It doesn’t announce itself with trumpets or fanfare. It starts small—hungry like a parasite, just an egg nestled in your chest where hope used to live. But once it hatches, once it unleashes within you and spreads through your veins like poison or salvation, it fuckingfeasts. It duplicates, multiplies, consumes everything soft until there’s nothing left but sharp edges and fury.
And sooner than you know it, you’re not just consumed by it.
Youareit.
Twitching with the need for more. Starving for the kind of control that means no one can ever hurt you again. The kind that means you do the hurting first.
I’m driving Atticus’s car I stole through the dark, hands on the top of the wheel, and I can feel that parasite writhing inside me. Fed by rage. Fed by betrayal. Fed by every lie, everymanipulation, every time someone thought they could use me as a pawn in their fucking war.
Not anymore.
The warehouse comes into view, exactly where this GPS led me. Axel told me before I left to meet him back here the second I could get away. But for what? He didn’t say. We didn’t exactly have enough time in the bedroom to go over details.
I park the car in the shadows and kill the engine. For a moment I just sit, breathing, feeling my pulse hammer against my ribs.
My boots crunch on gravel as I approach the warehouse entrance—the same one Koa probably walked through hours ago, thinking he was in control.
Men like him always think they’re in control.
Until they’re not.
I push through the door and the smell hits me first—blood and gunpowder and something else, something chemical that makes my nose burn. The warehouse is dimly lit, shadows pooling in corners, and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust.
Then there’s a man face down on a chair in the middle of the room, his body twisted at an unnatural angle. The chair’s tipped over, pinning him, and his neck is craned the opposite way so he can’t see the entrance. Can’t see me.
I blink a few times. It’s Koa.
I stare at him, relieved he can’t see me. He doesn’t need to know I’m here.
My boots echo as I walk deeper into the warehouse, and then I see Axel standing near the far wall, arms crossed, looking older than he did this morning. Looking harder.
He sees me and something flickers across his face. Relief? Guilt? I can’t tell anymore.
“Hey.”
I shake my head, not wanting to speak.
A door to the right opens and Gilbert Kane steps out—our father. He looks the same as I remember but just older now, more line indents on his skin.
He walks to the room to the right, gesturing for us to follow.
I glance back at Koa one more time. He’s stopped fighting, stopped struggling against the ropes. Just laying there awfully quiet, blood pooling beneath his face where it’s pressed against concrete.
Part of me wants to check if he’s breathing.
I follow Gilbert and Axel into the side room, my jaw clenched so tight my teeth ache. Gilbert shuts the door behind us with a soft click that sounds too much like a trap springing shut.
He gestures to two chairs arranged in front of a desk. “Please, sit.”
“We’ll stand,” I say before Axel can respond.
Gilbert’s lips twitch into something that might be a smile if it reached his eyes. “Stubborn. Just like your mother.”
“Don’t talk about her.”
He raises his hands, then settles into the chair behind the desk. Casual, relaxed, like we’re having a pleasant family reunion instead of whatever the fuck this is.
He looks at Axel first, and my brother sighs like they’re sharing some kind of inside joke I’m not privy to.
