6. Theon
THEON
The centrifuge finishes its final cycle at two forty-seven in the morning, and my body files a formal complaint.
Forty-one detox protocols. Forty-one children whose blood chemistry I’ve reconstructed from stolen medical files, each one a small chemical hostage negotiation I’ll conduct across six weeks of careful tapering.
My eyes burn. My hands have started making micro-errors in pipetting, the kind of drift that gets people killed in my line of work.
I seal the samples, log the batch, and strip off my gloves.
The corridor outside my lab carries sound the way water carries scent—faint, directional, unmistakable. Laughter. A low moan. The unmistakable rhythm of skin meeting skin.
The brothers are unwinding.
I follow the noise up to the common level and stop in the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the low amber light.
The living room has been rearranged the way it always is on nights like this—couches pushed into a loose constellation, cushions on the floor, a bottle of Raphael’s absurdly expensive whiskey open on the side table like a hostess gift at the world’s strangest dinner party.
Bodies everywhere. Ours and theirs.
The regulars are here—the vetted few who knew exactly what they were walking into and have kept coming back for years.
Mira, the ER surgeon with the filthy mouth.
Calla, who runs a gallery and once told Marcus his mask was derivative.
Aiden, broad-shouldered and grinning, currently pinned to the wall by Marcus with a forearm across his collarbone.
“You gonna do it or just breathe on me?” Aiden taunts.
“I’m listening to your heart rate,” Marcus says against his throat. “It spiked when I grabbed you. Spiked again when I said that. You’re embarrassingly easy to read.”
“Then read faster.”
Marcus laughs against his skin, drops to his knees, and Aiden’s head thunks back against the concrete.
Nikolai occupies the big armchair by the far wall, Jenna riding him with the unhurried confidence of a woman who has decided that patience is its own form of cruelty.
She’s naked except for the diamond choker at her throat, her rounded belly catching the lamplight as she rolls her hips.
His hands frame it—not gripping, cradling—before sliding down to her hips.
She sees me first. Of course she does. She smirks over her shoulder, breathless and wicked. “Look who crawled out of his lab. Thought you’d fused to the fume hood.”
“Eyes on me.” Nikolai’s voice comes out as gravel, one hand rising to catch her jaw and turn her face back to his. “You can torment my brother later.”
“Promises.” She grinds down. His breath catches, and for one raw second the vigilance in his pale eyes gives way to hunger.
“Theon.” Darius’s voice floats up from the couch, wrecked and delighted.
He’s stretched across Damon’s lap, Damon’s hand wrapped around his throat with the exact pressure that keeps Darius pliant without cutting off his air—I know because I’ve measured their oxygen saturation during this, at their request, for science.
“We saved you a spot. Well. We saved you a Mira.”
Mira is on the floor cushions with Raphael, her dark hair a ruin. She twists to look at me.
“About time. Your terrifying brother has been taking me apart for an hour and won’t let me finish.”
“Won’t,” Raphael agrees pleasantly. He’s kneeling between her thighs, two fingers moving inside her with infuriating patience. “She begs beautifully, though. Listen.”
“I will end you,” Mira breathes.
“You’ll thank me.” He glances up at me. “Front or back?”
“You’ve already established position,” I say. “I’ll take what’s available.”
“God, even naked he talks like a lab report,” Calla says from somewhere in the cushion pile, and Ezra, of all people, laughs.
He’s sprawled with her draped across him, her fingers tracing the biomechanical ink up his neck, his own hand moving between her thighs with a metronome steadiness that has her twitching.
“He’s not naked yet,” Ezra points out. “Eleven seconds. He folds his shirt.”
I fold my shirt. The room jeers. I set it on the arm of the couch with dignity and take my time about the rest, because giving them the satisfaction of hurrying would set a bad precedent.
Mira reaches back for me the moment I kneel behind her. “Come here, come here. If he edges me one more time, I’m going to bite through his femoral artery.”
“You’d miss,” Raphael says fondly. “It’s deeper than people think.”
“Tell me what you want,” I say against her ear, because I always ask, because the asking matters more to me than anything that follows it. Choice was the first thing they took from all of us. It’s the first thing we give.
“You. Behind me. Hard. While your sadist brother keeps doing exactly what he’s doing until I lose my mind.” She shudders. “That specific enough for you, Doctor?”
“Adequately parameterized.” I push into her in one slow stroke, and her groan hits the ceiling.
She’s hot and tight and already shaking from an hour of Raphael’s patience.
Raphael and I know each other’s timing. After fifteen years of fighting and bleeding together—and this—we rarely need to speak.
He works her clit while I drive into her from behind.
Her arms give way, and Raphael holds her up between us.
“There she is,” Raphael murmurs, watching her face the way he watches everything. “Stay with us.”
“Fuck—fuck, harder, Theon, please—”
I give her harder. Across the room, Darius groans as Damon shifts him, turns him, bends him over the couch arm with that terrifying gentleness of his, one big hand splayed across the back of Darius’s neck.
“Color,” Damon says quietly.
“Green, green. If you check in one more time instead of fucking me, I’m going to manipulate you into buying a boat—”
Damon fucks him. Darius loses the rest in a shout.
“Twelve percent,” Ezra says, apropos of nothing, his voice fraying at the edges as Calla sinks down onto him.
“Twelve percent what?” Marcus calls from the wall, where Aiden has gone loose-limbed and glassy.
“Probability Korte relocates the stockpile before we breach. Down from nineteen. Her new specialist arrived, which means she’s committed to hardening in place rather than—” Calla rolls her hips, and he stops talking. “Rather than moving. Give me a second.”
“He’s running Ashford models,” Jenna says, delighted, riding Nikolai faster now. “While balls-deep. I love this family.”
“Someone has to.” Ezra’s hands find Calla’s waist. “Nikolai asked.”
“I asked six hours ago,” Nikolai says through clenched teeth. He hauls Jenna down harder and swallows her cry with his mouth. “Report later. All of you. Stop working.”
“Rich,” Raphael says, “from the man who once took a call mid-orgasm.”
“It was important.”
“It was hilarious.”
Mira comes with a scream that Raphael catches in his palm, her whole body seizing around me.
He finally lets her finish, drawing it out until she’s sobbing curses into the cushions.
I follow her over the edge with my teeth set against her shoulder, the release hitting me like a solvent stripping the last eight hours from my nervous system.
For four full seconds, my mind is quiet. No formulas. No Korte. No children.
Four seconds. My personal record is nine.
Mira collapses. Raphael pulls her into his lap and strokes her hair, murmuring things too low to hear. She goes loose against him while he talks her down.
“Water,” I say, and Damon, without breaking stride, points at the side table where he’s already staged six bottles. Prepared. Always prepared.
Jenna finishes first, then Nikolai, his groan buried in her throat, his arms locked around her.
He doesn’t let go afterward. He never lets go afterward.
She stays folded against his chest, his hand tracing slow circles on her belly, and his eyes resume their scan of the room—counting us, checking exits, the vigilance that never fully sleeps.
“Ashford,” he says when the room has settled into loose limbs and the whiskey is passing from hand to hand. “Three days.”
“Confirmed,” Ezra says, Calla dozing on his chest. “Weather window holds. I reran the models this morning.”
“The specialist,” Marcus says. He’s on the floor now, Aiden’s head pillowed on his thigh. “She’s not security. Her purchasing patterns are pure analytical chemistry. Verification work.”
“An auditor,” I say. “Korte thinks I’ll poison the stockpile, so she brought eyes to check it.”
“Will you?” Jenna asks. “Poison it?”
“No. I need it intact. Forty-one dependencies to taper. Destroy the supply and I kill them slower than Korte would.” The whiskey burns clean going down. “The auditor is a complication, not a target. I route around her.”
“And if she routes into you?” Nikolai asks.
I consider it. A stranger in Korte’s lab, cataloging compounds, standing between me and eight critical minutes of access. Statistically, a complication. Nothing more.
“Then I’ll adjust,” I say.
Raphael snorts. “He’ll adjust. Famous last words in this family.”
“When have I ever failed to adjust?”
“Budapest,” four voices say in unison, and even Damon smiles, and Mira asks what happened in Budapest, and no one tells her, because what happens in Budapest joins everything else in the sealed archive of us.
I stay another hour. Raphael makes me eat.
Darius falls asleep mid-sentence against Damon’s shoulder.
Across the room, Jenna catches my eye and mouths thank you for the prenatal panel.
I ran her bloodwork this week, and every result is where Raphael wants it.
Good news is something I almost never get to give.
Then my mind starts running again, and I know the reprieve is over.
Back in my quarters, I shower, press my nightly dose into the outside of my thigh, and lie down in the dark with my eyes open.
Three days.
Forty-one children sleeping in a dormitory in Ashford, their blood chemistry engineered into a leash. Korte with her cattle-prod philosophy of discipline. And a specialist I’ve never met, standing in a sublevel lab, checking my old tormentor’s poisons for signs of me.
I hope, for her sake, she’s only good at chemistry.
I fall asleep composing tapering schedules, and for once, the nightmare doesn’t come.