Chapter 24
Enzo sat with his back to the cold metal, Seven in his lap, his head heavy against his chest. There was a bandage covering the four-inch groove the stray bullet had carved into his cheek and another wrapped around the missing curve of his earlobe.
Atticus had assured him Seven was fine—“mild concussion, ruptured eardrum, no internal bleeding”—but Enzo’s chest was still too tight to breathe right.
He believed Atticus. He just didn’t feel like believing him.
Every rise of Seven’s chest against his own came as proof he refused to stop checking for.
They’d moved. Not far—just across the docks to another corpse of a building—but far enough that the shadows had rearranged themselves.
The abandoned processing shed loomed like a rusted cathedral, its corrugated roof slick with moonlight.
A single sodium lamp leaned crookedly from a post, flickering in and out, like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to live.
It threw light in uneven pulses, heartbeat flashes that made the wet ground look like it was breathing.
Atticus lingered close, his usual calm pulled taut, like he knew the second he walked away, Enzo would unravel.
Jericho’s low voice carried from somewhere deeper in the shed, smooth and steady as a surgeon’s hand, impossible to read.
Grant and his buddies lay hog-tied in the open, their muffled groans catching beneath the whine of distant waves.
Somewhere out on the water, there was a relentless dinging sound that he couldn’t quite place.
Enzo’s brothers were orbiting the scene, one moment hurling insults at the captives, the next craning their necks toward the far side of the room where Avi’s “project” was taking shape.
Avi stood grinning, the kind of grin men wore right before they did something they could never take back.
There was that wild spark in his eyes—half genius, half lunatic—that made Enzo’s stomach knot with something between awe and disgust. He wanted to tell him to stop smiling like that.
He wanted to tell him not to enjoy it. But telling a psychopath to act more human seemed a useless pursuit.
“You see it?” Avi called, his voice echoing off the rafters, far too bright for the room it lived in. Enzo had overheard him telling Asa earlier he was naming it Teeth Therapy. He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. The thing explained itself.
It was a ramp—old, salt-gnawed metal climbing up from a shallow basin of stagnant water into a waiting mouth of shadow.
The sides were high to keep their catch in the machine’s relentless jaws.
The teeth—God, they really did look like teeth—were rusted blades welded at uneven angles, jagged enough to catch the meager light and throw it back in cruel, fractured gleams. At the base sat a square pit, the water inside thick and black as oil, trembling whenever the wind breathed through the holes in the walls.
Enzo’s throat felt dry as he took it in.
The smell of brine and blood clung to the air.
Seven’s blood. It soaked into their clothes.
It soaked into Enzo’s psyche, whispering a million different what-ifs.
What if the bullet had been just a millimeter closer?
What if Seven had missed? Would he be clinging to three dead bodies?
His pulse was loud enough to drown out the machinery starting to hum.
He tightened his hold on Seven, grounding himself in the weight of him—warm, breathing, alive—and decided he didn’t care what the others did next. Not tonight.
Enzo had no idea what that pit had once held, but whatever it was had been joined by three gallons of gasoline from his trunk.
The fumes curled through the air so thick his eyes burned, a sting of heat and chemical rot that coated the back of his throat.
Cans and warped crates lined the walls, and chains hung from an overhead rail, swaying slightly every time someone walked by.
The whole set-up looked rehearsed, like some insane fever dream of theater and torture, and everyone knew their cues except him.
“Enzo?” Seven groaned, his head rolling weakly against his chest as he fought to look up.
Enzo’s pulse spiked so fast it made his vision blur. For a second, every other sound—metal, waves, muffled whimpering—disappeared. “I’m here, baby. How do you feel?”
“Like someone dragged me across the pavement by my hair,” Seven muttered, voice hoarse and raw. “What happened?”
Enzo shot a glare towards the sweaty man with his greasy ponytail. “That stupid fuck, Caesar, shot you.”
Seven’s head snapped downward, like he could assess the damage by instinct.
“It was a stray bullet,” Atticus said from where he sat on the lowest stair riser, voice calm, clinical. “Caught your cheek and ear. You’re probably gonna have a scar, and you’re missing part of your earlobe.”
Seven sagged against Enzo’s chest with an exhausted breath. “Is that all?” he asked, relief bleeding into the words. “Is everyone else okay?”
Atticus nodded, but Enzo’s jaw flexed. “No, that’s not all. You’ve got a ruptured eardrum, a concussion, and probably a few cracked ribs from falling down the stairs.”
His hand never stopped moving, tracing small circles against Seven’s arm, like he could keep him here just by touch.
Seven grimaced. “That explains why it feels like somebody went at me with a baseball bat.”
Avi appeared in front of them, all grin and mania, his eyes practically glowing. “Perfect timing,” he said to Seven. “Just in time to watch me knock another thing off my bucket list.”
Felix and Zane traded uneasy glances but stayed quiet. Atticus just huffed, the corner of his mouth twitching, like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be horrified or impressed.
Seven tried to sit up straighter, squinting toward the monstrous contraption at the center of the room. “What is it?”
“What is it really?” Avi asked, tilting his head with a smirk. “Or what’s my vision?”
Seven blinked. “Both?”
“Near as I can tell, this used to be a fish descaler,” Avi said proudly. “See those grater-like things on the ramp? They’d drag the fish across to scrape off scales before dumping them in the pool.”
Seven leaned forward, his nose wrinkling as the sharp, metallic scent of gas hit him. “What’s in the pool now?”
“It was stagnant water,” Avi said, grinning wider. “Now, it’s water and gasoline.”
Seven stared at him. “You had ‘run a dude over a cheese grater into a vat of gasoline’ on your bucket list? That’s oddly specific and weirdly coincidental, even for you.”
“No,” Avi said, scandalized. “I once heard this Weird Al song—”
“Who?” Seven interrupted.
“Before your time.” Avi waved him off. “Anyway, he wrote about diving into a swimming pool of double-edged razor blades rather than spending another minute with his girl. And I thought, that’s art. But I knew I could improve on it.”
“Lunatic,” Atticus muttered, but his tone carried reluctant amusement.
The tension in the room pulsed like a heartbeat, laughter and horror tangling together, the smell of gasoline cutting through it all.
Enzo smoothed his thumb over the edge of Seven’s jaw, feeling the dried tack of blood beneath the bandage.
Seven was breathing. That was all that mattered. The rest of the world could burn.
“As I was saying,” Avi called, louder than necessary, punctuating each syllable. “I knew I could do it better. What if, instead of diving into razor blades, they could, like, slide down them and land in lemon juice or alcohol…or, since we’re improvising…gasoline.”
“That’s…intense, man,” Seven said, throat tight with a laugh that didn’t reach his eyes.
“This is gonna be so fucking cool,” Avi crowed and hustled back to fuss over his vision.
Enzo exchanged a look with Atticus—the only two people who felt like actual adults in the room right now—while Felix, Zane, and Jericho hovered, saying nothing that encouraged Avi’s mania, yet not stepping in to stop it.
Jericho offered practical tips about keeping the gears from gumming up.
Asa barked a reminder about stabilizing the ramp so it didn’t collapse halfway down.
Enzo kept staring at the ramp. He tried to look away, but his gaze kept snagging on small, awful details: a strip of denim hooked on a serrated tooth, threads frayed like a torn flag, a dark smear on the concrete rim near the pit, a coil of rope lying beside a winch with the kind of deliberate placement that made his chest tighten.
The air tasted faintly of iron and gasoline; it made his stomach flip.
A small commotion at the door announced August and Lucas’s arrival.
August’s smile split his face like a knife. “Oh, excellent. We didn’t miss it.”
“I wouldn’t start without you,” Avi said, grinning, like he’d been given permission to finish a thesis. “Not after you let me shatter that body.”
Lucas folded down beside Seven, keeping a careful distance from the man’s kicked-out legs. “How are you feeling?” he asked in a low voice.
“Like someone shot me in the face,” Seven muttered. The joke eased some tension; a crooked, exhausted grin softened his features. “My head’s pounding, and I think I cracked a tooth. Do I look as bad as I feel?”
Lucas’s mouth quirked. “Actually? You look kinda hot, like a movie hero.”
Enzo’s jaw tightened at the casual compliment. Before he could retort, August swooped in and pulled Lucas upright into his arms. “That’s enough of that,” August said, warm annoyance in his tone. “Have we reached the point in our relationship where you flirt with younger men right in front of me?”
Lucas rolled his eyes. “If I got mad every time some student hit on you, I’d need a Botox retainer to keep up with all the frown lines.”
“That’s different,” August countered, smug.
“How so?” Lucas prodded with a laugh.
August wrapped his arms around him from behind. “They flirt with me. I would never flirt with them, not when I have you.”