Page 255 of Wicked Brutal

“He put his hands on my little buddy?” Arthur watches him carefully. Dad looks at me. “On my Toby?”

“Yeah.”

“That motherfucker.” He pushes away from the table.

“Walter,” Arthur says.

“No.” Dad’s already moving. He points at my phone. “He hit my Toby.”

“I know.”

“Where is Roman?”

“Probably home.”

“Good.” He turns toward the door. Callum steps into his path. Dad stops. “Move.”

“No.”

“Callum.”

“I’m just as pissed as you are.”

“Then come with me.” Under any other circumstances that might be funny. Nobody laughs.

“Tobias is still in that house,” Arthur says from behind them.

Dad’s whole body locks. Arthur doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. Dad turns around. The rage doesn’t leave him — it just gets trapped somewhere with nowhere to go. His eyes drop back to the picture.

“My little buddy.”

Quieter this time. Tobias spends half his life attached to Dad whenever he’s allowed near our house. He has his own ultrasound picture hidden in Mom’s article folder because he decided the baby is his too. Dad carries him around so he can see things, lets him talk his ear off about frogs and ghosts and whatever’s taken over his brain that day. And Tobias calls him my Walter. Dad sits back down. Barely.

“There’s more,” I say. His eyes come to mine. I wish to God there wasn’t. “Ally stepped between them.”

Kaid swears under his breath — of course he understands immediately. All of them do.

“What did Roman do?” X asks.

“He grabbed her.” I swipe to her arm. Dad takes the phone again. Nobody has to ask what they’re looking at. Roman’s fingers are printed into her skin. Another picture. Other arm. “He tried to pull her out of the way. She kept getting back between him and Toby.” Dad’s jaw flexes. “He grabbed her with both hands.” I hate the next part. “And shook her.”

Danny reacts before anyone else, and it comes out of him like it was ripped loose. “What?”

The room turns to him. He’s gone white. “Danny—“

“How hard, Ryan?”

“Hard.” I watch the question form on his face before he can get to it, and I answer it before he has to say it out loud, because I know exactly why he’s the one asking. “No bleeding. No cramps. She didn’t fall. Nothing hit her stomach. I made her go through every one of them with me. She says nothing feels different.”

His chair’s already halfway back. He drags both hands over his face. “Fuck.”

Clifford stands and puts a hand on his shoulder. Doesn’t tell him to calm down. Just stands there with him. Theodore’s gone pale too — of course he has. Becca is his daughter. The baby they lost was his grandchild. The same shit we’ve been tearing apart for months reached into Danny and Becca’s life once already and took something neither of them even had time to understand they wanted before it was gone. And now we’re sitting here talking about Ally being shaken while she’s pregnant.

I look back at Dad. His face is terrifying. “He hit her too.”

I swipe again. Her cheek. Her split lip. Dad stares at it. Kaid comes around the table. X follows. Iz is already there. The phone moves between them — Kaid first, expression going blank; X next, going colder; Danny over his shoulder.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”