Page 59

R ain crashed around us like artillery fire, turning the ground to mud. We ran toward Law's nightmare, each second away from Oakley feeling like watching her slip through my fingers grain by grain.

The storm intensified, wind howling like a living thing hungry for flesh, forcing us to seek temporary shelter. Every fiber of my being screamed to keep moving, to find her, but the downpour had become a curtain of steel needles. Through the gray veil, I spotted a shack that squatted like a wounded animal in the clearing. The door exploded inward under my shoulder, wood splintering with the sound of breaking bones, wind shrieking behind us like it wanted her soul too.

Inside the cramped shack, a woman had collapsed against the back wall, her entire body convulsing with violent tremors. She was down to just her underwear, pale skin mottled with cold and terror. A soaked green dress lay crumpled in the corner like a discarded flag, water still pooling beneath it. She shook so hard her teeth chattered audibly, the sound echoing off the weathered walls like bones rattling in a coffin. Fear had bled her dry, pupils blown wide and black as tar pits. Long scratches painted highways down her arms and shoulders, the wounds still weeping like fresh cuts on a butcher's block.

The space reeked of fear and stale air, chaos spread before us like a crime photographer's wet dream—furniture overturned like scattered bones, dark smears painting the walls in abstract patterns, a lamp reduced to glittering fragments that caught the weak light like fallen stars.

Her legs gave out completely as we crowded through the doorway—Law, Tyrant, Husk, Grim, Sarge, Knight, and myself filling the cramped space until shoulders pressed against shoulders. Seven massive bodies in a room meant for two. She hit the floor hard, a broken sob tearing from her throat as her body folded in on itself.

Tyrant pushed past Husk and Knight, dropping to his knees beside her before anyone else could react. The rest of us pressed back—Law and Grim flattening against the left wall, Sarge and Knight taking the right, Husk lingering by the door. I remained near the entrance, watching. Tyrant’s massive hands hovered just above her shoulders, not touching but close enough to catch her if she collapsed further.

Her breathing came in rapid, shallow gasps that sounded like drowning, chest rising and falling too fast, eyes darting wildly between our faces. Panic consumed her completely—pupils blown wide, trembling so violently her teeth chattered like broken glass.

"Can't—" she gasped, hands clawing at her throat. "Can't breathe?—"

Tyrant's voice transformed completely—rough edges smoothing like river stones, all the hardness melting away until only gentleness remained. "Hey, sweetheart, I need you to look at me." He waited, patient as stone, until her wild eyes found him. "That's it. Can you tell me your name?"

She shook her head frantically, still hyperventilating.

"Okay, that's okay. You don't have to tell me anything." Tyrant quickly shrugged off his jacket from beneath his cut, the movement swift and practiced. "You're freezing. Let me help." He wrapped the warm fabric around her trembling shoulders like armor made of kindness. "There. Better?"

She managed a tiny nod, still gasping for air.

"Good. Now, I need you to breathe with me." His hands settled on her shoulders with the delicacy of handling spun glass. "In and out. Just focus on my voice. You're safe now."

Slowly, her wild gaze focused on the patches stitched to our cuts. Something shifted in her expression—desperation mixing with fragile hope.

"You are..." she was breathless still. "Oakley's friends?"

Moving without thinking—pure instinct, pure dread coursing through my veins like liquid lightning—I shoved past Law and Grim, crossing the small room in three strides. My hand found her throat, fingers wrapping around the delicate column like a vise, pinning her against the far wall where the wood grain pressed patterns into her spine. "Where the fuck is she?" The words tore from my throat as raw as gravel, nothing human left in the sound that escaped me. "Where the fuck is my wife?"

She crumpled like paper in rain, folding in on herself with a whimper that cut through the air sharp as a knife blade—the practiced response of someone who'd been shattered and reassembled too many times to count. No fight left in her. No screaming. Just eyelids squeezed tight as coffin lids.

Tyrant's body slammed into mine with the force of a freight train, leaving the woman unguarded as he shoved me back so hard my boots skidded across the wooden floor. He positioned himself between us, a wall of muscle and leather, chest rising and falling like a bellows, icy eyes burning with the intensity of blue flames.

"You're scaring the wrong fucking girl, brother," he growled, before turning back to her and softly asked. "Do you know where she is, sweetheart?"

"S-She told me to run," the woman sobbed, her voice fragmenting like glass hitting concrete. Arms wrapped around herself in an embrace that looked more like holding broken pieces together. "She said to find the Unforgiven Souls...V-V and L-Law." The words dissolved into gasps that sounded like drowning. "I-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I left her?—"

"Hey, hey—you're safe now." Tyrant returned to the woman, positioning himself to shield her from the rest of us.

My attention snagged on something else, pulled like iron to a magnet. A thin trail snaked across the wooden floor with the precision of calligraphy, leading from where I stood toward the far corner where a small table sat pushed against the wall like an altar waiting for sacrifice. Something in me went still as death. I followed the trail, stepping carefully around Tyrant and the woman, aware of every pair of eyes tracking my movement.

The world stopped.

Everything fucking stopped.

A sound escaped me that wasn't human—wasn't anything that should come from a throat designed for words. It started deep in my chest like a machine breaking down, grinding metal against metal, building into something that made the cabin walls shake. Glass rattled in broken windows. Dust rained from rafters.

Oakley's severed finger, her wedding ring catching the weak light.

Behind me, the room erupted. I heard Law's sharp intake of breath, heard his boots stumble across the floor as he rushed toward me. "No, no, no—" His knees hit the floor beside me. His wail joined mine—a duet of men being torn apart by the same cruel hands.

"Jesus Christ," Grim's voice cracked from the wall.

The scream that finally tore free didn't belong to any living thing—it was the sound of a soul being ripped in half.

The lilac polish. That fucking lilac polish she'd painted on yesterday morning while she baked cinnamon rolls. I'd watched her blow on each nail, tongue poking out in concentration.

My body moved without permission from my brain, lurching upright. The table loomed before me—solid oak that had probably witnessed a hundred family dinners, now serving as an altar for this obscenity. My hands found its edges, gripping until wood screamed under the pressure, splinters driving deep as thorns into my palms.

But I couldn't look at Law. Couldn't look at anything except that small piece of her, that fragment of the woman who'd traced my scars like she wasn't scared of what they said about me.

Three days ago—Jesus fucking Christ, it was only three days ago—she'd traced the edge of my mask with her fingertips while telling me she'd give me her answer on Sunday.

The beast I'd spent years chaining in the deepest dungeons of my soul broke free with the violence of a dam bursting. Every careful lesson in control, every moment of restraint, every time I'd chosen mercy over massacre—all of it burned away like tissue paper in a furnace. The man who'd learned to love was dead. The husband who'd promised to protect her was a failure. All that remained was what I'd always been beneath the mask: a killer with nothing left to lose.

My hands swept across the table, sending everything flying except that small piece of her that I couldn't bear to disturb. Behind me, men scrambled to avoid the debris—Sarge pulling Knight back, Husk ducking, Grim pressing flatter against the wall.

I needed destruction. Needed something, anything, to match the devastation inside my chest. Spinning toward the wall where Law had been pressed, I drove my fists into the wood with the rhythm of a funeral drum—over and over, feeling nothing but the satisfaction of something else breaking the way my world had. Law scrambled sideways to avoid my rampage, pressing against Grim as I pounded holes in the wall.

Knuckles split. The dark wetness painted patterns across aged wood as sounds tore from my throat that had no name in any human language. Couldn't stop. Didn't want to stop.

I found a chair near the door, hefting it like a weapon. Husk dove sideways as I hurled it across the cramped space with enough force to shatter reality. Wood exploded against the far wall inches from where Sarge stood, splinters becoming shrapnel, debris raining down like an apocalypse while my roar filled every corner of the cabin—raw, animalistic, the sound of something breaking beyond any possibility of repair.

Tyrant had moved to shield the woman completely, his broad back taking the brunt of flying debris. Grim stood rigid behind him, face drained until he looked like a ghost of himself.

I couldn't stay here. Couldn't look at them. Couldn't look at what was left of her without feeling my sanity slip like sand through a broken hourglass. The walls pressed inward like a closing fist, air growing thin as mountain peaks. Every breath tasted of copper and failure and the bitter flavor of absolute inadequacy coating my tongue like poison.

Pushing past the others, I stumbled toward the door and exploded into the storm. Rain struck my face like tiny bullets. Lifting my face to the sky, I let the storm try to wash away the image of Oakley's finger burned forever into my retinas like a photograph taken in hell.

But the rain couldn't wash away the truth: I'd failed her. Every scar I wore, every wound I'd collected—all of it had found its way to her skin anyway. The worst parts of me had bled into everything good in her until she paid for loving someone like me.

Running through the forest like a man possessed, branches tearing at my suit jacket, until I reached a clearing deep in the woods—a perfect circle of earth surrounded by towering pines that rose like cathedral walls, their branches weaving together overhead to form a natural cathedral of shadows. The trees stood sentinel around the space, ancient and silent, witnesses to whatever unholy reunion was about to unfold.

There, in the center of the clearing, stood a figure from hell itself.

The downpour plastered dark hair to skeletal features I'd inherited from her like a curse, eyes hollow with the hate she'd carried since drawing her first breath. She'd always felt bigger than life when I was small; now, she looked painfully mortal.

Stepping out of the tree line and into the clearing. The moment I saw her face everything clicked into place with sickening clarity.

"Look how you've grown," she whispered, her voice carrying across the clearing like a corrupted lullaby.

The past crashed over me like a tidal wave, dragging me back to white fences and pastel flowers, to brick structures slick with runoff and rooms built for screaming. To the woman who'd watched, never intervened. To basement walls that drank screams and the needle through my lips, thread pulling tight until my voice disappeared forever.

To the woman who'd taught me that monsters were made, not born.

"Mother."