Page 55

Vanilla. Brown sugar. Faint. Two miles off. And under it, blood, and fear, and fifteen strange men.

MINE.

The growl that comes out of me isn’t a man’s. Finn turns around in his seat and looks at me. Then he looks at Rian. Then his own eyes go gold.

“Oh, shit,” he says. And he grins.

We stop two blocks out. An empty lot behind a chain-link fence, broken concrete, gulls. The other two cars pull in behind us and twenty of my men get out and start checking weapons, and I get out and start taking off my clothes.

Jacket. Shoes. Shirt. I fold nothing. I hand nothing to anybody. Four years of yes sir and cuffs and keeping my hands to myself, and I’m done. I’m fucking done.

Rian looks at me. Aidan’s car pulls up and he gets out and looks at me.

“Dec,” Aidan says quietly.

“They put her in a cage.”

That’s all I say. That’s all I need to say.

Aidan takes off his tie.

I stand there on the broken concrete, stark naked, with the wind on my skin, and I find the door inside me. The one I kept locked and bolted and chained for four years, in a cell, in a chow line, in a corridor with a dirty guard’s throat in my hand.

She’s in a cage, brother. Our girl. Go get her.

I open it.

It hurts. Christ, it hurts. Four years of bones that haven’t moved. My spine cracks. My shoulders tear. My jaw breaks and comes back longer. I hit the ground on all fours and the concrete splits under my hands, and they’re not hands anymore.

Then it stops hurting.

Then it’s just right.

I’m big. I’ve always been big. Black with silver through it, five feet at the shoulder, and I shake myself out and I can smell everything. Salt. Rust. Gun oil. Fifteen men, sweating. Dead fish.

And her.

Behind me, Finn’s clothes hit the ground. Then Rian’s. Then Aidan’s, folded, because he’s Aidan. One by one, my brothers come down onto four legs. Red. Gray. Brown. Four Greene wolves in a parking lot on the south river, and twenty men behind us with rifles, and not one of Eamon’s fifteen has heard a car.

I don’t look back at them.

I run.

I don’t remember all of it.

Two on the loading dock, looking the wrong way. They’re waiting for a car. They’re waiting for a man on his knees. They never turn around.

A steel door. Locked. I go through it.

Inside it’s dark and it stinks and it’s full of screaming. Men everywhere. Guns. Something hits my shoulder, something hits my ribs, bee stings, nothing. They’ve got guns. I’ve got teeth. I take a man’s arm at the elbow. I take a throat. One runs, and I bring him down from behind, and he doesn’t get up. There’s one on the catwalk with a rifle and I go up the stairs in two jumps and he goes over the rail.

The ones I pass, my brothers take. I hear Finn laughing. I hear a man begging Rian, and then I don’t.

Mine. Mine. WHERE.

There. At the back. Past the hooks.

I come around a rusted conveyor with blood running off my jaw, and I see it.