Page 139 of What We Become

“It just happened, okay?” She’s pacing, the robe swishing around her knees, her face the color of a tomato. “Drake came to visit two weeks ago and he’s—he’s like Dean but he smiles more and he makes these terrible jokes and one night we were all watching a movie and I fell asleep between them and when I woke up⁠—”

“You were the middle of a Double Dean sandwich.”

“Don’t call it that.”

“A Drake cake?”

“Sage!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I hold up my hands. “I’m not judging. Look at my life, Amy. I’m the last person on earth who gets to judge anyone’s sexual arrangements.”

Case in point: Christmas came and went this week, and I nearly missed it. I’ve never been a holiday person—there was never much in my life worth putting a bow on—and this year I had zero patience for pretending. So the deal was a tree the height of a toddler that Milo smuggled in anyway, and one day where none of us got out of bed. That was the whole festive program. Best Christmas I’ve ever had, which is a very low bar with a lot of clearance.

She stops pacing. “You’re not weirded out?”

I grin. For a second I’m so happy for her it actually hurts, this clean jolt of pride and relief that maybe the world hasn’t wrung all the fun out of us yet. “Amy, the only thing I’m weirded out by is that you managed to keep this from me for two whole weeks.”

She slumps onto the bed and puts her face in her hands, letting out a muffled screech. “It wasn’t supposed to be a thing! Drake lives in fucking Toronto or wherever. He’s only here for a little while. But then he kept coming up and—” She peeks through her fingers, eyes enormous and pleading. “I like them, Sage. I like both of them so much. Is that fucked up? Is it fucked up that I want both twins?”

I flop beside her and lean in, conspiratorial. “Amy, I have literally five men in rotation and a giant custom bed that Milo dubbed fuck pit 2.0. I think you having two men with the same face is the least weird thing happening in this room.”

Her hands drop and she lets out a shuddery laugh. “You sure?”

“I’m jealous,” I admit. “Twins? Oh my God. I bet they hold you down at the same time, don’t they? I bet they do things that⁠—”

“Stop!” But she grins, bright red again, and buries her face in the pillow to scream.

“You’re happy, though, right?” I ask, softer. “Because that’s all I care about.”

She sits up, smoothing her hair so she looks less like a sex gremlin. “I am. But, God, I’m a disaster.”

“You’re not a disaster. You’re just . . . exploring.”

“Exploring. With brothers. At the same time.” She moves the pillow enough to look at me with one eye. “It’s so good, Sage. Like, I’ve never come so hard in my life. But . . .”

“But?”

She sighs. “I feel like I’m only falling into something intense because it’s easier than dealing with the actual stuff.”

“What actual stuff?”

She pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them.

“Everything. I’m overwhelmed, Sage.” She says it quietly. Like she’s been holding it in and the words are heavier than they should be. “Not by the twins—that’s actually the only part that makes sense right now. But everything else. Dean’s work. What that work actually means. The fact that I wake up some nights and he’s out there, accepting a . . . ‘special delivery.’ And it’s not slowing down, Sage. It’s getting bigger. Dean got a call last week from someone he’d never spoken to before—someone with a codename. They wanted to know if Dean could handle ‘increased volume’ and whether his facility had the capacity for ‘regional processing.’ Those were the actual words. Regional processing. Like he’s running a fucking Amazon warehouse for corpses.”

My blood goes cold. Regional processing. That sounds like the network Odin described. The franchise model. If they’re reaching out to Dean directly, that means the organization isn’t tracking the Hangmen from a distance anymore. It’s recruiting. Absorbing. Using infrastructure that already exists.

“What did Dean say?” I ask.

“He said he’d think about it. But honestly, I don’t know if he has a choice.” She hugs the pillow to her chest. “That’s the part that scares me, Sage. This . . . underworld we’ve found ourselves in keeps getting bigger and more organized and more normal. I’m worried I’m going to wake up one day and this will be what life is and I won’t even remember when it wasn’t.”

I don’t say anything because I get it. There isn’t a sentence in the world that makes this smaller.

“I’m not like you,” she says. “I know that sounds like an insult and it’s not. It’s just—you chose this world. You’ve walked into it with your eyes open and you made a place for yourself in it. I sort of . . . fell into it with a knife in my hand. Then I dropped that knife and grabbed straight onto Dean, but the floor was already made of bones before I realized I was standing on it.”

She’s wrong about how cleanly I chose it—I fell into this world too. The difference is that somewhere along the way, I stopped looking for the exit.

“Amy—”