Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
ABADDON
I watch Hannah walk away from me, and every instinct screams to follow her. To corner her. To make her submit until she promises never to leave.
The old me would have done exactly that. Would have tied her to our bed and kept her there until she begged for my forgiveness, until she admitted she needed me as much as I need her.
But the shame burning in my chest stops me cold.
Only cowards use force.
Her words again echo in my head like a prayer I’m finally learning to understand. She just told me she won’t leave unless I make it impossible for her to stay. And here I am, already planning how to trap her.
Gods, I really am my father’s son.
Thing blocks the doorway of his new rooms as if he can sense my violent impulses, and for the first time in centuries, I’m grateful for his intervention.
“Let her go, brother,” he says quietly.
The beast in me roars at being denied, but beneath that rage, something else stirs—something that might be wisdom. “You speak like a civilized being now?” I bark, not bothering to hide my confusion. “After two centuries of madness?”
Thing’s massive shoulders tense. “You treat me as a beast, you get a beast in return.”
His words hit like a physical blow. How many times did I tell myself I was protecting the world from him, when really I was just perpetuating the same cycle that destroyed us all?
“You are Death! You slaughtered armies,” I grasp for justification. “Entire cities fell to your insatiable hunger.”
“I was an instrument of slaughter,” Thing corrects, his voice heavy with old pain. “Weaponized by our father. As were you. As were we all.”
“Oh, this is rich,” Remus chimes in, that familiar sharp grin spreading across his face. “Abaddon, the mighty Pestilence, lecturing anyone about bloodshed? Ha! All fear the Pest who darkens their door, isn’t that right, brother?”
I bare my teeth at him, but the shame keeps growing. “You incited more bloodshed than any of us, War. Father used us to clean up your messes.”
“Ah, but what beautiful messes they were.” Remus’s eyes go distant with nostalgia. “The Battle of Borodino—cannon fire lighting the sky, bodies piled six feet deep. That was a good day for all of us.”
Thing turns away in disgust, and my stomach churns. We were Father’s cavalry, his loyal weapons of mass destruction.
His perfect sons, as long as we delivered death and despair on command.
Until the day we weren’t.
I move to the window, needing air that doesn’t taste of old violence and regret.
Father’s ambition had been limitless—like Napoleon, he wanted the entire world. But my brothers and I were wild cards he could never fully control.
Remus lived for chaos, caring nothing for sides or strategy. Famine fed off the starving masses we created. I swept through their ranks like a plague, and Thing... Thing was pure fury incarnate, carrying the dead to realms beyond counting.
Battle after battle, war after war. Horses rotting beneath their riders as armies chased each other across blood-soaked fields. And through it all, Father’s voice rang in our heads, driving us onwards: More. Always more.
I believed in his mission with the fervor of a zealot. I was his most devoted son, his truest disciple.
Which made my betrayal so much more devastating when it finally came.
If I’d doubted him even a little, if I’d been ninety-nine percent faithful instead of absolutely devoted... maybe things would have ended differently.
Maybe my youngest brother, Layden, would still be alive.
But when I finally saw Father for what he truly was, my faith in him didn’t just break—it shattered completely. And in my rage, I destroyed the Creator that no earthly army had ever managed to defeat.
“That was the last day,” Thing says quietly, following my thoughts.
Remus pops another grape in his mouth from a bowl he must have stolen from the kitchen—my grapes, meant for my consort—and grins. “That was just the beginning of the end.”
“The last battle,” I correct.
“But there was still Moscow to burn before we were through,” Remus reminds us with sick pleasure.
“Father was so proud,” Thing murmurs, his voice thick with old disgust.
I laugh bitterly. “Father was never proud. Of all the emotions foreign to him, that one he understood least.”
“He was a terrible father,” Remus agrees with characteristic lightness, “but he made us great.”
“Great?” The word tastes like ash. “He created us and despised us in the same breath. Used us like dogs, then put us down when we were no longer useful. We all watched him murder Layden right in front of us, like it was a lesson.”
“I’ve seen humans with their dogs,” Thing says softly. “I don’t think we were thought of so highly.”
The truth of it cuts deep, but Remus just laughs. “You think you’re so much better? The second you had the chance, you did the same thing to us. You chained us like animals for two hundred years. At least with Father, we were free to wander and... feed our appetites.”
“Your appetite for war and destruction?” I snarl. “Would there be anything left of this world if I’d let you continue your bloodlust?”
“You forget,” Remus says, his smile turning razor-sharp, “you weren’t my only jailer.”
“Then take up your disputes with your twin.” I narrow my eyes at him. “He voluntarily walked into that basement to save the world from the both of you.”
For a moment, pure rage replaces Remus’s cultured mask. If there’s anyone he hates more than me, it’s Romulus, the other half of his soul and the conjoined twin whose face sleeps at the back of his head. The tactician to Remus’s madman, Romulus is the conscience he never wanted.
They worked as one for centuries, an unstoppable war machine. One always slept while the other was awake. Until Romulus turned against his twin and helped me forge those hell-metal chains.
“What will you do now, brother?” Thing asks, breaking the tense silence. “You have a consort and kit to think of.”
What will I do?
The answer should be simple, but Thing’s calm rationality after two centuries of mindless snarling throws me off balance. “I will do as I have always done.”
Thing shakes his head, and I swear I see disappointment in those red eyes. “You must go gently with your consort. She is small, and humans are easily damaged. Plus, she now carries your kit—the hope of a future for all of us. If you cannot learn gentleness, you will not be allowed near her.”
Behind him, Remus rubs his hands together in anticipation of violence.
The old rage flares, demanding I put Thing in his place. “I would never hurt my consort!”
“Perhaps,” Thing says gravely, “that is what Creator-Father thought as well. And yet we all know how that ended.”
His words slice through me like a hell-metal blade, cutting off my protests before they can form.
Ah. Yes.
The thing we never speak of. The reason our family was shattered beyond repair that day in Moscow, when the city burned and Father’s true nature was finally revealed completely.
Our youngest brother, Layden—beautiful, tortured Famine—had connected with Father’s consort in ways none of us understood. She’d been the gentle presence we’d never known, the mother figure our creator had never provided.
Then Father lost his temper, as he always did...
And we came home from the blood-soaked Moscow streets to find her broken body at the bottom of the stairs, Father commanding us to “clean up the mess”...
Layden snapped.
He attacked our Creator with the fury of true grief, but he was built for widespread destruction, not close combat. Father toyed with him, slicing off his magnificent wings and pouring molten hell-metal over the wounds so they’d never heal and re-grow.
Even then, we thought it would end there.
But when Layden kept calling him a murderer, kept demanding justice for the woman who’d shown us kindness...
Father drove a hell-metal sword through our brother’s too-soft heart.
While we stood frozen. Watching.
Doing nothing as our brother died.
The memory burns through me like acid, and suddenly I understand what Thing is trying to tell me. What Hannah tried to make me see when she freed him from those chains.
I’ve been so terrified of becoming weak that I became the very monster I once helped destroy.
“I don’t want to be him,” I whisper, the admission torn from somewhere deep inside my chest. “But I don’t know how to be anything else.”
Thing’s expression softens—the first truly gentle look I’ve seen from him in centuries. “You learn. Same as consort teaches. Same as she shows us there is different way.”
“She could leave,” I say, voicing my greatest fear. “She could take my kit and disappear, and I’d deserve it.”
“Yes,” Thing agrees without mercy. “You would. So you make sure she chooses to stay.”
“How?” The word comes out broken, desperate.
For the first time since Father died, Thing smiles. Not the mindless grin of a beast, but something warm and almost... hopeful.
“You become worthy of the choice she made when she came to you,” he says simply. “You become the male she needs, not the monster you were taught to be.”
Behind him, Remus makes a disgusted sound. “Gods, you’re all going soft. Next, you’ll be braiding each other’s hair and singing lullabies.”