Page 231 of What We Burn

“Don’t.” The word is a blade. “Don’t manage me right now, Holden. Don’t reframe this. Don’t tell me I was ‘being reactive’ or ‘escalating unnecessarily’ or whatever phrase you used to make me feel like I was the problem.” He points at the blanket. “That is the problem. That has always been the problem. And I wanted to deal with it months ago.”

Holden’s mouth presses into a tight line, and I can practically hear his thoughts. He was the one who overruled Milo. The one who said, we’re not killing Amy’s boyfriend because he’s a loud-mouthed idiot who misses his friend. He said he’d put pressure on him. Run his friends through the system. That was supposed to be enough.

But it wasn’t. And now Amy—one of the sweetest women on this earth—is in the bedroom shaking because she had to do what we should have let Milo do from the start.

“You’re right,” Holden says.

The room shifts. Milo gapes at him.

“You were right about Tyler. I made the call to stand down, and I was wrong.” Holden’s gaze drops to the blanket. “Then tonight, I sat outside and watched him walk into this building.”

Milo goes perfectly still. “How the fuck did that happen?”

“He came in with two residents. Hat low, sunglasses on. They held the door for him. Talked to him like they knew him. His face is different enough after the beating that I didn’t recognize him.” Holden’s fingers curl around the edge of the counter until his knuckles whiten. “I should have.”

Nobody speaks.

“I was wrong twice,” he says. “Sage and Amy paid for both.”

Milo stares at him for a long moment. I don’t know what he’s looking for—an apology, maybe, or permission, or just the acknowledgment that his instincts are worth more than we gave them credit for. Whatever it is, he seems to find it, because something in his shoulders releases. Like a spring that’s been wound too tight for too long and has finally been allowed to move.

“Rapist’s best friends are not good fucking guys,” he says. “That’s not a complicated concept. That’s not a gray area. That’s pattern recognition, and I’ve been screaming it into the void for months while the rest of you treated me like I was crazy for wanting to go scorched earth on this.” He kicks the kit bag gently with his foot. “I love you all. But I am so fucking tired of being the one who sees the threat first and gets told to calm down.”

“Nobody’s telling you to calm down,” Micah says quietly from the kitchen.

“No. Not tonight. Tonight I get to be right because a sweet woman had to stab her ex-boyfriend to death in her own living room.” Milo’s voice cracks on the word own, and just for a second, the mask slips and what’s underneath isn’t anger. It’s grief. The same grief that’s in all of us—the knowledge that we failed. We failed both of them. I failed them all. “If we’d done what I wanted from the beginning, none of this would have happened. None of it. Not the texts, not the threats, not Tyler showing up here tonight. Sage and Amy would be doing face masks right now instead of sitting in a bedroom while Amy cries with blood on her hands.”

That’s not true. Not all of it. We still don’t know whether Tyler was Stephen. But Milo has spent months circling that theory, and right now every text, threat, and attack has collapsed into the body under that blanket.

Fuck. Maybe he was right.

Maybe he was always right.

The kettle clicks off. Nobody moves to pour it.

Milo crouches beside me. Looks at the blanket. Then he pulls it back, just enough to see Tyler’s face. The eyes still open, still fixed on the bedroom door.

“Fuck you,” Milo says to the body. “You stupid, stubborn, dead piece of shit.”

Then he reaches into Tyler’s pocket and pulls out his phone.

Milo angles the screen toward his face until the phone unlocks with a soft click. He starts scrolling. Fast. Thumbs moving with the kind of speed that only comes from someone who thinks in systems and code and the architecture of other people’s digital lives.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“My job.” Milo doesn’t look up.

He scrolls for another thirty seconds. Then he stops. His thumb hovers over the screen and his face changes—the anger draining away, replaced by the most dangerous Milo there is. Calm and focused.

“Invite sent,” he says, and pockets the phone.

Knox’s head lifts. “Invite to where?”

Milo stands and picks up the kit bag. “Somewhere they can’t leave.” He heads for the broken doorway.

Holden moves into his path. “If you hit every name we have, they’ll shut down the yard. We lose the unidentified accounts. We lose Stephen.”

Milo stops in front of him. His gaze drops to the blanket.