Page 152 of What We Burn

“SMAN69 is on it.”

“That’s who you believe Stephen is, right?”

I nod.

“Are they . . . ” She pauses and clears her throat. “Are they posting about me?”

“I don’t know.”

She’s quiet for a long time. The house breathes around us.

I watch her face. The anger isn’t the hot, reactive kind. It’s the cold kind that calcifies. That gets filed and sorted and stored in a place where it becomes fuel instead of noise. I’ve seen it in men who go to war. I’ve never seen it in anyone who looks like Fury.

She reaches for the knife on the coffee table, where she left it before her run. Flicks it open and holds it in her palm. Looks at the blade. Runs her thumb along the flat the way she ran her thumb along my bees five minutes ago. The same patient attention. The same careful study.

“How many?” she asks.

“Thirty-seven. Fenrir suspects more.”

“And they’ve been doing this—actively hunting women like it’s some kind of game—while everyone else goes to work and eats dinner and pretends the world is fine.”

I don’t answer because she’s not asking me. She’s talking to herself. Working through it the way she works through everything. Piece by piece. Brick by brick. Building the house she’s going to burn down.

“I want to see it,” she says. “The platform. The profiles. All of it.”

“Odin wants us at a meeting tomorrow.”

“Good.” She snaps the knife shut. Her eyes are gray and steady when they meet mine. “Promise me we get to burn it all down.”

“I promise.”

“And we kill every single one of them.”

“Fury.” I reach for her. Pull her into me. She comes without resistance. I hold her there, her heartbeat against my ribs, over the bees and the sage. “Every last one.”

FORTY

SAGE

Sat, Aug 22 at 7:15am

Brock:

Do you think about me, pet? I think about you. Every time I wrap my hand around my cock.

[Delete]

[Block]

Nobody points me toward the bar this time.

It’s barely eight on Saturday morning, and Unholy Desires is still wearing the remains of Friday night. The room smells like leather polish, expensive perfume, and whatever the cleaners use to wipe sins off mahogany.

Knox walks me past the velvet stanchions that usually dictate who gets to exist in this space and who gets turned away. My worn boots make hardly a sound on the hardwood, but in the cavernous quiet of the empty club, every footfall feels deliberate. I’m not here to hide today.

I’m walking into the war room.

Behind the massive main bar, Micah is still in last night’s black button-up, sleeves shoved to the elbow, wiping down the taps like he has all the time in the world.