Page 210 of What We Become

The banging intensifies.

“What the actual fuck,” Stephen mutters. “I told them I wasn’t to be disturbed.”

Stephen releases my hair and stalks toward the door, knife raised. He glances back at me with a warning glare that promises this isn’t over. Then he cracks the door open a sliver, peering out into the gray dawn light.

“Who the fuck are you?” he hisses.

“Oh, hi!” a chirpy voice rings out. “I was in the area, and I was wondering . . . have you seen my son?”

FIFTY-ONE

KNOX

The door splinters under Dennis’s boot like wet cardboard. Gloria doesn’t wait—she’s through the gap first, shotgun leading, Gene and Ray following in their turtlenecks like this is a fucking neighborhood watch meeting. I shoulder past Dennis, my left leg screaming as I cross the threshold.

Stephen stumbles back but catches himself. The knife comes up.

I don’t let him use it.

Three limping strides. My hand closes around his throat. I brace on my right leg and haul him off the ground. The right leg takes all of it and starts to shake. Gray crawls in at the edges of everything. I don’t put the left down. His feet kick air. He claws at my arm and gets nothing. He’s light. A sack of bones and bullshit. All the violence he’s spent months rehearsing, means jack shit now because my hand is around his neck and he’s nothing but a puppet at the end of my arm.

His mouth gapes for breath. The knife arm flails, but I catch his wrist and wrench it sideways. The blade hits the dirt. I tighten my grip on his throat, and he makes a wet, strangled sound that I could listen to all day.

“Knox!” Fury’s cry cuts through the haze, and I see them.

My family.

Strung from hooks like they belong in a slaughterhouse. Ropes at their wrists, arms stretched overhead. Milo’s thigh is soaked dark with blood. Holden’s side is bleeding through his shirt. Micah is pale under a sheen of sweat. Eli’s wrists are raw meat.

And Fury.

Fury, with blood at the corners of her mouth and a fresh red line at her throat. Her eyes are wild and wet and locked on me.

“Knoxie.”

“Fury.” My voice breaks on her name. I don’t give a fuck who hears it.

Behind me, the dads are already moving. Dennis reaches Milo first, climbing a stepladder and sawing through the rope with an efficiency that tells me he’s cut people free before. Gene goes for Holden. Ray heads for Micah.

“Two out by the tractor shed,” Dennis says, still sawing. “They won’t be getting up. Third one had a pickup and decided he had somewhere else to be.”

I look at Stephen in my grip. His eyes are bulging. His fingers are weakening against my forearm.

I want to squeeze until there’s nothing left.

“Easy, honey,” Gloria says from behind me. “We need him alive for now.”

For now.

I drive Stephen’s skull into the nearest support beam. The crack is solid. His body goes limp. I let him drop and grab rope from the floor—the same rope that held my family. Wrists first. Ankles next. I cinch the knots hard enough to bite into skin. Then I loop a second line around his chest and the post for good measure.

If he wakes up, he’s waking up trussed.

“I’ll just . . .” Gloria crouches beside him and does what she does best—she sticks a needle in his neck. “Now you can’t bother anyone until we’re ready to deal with you,” she says, capping the syringe and dropping it into her pocket.

How many of those does she have in there?

I turn away from Stephen’s unconscious heap to assess the others.