LOGINCHAPTER 130JULIAThe new house smells like garlic and something burning.That's Sebastian's fault."It's not burning," he announces from the kitchen, to nobody who asked, in the specific tone of a man who knows it's burning and has committed to the position."It's burning," Silas says, from the living room, not looking up from his book."It's a little burning," I confirm, from the couch, also not looking up.The new house is on the east side of the city.We chose everything in this house.Every room, every piece of furniture, every decision made by people doing it freely, with no one managing the outcome. It still surprises me sometimes. The freedom of it.Steve has been dead for four months.He's gone. The things he built are being dismantled. The pack is restructuring around something that doesn't run on fear, which is taking time, which will keep taking time, which is work the twins are doing carefully and daily.It's not clean.It was never going to be clean, but it is, increment
CHAPTER 129SEBASTIANHe's gone.I stand over him, and I wait for something to arrive. Some feeling, some signal, some internal shift that marks the before and after of a thing this large. I've been living in the past my entire life. Twenty years of his house, his voice, his hand on every lever that mattered. Twenty years of the specific survival of being his son.The after should feel like something.It doesn't feel like anything yet.Just cold air. Just the street. Just the specific silence of an ending.Silas is beside me.Neither of us speaks.Julia makes a sound. I turn.She's still upright. Barely. Her shoulder was wrong, her face showing everything the night cost her, blood dried at her temple and her lip, her good arm wrapped around her ribs like she's holding herself in place.She's looking at me.I let her see me, all of it.She doesn't try to fix me.She just stays.Our mother is behind me.She's here.She's actually here.Her hand finds my arm.I look down at it. Her hand
CHAPTER 128SILASI smell her blood from the end of the street.She's on the ground.His knee on her back.Her cheek on the street and her hand flat against the concrete still pushing, still pushing, blood on her face and her shoulder wrong in the specific way I recognise from the first attack, and she is hurt, she is badly hurt, and the thing that moves through me in that moment is not rage.He dies tonight.Sebastian is already moving.He hits my father like a verdict.My father releases Julia.I go to my father's right.He's fast.I know how fast he is. I've known since I was fourteen, and I learned the specific futility of fighting him in his full strength, the ceiling of what I was and the gap between that ceiling and what he was. He used to demonstrate it deliberately. The specific cruelty of showing us our own limits while we were still growing into them.I'm not fourteen.I'm not at my ceiling."Silas." His voice. The warmth is completely absent now, stripped down to the real
CHAPTER 127JULIAThe moment arrives quietly.One second, Steve is turning toward the window, and his attention moves off me by three degrees, and something in my blood says:Now.I move.My elbow finds the side of his head before he's finished turning.The impact runs up my arm. He's solid, denser than he looks, the specific density of an alpha who has been what he is for twenty years, but the surprise of it, the fact that I moved first, that he was not positioned for me to move first, buys me the half second I need.I'm out of the car before he recovers.The street is empty.Of course it is.He chose this location. He chose this street. The deliberate emptiness of it is its own kind of message; we are somewhere he controls, somewhere he prepared, and for a half second I feel the shape of that close around me.Then he's out of the car.And I feel something else.He's fast.Faster than I expected, and I expected fast. He crosses the distance between us in a barely human movement, the
CHAPTER 126JULIAI don't look back.The car is black. He opens the door. I get in.The door closes. The distance opens.It's physical.That's the thing nobody could have told me, the thing I couldn't have understood before the bond, before whatever woke up in my blood and rewired the way I experience proximity and absence. The distance is physical. As the car pulls away from the house, I feel it the way you feel a temperature drop, immediate, total, the specific cold of moving away from the two people my body has learned to orient toward.I breathe through it.I catalogue it and set it aside.I will feel this later.Right now, I need every available resource directed outward.Steve sits beside me.I give him nothing.He smiles anyway, which means he expected nothing and is comfortable with it, which means he's done this before, which means I am not the first person he has sat beside in the back of this car and calculated.I think about his sons.I think about what twenty years of
CHAPTER 125SEBASTIANMy father knocks on the door of his own house like a visitor, like a man making a social call, like someone who has decided that the performance of civility is its own kind of power. Which is it? Which he knows it is. I stand in the hallway, and I hear the knock, and something in my chest goes cold and specific.Silas is beside me.Julia is behind us.Rowan and Bree are in position.I open the door.He looks the same.He's smiling.I want to put my hand through it.I hold.She's beside him and small.She looks at me, and her eyes are the same.Dark and direct and seeing everything.She's older. She's thinner. She's here. My mother is here.My heart bursts alive."Boys," my father says warmly.Like a reunion, a family occasion.I don't look at him.I can't look at him right now because if I look at him right now, the hold will break and everything we've planned, everything Julia laid out in the garden with her jaw set and her voice certain, will come apart before
CHAPTER 100JULIAI smell the bonfire before I see it.Wood smoke and something underneath it, sharper, that makes the back of my neck prickle before I've even turned the corner onto the field. I tell myself it's the cold. I turn the corner.There are maybe sixty people here. Alicia said some peopl
CHAPTER 99JULIAI wear the green dress.I wear it for myself. I stand in front of the mirror and look at myself for a moment. This isn't bravery.I know what bravery feels like; it has a performance to it, a squaring of shoulders, a decision made against resistance. This isn't that. This is quiet
CHAPTER 98JULIA – POINT OF VIEWBree opens the door before I knock. Rowan’s place is cosy. His parents are out of town, and they are playing house.She takes one look at my face and steps aside without saying anything, which is one of the reasons she is my best friend.I sit on the couch.She brin
CHAPTER 97JULIAIt happens at breakfast.I come down in a good mood, which feels important to note. I'd slept well for the first time in days, and the morning is doing that thing where the light comes through the kitchen window at the right angle and makes everything look deliberate, considered. S







