Page 207 of What We Become

ELI

Blood trickles down my forearms and drips off my elbows into the straw, my wrists rubbed raw against the rope’s coarse fibers. The pain is useful. It’s the only thing keeping my head clear while Stephen circles Sage.

He lets the threat hang while he slips the satchel off his shoulder and drops it at his feet. He kneels, unzips it, and pulls out a folded knife. He opens it slowly, watching Sage.

“I’ll make it easy,” he says. Calm. Conversational. Like they’re catching up over coffee. “Tell me what you did to Brock. Start from the moment you left the party with him. Don’t lie. Or I start cutting.”

Sage’s jaw is set. I’ve seen that look before—on the beach, when she took Knox’s knife and went for Brock before any of us could stop her. She doesn’t need permission to fight back.

But she’s hurting. I can see it in the tremors running through her arms, the way her fingers have gone white against the rope. Knox’s shirt hangs crooked off one shoulder. A bruise darkens her jaw, and I keep looking at it, then at the knife in Stephen’s hand.

I will kill him.

The leader in me wants to assess the room. Catalog variables. Find something I can use. Except the only resource I have is rage, the obstacle is industrial-grade rope, and the objective keeps shifting between getting Sage free and wrapping this rope around Stephen’s throat until I hear things crack.

The monster behind my ribs is wide awake. I remember the headlights. The wheel under my hands. The road tipping. After that, there are gaps I can’t fill. I don’t remember anyone taking us out of the car. I don’t know what happened to Knox.

That shower. The last of the foam coming out of her hair while I told her what the tattoo she designed for my back meant to me.

The cage was never keeping the monster in, Sage. It was keeping everything else out.

I can still see her crying when I said it. Hear myself telling her how good it felt to have Micah back. To let any of them love me.

She put six birds above that cage, and I have never once said the number out loud. Not to her. Not to anyone. I count them now anyway—five of us in a row, and one still out there somewhere, wings open, farther from the wreck than the rest of us ever got.

Now Stephen is walking between them with a knife, and every instinct I have tells me to put myself in his way. I pull until the rope bites deeper and get nowhere.

I know how to hurt someone. I’m finally learning how to love them.

I don’t know how to stand here and watch.

To my right, Holden is bleeding from a split in his eyebrow. The blood runs into his eye, and he blinks it away. Milo is pale. Every few minutes he shifts his weight and sucks a breath through his nose and pretends he didn’t. I suspect he’s injured his chest in the rollover and hasn’t told us. What worries me is the lack of jokes.

I’m petrified for him.

Micah has gone quiet, but his eyes are tracking everything. I’ve watched him read enough people across his bar to know he’s looking for something we can use. What Stephen wants. What gets under his skin.

I wait for him to look at me.

When he does, he tries to smile. Barely manages it. Even now, the bastard is trying to make this easier for me.

I want my hand on the back of his neck. I want him close enough to feel him breathing.

All I can give him is a nod.

And Sage.

She strains against the ropes, eyes following the knife. The animal I watched her feed in that plastic-wrapped living room is still there. So is the fear. I can see it every time Stephen looks away from her and toward one of us.

Her fingers flex against the bindings.

She wants her hands free as badly as I do.

“Brock was a rapist,” Sage spits.

“Brock was all I had—my family!” The mask drops for half a second. Underneath it is grief so rotted it’s turned into obsession. Hatred wearing love’s clothes.

“That is so gross, man,” Milo says from his hook. “You were fucking your cousin.”