Page 214 of What We Become

She slowly rises, her fingers sliding up to my shoulder and staying there the whole way up. I get it. If she disappeared from my reach again, I don’t know what I’d become.

She turns toward Stephen.

Even unconscious, he looks wrong tied to that post. Too small for the damage he’s done. Too ordinary. Blood mats one side of his hair where I cracked his skull into the beam. His chest moves. Slow. Shallow.

Fury stops in front of him, nothing but contempt in her eyes.

“He did say he wants to know what happened to Brock.”

She turns to look at all of us.

“I say we show him.”

FIFTY-TWO

SAGE

The van smells of industrial cleaner and cigar smoke.

We’re parked behind a gas station on a county road. Stephen is in the back, still out from whatever Gloria injected into him, wrapped in a tarp and secured with enough rope to anchor a sailboat. They found Mars tied up outside the barn. Brock’s little terrier is now sitting in the passenger seat, panting up a storm, excited over all the attention.

She lifts a paw at me through the gap in the seats. Somebody taught her that in three days, with treats and repetition, so he’d have something to walk me into the bushes with. I scratch behind her ear until she puts it down.

Dennis has Milo on the van’s bench seat, checking the dressing over his newly stapled thigh. Knox sits opposite, his left leg now splinted and stretched along the bench. He finishes updating Odin and hands Gloria her phone back.

The trauma kit Dennis is working from lives under the driver’s seat. It’s military-grade.

I’m not sure I want to know why Gloria has it.

Ray is redressing Holden’s stab wound. Holden sits with his shirt open and his jaw set, enduring the examination with barely contained irritation. He hates being touched by anyone who isn’t one of us.

“You’re lucky,” Ray says, positioning the medical stapler over the wound to close it further.

Holden grunts as the first goes in. “I don’t feel lucky.”

“That’s because you’re stubborn. Hold still.” Ka-chung!

Gene wraps my wrists in clean gauze. His hands are quick, practiced, gentle. It’s hard to wrap my head around this version of them. They breached a barn, cut five people free, secured a prisoner, and loaded him into a van without raising their voices or breaking formation.

These are not suburban dads.

“Gloria?” I call.

She’s leaning against the van’s open door, shotgun balanced over one shoulder, watching the road.

“Yes, dear?”

“Who are you?”

She looks at me. At the men behind me. At Milo, who immediately covers his ears with both hands and starts humming loudly.

“I oversee maritime import channels,” she says with a shrug. “Private debt resolution. Offshore warehousing. And a considerable portion of Hunter Harbor’s informal labor market.”

“She’s a crime lord,” Holden says flatly.

“If you prefer vulgar terms,” Gloria says, unbothered.

Milo hums louder.