his hands up. Not hard enough to kill him. Hard enough to remind him that breathing is a privilege, not a right. He chokes and drops to his knees, both hands grabbing his neck, and I step past him like he’s furniture.

The second guy is smarter. He’s already reaching under his jacket, going for something tucked into his waistband. I don’t give him the chance to get there. I kick his knee out from under him. It’s not a fair fight, no warning shot, just physics and intent meeting at the right angle. He goes down screaming, and I follow him, dropping my knee onto his chest hard enough to empty his lungs.

The gun slides across the asphalt. I don’t even look at it. I’m already checking the first guy, making sure he’s still on his knees where I left him, making sure Fawn is still standing.

She’s staring at me.

Not at the men on the ground or at the gun. But at me. Her eyes are wide in the light from the parking lot lamps, brown and shocked and seeing too much, and I realize I didn’t think this through. I didn’t think about what happens after, only about getting to her before they touched her, and now she’s looking at me like I’m one of the monsters instead of the thing that keeps monsters away.

“You’re bleeding,” she says.

I look down. There’s a cut on my knuckle I don’t remember getting, probably from the second guy’s teeth when I hit him. I wipe it on my jeans. “It’s not mine.”

The guy under my knee groans, and I lean down, grabbing his jaw and turning his face toward the light. There’s a tattoo on his neck, a crest I recognize, one I’ve seen in warehouses and back rooms and on the bodies of men who thought they could take what belongs to the Winter family.

Moore.

The crest is unmistakable. A wolf’s head over crossed daggers, inked in black and red. Frank Moore’s mark. His men, in this parking lot, touching what belongs to…

What belongs to us.