Chapter 4: Succession

Lucas

Once the meeting broke, the yard changed from listening to calculation. That was always the part I preferred. Talk mattered, but only up to a point. Too much of it and you began to smell performance, all heat and no action. Garrick understood that. He always had. Say what needed saying, let everyone see the shape of the threat, then turn them loose to do what they did best: listen, track, notice, wait. A good crew did not rush at noise. It read the ground first.

The fires still burned hard against the dark. Meat hissed and spat where grease dropped onto the grills, and the smoke had thickened enough that every breath tasted of char and iron and wood. Around me Blackthorn folded itself into smaller groups, little pockets of low conversation, heads inclined, shoulders turned inward. Questions had already begun moving through them, through scent as much as speech. Who had heard what. Which little dealers had started going quiet. Whether the attacks in the news carried the stink of something real or merely outsider panic dressed in fur and claws for cameras. Some of the younger males were too eager, their bodies running half a step ahead of their judgement, but that was nothing new. Youth always mistook movement for strength. Half the job of an older man was teaching them that speed and stupidity often travelled together.

I stood with my arms folded, letting my eyes move across the yard and beyond it, past the open edge of the garage where the industrial dark swallowed whatever the floodlights didn’t reach. The night carried the usual city filth at its edges; exhaust, damp brick, stale takeaway grease, waste, cold metal. Under it all, beneath the clutter of modern life, the yard still smelled of home. That mattered. Territory was not just a line on a map or an area somebody claimed because they worked there. It lived in the body. In memory. In the way your muscles settled when you were standing on ground that belonged to you and your own.

Or to the those who had made you their own.

I glanced, almost without thinking, toward Garrick. He stood by the workbench with Morrow and Izaak close to him, their conversation too low to catch but serious enough that nobody interrupted. He still held the yard, even now. The older he got, the less he seemed to need to prove it. Blackthorn bent around him from habit as much as instinct. Respect sat easily on Garrick because he had earned it in blood and years and the sort of hard endurance remembered long after beauty, speed or youthful brutality had gone. He had held us together through bad seasons, through hunger, through the worst years of addiction taking root in the weaker parts of Blackthorn like rot in timber. He had never been soft. Even now, he wasn’t soft. But age was there. In the way he moved after standing too long. In the extra beat he sometimes took before turning. In the heaviness that settled on him when old history brushed too close to the present.

Red Maw had done that tonight.

My jaw tightened at the thought of them. Their name always brought with it a particular kind of disgust, not the hot, clean kind you feel for an enemy you can strike directly, but something fouler. Red Maw were not disciplined enough to be honourable and not chaotic enough to be harmless. They moved where weakness gathered. Drugs, debt, dirt, lone wolves with no spine and too much appetite, all of it seemed to cling to them. Groups like that did not merely make trouble. They spoiled things. Ground, bodies, loyalties, everything they touched seemed to come away fouled.

If they were moving again, Garrick was right. We needed to know how and why before anyone let instinct drag us into their stink.

Beside me, Finn said something under his breath that made one of the younger males bark a laugh. I didn’t catch the line, only the effect. That was Finn all over. He could puncture tension in a room, or a yard, or the thick edge of a bad night with almost no effort. Some men filled space by making others fall silent. Finn filled it by making them easier in themselves. He had always had that knack. Useful in Blackthorn. Dangerous too, in its own way. People trusted what made them laugh.

He leaned one shoulder against the side of a van, long body loose, half-smiling as though the name Red Maw had not just dropped over the yard like a dead weight. Finn was taller than me but rangier, less physically dense, built longer through the limbs and shoulders, as though whatever force sat in him had been stretched out rather than packed in hard. He was charming in an easy way, the kind that made people relax before they had properly thought about him. Hair slightly untidy even when he had made the effort. Features more expressive than mine, better suited to humour, deflection, the quick turn that kept things light. He still smelled faintly of cologne beneath the smoke, something clean and familiar that had clung to him for years. There were days it sat naturally on him, part of the same easy charm that made him good company. Lately, though, there were times when it seemed to be covering something else. Fatigue. Sourness. That half-second dulling in him I’d noticed more often of late. His mood shifting strangely. His senses blunting for a beat before he snapped himself back into place. A small thing. Easy to dismiss. Easier, maybe, than asking the wrong question.

He caught me looking and smirked. “What?”

“You going to be useful,” I asked, “or just entertaining?”

“Both, if you’re lucky.”

That got another short laugh from the boy beside him. I didn’t smile, but I wasn’t annoyed either. Finn’s mouth was often faster than his judgement, but there were worse traits in a man than keeping young idiots from working themselves up into heroics.

Across the yard, near one of the fires, Selene stood with her hair loose over her shoulders, the red of it catching orange in the light so vividly it looked almost lit from within. I hadn’t seen her take it down, but there it was now, heavy and bright against the dark of her hoodie, and several of the younger males had already made the mistake of glancing twice. She ignored them, of course. She usually did. Selene was noticed whether she invited it or not. Her beauty was immediate, vivid, but never soft. Long thick red hair, eyes that could look like challenge or hurt or trouble depending on how the light caught them, a lean athletic body visibly trained and carried with the kind of balance that said she knew exactly how to use it. She was strong, visibly feminine, and impossible to mistake for ornamental. There was danger in the way she held herself. Fire-shaped. Physically confident. Garrick’s daughter in the obvious sense, but not only that.

I had known for years what Blackthorn assumed would happen. It hung around us both often enough that you could smell it in other people’s expectations before it was ever named aloud. Selene and me. Garrick’s daughter and the likely successor. It made sense, and because it made sense, nobody examined it too closely unless they had a reason to. Blackthorn valued stability. It liked symbols lined up neatly. A bond between us would steady any transition. Quiet the grumblers. Keep everything looking whole instead of a structure half-opened by age and uncertainty.

I had never spoken against it. That, perhaps, was its own kind of cowardice.

The truth was harder to explain even to myself. Selene mattered. I respected her. More than respected. She was strong, sharper than many of the males around us, harder to dismiss than some of them realised, and there were moments when she hit the eye like a blow; hair, scent, mouth, the line of her neck when she turned suddenly toward something. But every thought of her came tangled in other things. Garrick. Duty. The future. The whole weight of what such a bond would mean before either of us had even touched it. She had become an assumption so early, so thoroughly, that sometimes I wondered whether I had ever properly looked at her without also seeing everything arranged around her. Desire is simple when it belongs only to the body. It becomes harder when everyone around you has already translated it into obligation.

I saw her. Of course I saw her. But there was a restlessness in Selene, a hunger for reassurance, for warmth offered quickly and freely, for that smaller more personal kind of attention some gave as naturally as breathing. Finn, for instance. He noticed things and handed back his noticing lightly, almost carelessly, as though it cost him nothing. I had never been built that way. Everything in me that mattered ran through restraint first. Through measure. Through the instinct to hold rather than spill.

I realised too late that I had gone quiet looking at her. Finn followed my gaze. That was another thing he was too good at.

“Careful,” he murmured. “You keep staring like that and the whole yard will think the wedding’s booked.”

I shot him a look, but he was already grinning. The younger male beside him wisely found something else to look at.

I should have ignored it. Instead I turned and crossed the distance toward her before I had properly decided to. Everyone noticed, of course. They always noticed movement with intent, especially mine. I kept myself neutral and let them think what they liked.

“Selene,” I said when I reached her.

She turned toward me with the firelight moving over her face and I had the stupid, fleeting thought that she looked like the old stories Greyfen hoarded and half of us mocked. Something old. Something beautiful enough to complicate.

“Lucas.”

There was always something careful in her tone with me, some faint edge of irony laid over things that might otherwise have sounded too straightforward. I never knew whether I caused that or merely failed to soften it.

“You heading home alone?” I asked.

The moment the words were out, I knew how they sounded. Practical. Protective. Measured. Not wrong, but not enough either.

She arched slightly. “I do know how roads work.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“No,” she said, and there was a faint bitterness in it that made me feel, irrationally, as though I had disappointed her in some smaller more private way than the words justified. “I know.”

I looked at her properly then. At the heat in her cheeks from the fire, the thick fall of red hair over her shoulders, the set of her mouth. There were younger males in the yard tonight too eager for a fight and too easy with their eyes. There was a city beyond our gates full of stink and whatever else might be moving underneath it. There was Red Maw in the air. Concern seemed the most natural thing in the world.

“If there’s trouble moving through the city,” I said, keeping my voice low, “don’t go anywhere stupid on your own.”

That irritated her immediately. I could smell it, feel it in the slight shift of her posture.

“I spend half my life teaching men not to underestimate me,” she replied. “I’m unlikely to wander into danger because somebody snarled on the news.”

“That isn’t what I said either.”

We stood there in it then, in that uncomfortable little pocket of space that always seemed to open between us. Too close for indifference. Too careful for anything else. There was heat from the fire, cold from the night, her scent brightened by smoke and effort and the warm female note of skin beneath both. If I had been a simpler man, perhaps I would have reached for her. If she had been a simpler woman, perhaps she would have made it easier. But simplicity had never been on offer where Selene was concerned.

Finn, because apparently he could smell tension from across the yard like a hound scenting meat, arrived at my shoulder at exactly the wrong moment.

“Careful,” he said lightly. “You keep sounding like somebody’s husband before you’ve even earned the right.”

Selene laughed. A real laugh, quick and bright enough to shift something ugly in my chest before I could stop it. I turned and looked at him hard. He only widened his grin, entirely unbothered.

“I’m helping,” he said, then looked to her with that easy warmth of his. “You all right, firegirl?”

She rolled her eyes, but I caught the way her mouth softened despite it.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t smell fine,” he said.

“That’s charming.”

“You smell irritated. Very different condition. Much prettier.”

She laughed again.

There it was. That effortless thing he did. He saw her, or at least gave the performance of seeing her, in precisely the register she seemed to crave. Light enough not to pin her down. Personal enough to land. Watching it, I felt an old, cold awareness settle in me. 

He asked whether she was staying for food. She said she hadn’t decided. He translated that to yes immediately and made some remark about preferring to face the end of the world on a full stomach. She smiled. Again.

Then he drifted away as easily as he had arrived, folding back into Blackthorn, already useful somewhere else, already leaving behind the little warmth he had stirred in his wake.

I was still there.

The silence after him felt different.

“Selene,” I said.

She looked at me properly this time. Waiting, perhaps. For a second I thought I should say something else. Something less functional. Something that belonged to her rather than to the situation around us. But whatever it was failed to take shape before duty, caution, and all the hard trained parts of me moved first and smothered it.

“If Red Maw are moving again,” I said, “we’ll know.”

The words came out colder than I intended. Not unkind. Just certain.

Something in her face closed slightly, though she nodded once.

I gave the smallest tilt of my head and stepped back, then turned away before the moment could become anything more uncomfortable than it already was.

As I moved across the yard, everything seemed sharper to me than before. The younger males near the grill. Morrow speaking low to Garrick. Finn laughing at something with too much brightness, then falling silent a beat too long before saying something else. Selene by the fire, red hair bright as fresh blood in the orange light, looking for all the world like something Blackthorn would gather around and never fully understand.

I knew what needed doing. Garrick was right. We needed information. Quiet movement. The right questions in the right places. If Red Maw were sniffing at our edges again, I would find out where. That part was easy. Action usually was.

What sat less easily was the shape of everything else. Garrick ageing. Selene waiting, whether she admitted it or not, for some future everyone else had already half-written. Finn drifting at my side with that half-familiar, half-off feeling I still hadn’t named. Blackthorn looking, as it always did, for steadiness.

I stood near the garage doors and watched the yard slide fully into readiness around me. Around us all. Smoke, blood, fire, engines cooling in the dark. Listening. Waiting.

If Red Maw were moving again, we would know.