Nine years old. Pajamas. Hair tangled into a frightened halo. Her face streaked with tears. Her hands… her hands were smeared with blood like she’d tried to wipe a nightmare off her skin and it wouldn’t come off.
Her eyes landed on me and my cut, and for a split second I saw her flinch like she expected another kind of danger.
I dropped to one knee immediately. Took the height out of the moment.
“Hey,” I said softly. “You’re Meera.”
She nodded, lips trembling.
“You did something really brave,” I told her. “You reached out. You didn’t freeze. You saved your mom.”
Her eyes flicked behind me, toward my brothers. Four big men in leather in her doorway. A child’s brain trying to decide if the cure looks too much like the disease.
I held out my hands, palms open. “Can I come in?”
She hesitated. Then, with the simple logic of terror, she stepped back and let us pass.
The smell hit first. Not gore. Not movie horror. Something worse in its ordinariness: spilled soda, old grease, and blood. Blood has a copper smell that doesn’t ask your permission to remember it.
Sarah Lane lay on the kitchen floor. Her arm was bent wrong. The wrongness wasn’t dramatic, it was factual, like math. A broken body doesn’t always look like chaos. Sometimes it looks like a person who just… stopped.
Reaper was on her instantly, kneeling beside her with a gentleness that would surprise anyone who’d ever seen him throw a punch.
“Breathing,” he muttered. “Pulse weak but there.”
Chains stripped off his flannel and folded it into a compress with hands that usually handled wrenches and throttle grips.
“Gunner,” I said. “Call 911. Now.”
Gunner did, voice calm, giving details like a man who had learned that panic wastes seconds.
Meera stood in the doorway, frozen, watching her mother as if staring hard enough could wake her.
I moved toward her. Slowly. Like you approach an animal caught in a trap.
“Meera,” I said, “I need you to come with me for a second.”
“I can’t leave her,” she whispered.
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