“Not even close,” I said. “But I’ll live.”
“Good,” he said. “You’re tougher than you look.”
We went back downstairs together, past the broken bodies and the chaos. The cleanup crew worked fast—lime on the floors, plastic sheeting, and bleach that burned my nose. One of the bikers, the younger one, paused to nod at me. Respect, or deference, or maybe just relief.
“Almost done here,” one of the men said. “Sorry, name’s Dementor. Up from Atlanta to teach these assholes how to clean up after themselves.” He smiled and winked at Shivs.
“Canon,” one of the other men said. “I’m babysitting this big asshole.” He nodded at Dementor.
I sat on the bottom step, glass in hand, watching the new order assert itself. The house would never be clean, not really, but that didn’t matter anymore. I’d crossed some line, and there was no going back.
Shivs came and stood next to me. I could feel the heat of him, the restlessness, the animal coiled under the skin. He didn’t speak for a long time.
Finally, he said, “They’ll try again. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not for a year. But they’ll come.”
I sipped the bourbon, letting the fire settle in my gut. “Let them,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
Carrie
By the time I got downstairs, the sun had climbed just high enough to drag the fog off the low fields, burning the world to a pale blue hush. The steps were cold, but the sounds in the house gave me a warmth I didn’t know I’d been missing.
I glanced outside at the line of bikes and the crowd of bikers milling around, some smoking, some drinking. Shivs hadn’t been kidding about the club providing protection.
The bikes were matte black, chrome, and dirt, every one of them caked in last night’s rain, dew beading on their tanks. Each ride had its own scars—missing reflectors, stitched leather seats, bars welded thicker than the law allowed. They looked like cavalry on a break between raids, lounging in my driveway as if they’d always belonged.
The house itself had no business looking so untouched. Sunlight glinted off the front windows, every pane immaculate, not so much as a fingerprint or a stray speck of glass. The door, which had lost its hinges to a battering ram less than twelvehours ago, was back in place, hung straight and true. Even the path leading up had been swept—literal broom marks in the residual mud.
I half expected to see a police cordon, or maybe yellow tape marking out the kill zones, but there was nothing. Not even the ghost of a siren. The only movement was a crow picking at something in the grass beside the porch; it caught my gaze, cocked its head, and hopped away like it had better things to do.
My legs were waterlogged, every muscle still holding on to the tension of the night before. The last time I’d set foot in the living room, there had been a massacre, four dead men on the floor, and a naked werewolf bleeding out on my grandmother’s antique rug.
Today there was birdsong.
The house was cleaner than it had ever been. Not just cleaned—sterilized. Bleach and wood polish in the air, undertones of lemon and alcohol. The portraits in the foyer had been righted, the glass in the bay window replaced, and someone had even vacuumed the runner on the stairs. I crossed the threshold, heels echoing, and paused at the spot where the wolf had lain. Not a drop of blood, not a splinter. You could have hosted a wake right here, and no one would have known it had ever seen violence.
Somewhere in the back, a pan hissed. I followed the sound, wary, fists already balled.
The kitchen looked like the set of a bourbon commercial. Mahogany cabinets, granite counters, the vast old butcher block cleaned to a pale pink shimmer. At the stove, stood Shivs.
He wore only a pair of jeans, low enough on his hips that the V of his pelvis cut a line above the waistband. Every inch of his torso was mapped with ink: not the curated kind you got at a Nashville shop, but prison-grade tribal, mixed with runes and skulls and lines that seemed to spiral with the movement of his muscles. Across his left scapula, a fresh white scar intersectedwith an older, jagged tattoo of a wolf’s jaw. The morning sun, angling through the window, threw all of it into relief—like he’d been carved from something harder than flesh.
He was flipping bacon in a cast-iron pan, his other hand busy with a digital forensics kit and a tangle of cell phones splayed out on the counter. Each one was in some state of disassembly, screens cracked and innards exposed. A French press sat on the edge of the sink, coffee so black it looked like motor oil. He didn’t look up.
“Sleep well?” he asked, voice casual as a handshake. The heat from the stove made the muscles in his back shine.
I tried to find my own voice. “You’re cooking.”
He turned, and for a second, I saw the wolf in the tilt of his jaw, the way his canines flashed in a grin. “You look like hell,” he said. “Sit down.”
I sat. I didn’t mean to, but my knees had other plans.
He poured a mug of coffee and slid it across the island to me. His hands, scarred and tattooed, handled the mug with a tenderness that was almost obscene. I took it, burned my tongue on the first sip, and didn’t care.
“You eat?” he said.
I shook my head.
He loaded a plate with eggs, bacon, and two slices of wheat toast cut thick enough to anchor a drowning man. He set it in front of me, slid into the chair opposite. For a moment, we were just two people at breakfast, the world not yet on fire.