Chapter Twenty-Two
CALYPSO
The Next Night
The way the air inside the clubhouse walls sits heavier, it feels like it’s charged with something that presses against the skin.
Every lamp throws longer shadows than it should.
Every voice carries an edge it doesn’t bother to soften.
The Kings of Anarchy are mobilizing, and everyone in the building feels it, the kind of shift that hits before anyone says a word.
I stand in the doorway of the main room, watching them work.
Wreck has the tactical maps spread across the long table at the center, hand-drawn, annotated in three different colors, covered in notations that track entry points, rogue patrol routes, and structural weak spots in Mordain’s underground network.
He points at a corridor junction with one thick finger, his voice low and certain as he speaks to Thorn and Maul.
Thorn listens in absolute silence, arms folded, bark-textured skin catching the light.
He nods once, a single, measured movement that somehow communicates everything.
Maul reaches across and taps a second exit route, already mapping threats with a precision that’s been drilled into trained instinct.
They move around each other the way a club moves when everybody knows their job. Nobody is getting in anybody else’s way. Nobody is trying to be the loudest voice in the room.
Every movement has a purpose.
Just work getting done.
At the far end, Flux has claimed a table and set up laptops on it.
Three screens glow in the low light while his fingers fly across the keyboards fast enough to blur.
City maps, power grids, security feeds, and traffic cameras.
Every system tied to the city is getting pulled apart and put back together under his hands.
He mutters something to himself, kills one feed, opens another, and reroutes a third.
Then he’s gone. One second he’s in the chair, next he’s shifting, body collapsing into something smaller and leaner, all sharp angles and unnatural speed as he slips through the window.
Gone before most people would register the movement.
Thirty seconds later, he’s back inside, reforming as he moves, dropping into the chair, and picking up exactly where he left off.
The transformation doesn’t seem to cost him a damn thing.
The keyboard starts rattling again before the rest of us have fully processed that he ever left.
Ruckus is seated cross-legged on the floor near the fireplace, which would look absurd if everything about his posture didn’t suggest deliberate intention.
Small cloth pouches are arranged in a careful row across his knee.
He works through each one methodically, pressing a coin between his palms and murmuring something too layered to be a simple phrase, each word landing with the weight of something genuinely old.
The air around him shimmers faintly at the edges, the barely visible flex of luck being shaped into something tangible.
Something that will sit in the breast pocket of every brother who goes into that tunnel tomorrow and bends the world a few degrees in their favor when it matters most. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and so does everyone else in the room.
Then I find Rhett and Bennett. They’ve claimed the bench along the far wall, tucked between two weapon crates, making it look productive enough that no one questions it.
Rhett is loading magazines with a methodical rhythm, an ingrained habit doing most of the work, pressing each round home with steady, practiced pressure.
Bennett has a blade across his knee, drawing a whetstone along the edge in long, deliberate strokes that ring out soft and clear in the spaces between conversation.
“So when we die…” Rhett says, not looking up from the magazine, his tone light, like this is just another conversation, “… do you go back to heaven?”
Bennett continues his stroke. “I’m not going to die.”
“But hypothetically.”
Bennett hesitates, the whetstone lifts, then lowers. “Hypothetically… yes.”
“And I go back to hell.”
Bennett snorts out a laugh. “Obviously.”
Rhett slots the finished magazine into his jacket and reaches for the next. “So really, nothing changes.”
Bennett is quiet for a moment, and I watch his hands still on the blade. Something moves across his expression. “I suppose not.”
“Want to make a bet on who kills more rogues?”
Bennett rolls his eyes. “That’s sacrilegious.”
“So yes?”
The corner of Bennett’s mouth shifts, just barely, but enough. “Winner doesn’t have to clean the pit for a month.”
Rhett’s grin breaks wide and crooked across his face. “Deal.”
“You’re both cleaning the pit regardless.
” Scar’s voice arrives before he does, cutting through their exchange without raising itself.
He passes behind them without slowing, red eyes moving across the tactical map as he goes, and neither of them actually startles, which says something about how well they know him. “Focus.”
I smirk as Rhett watches him go. “He heard the whole thing, didn’t he?”
Bennett resumes sharpening. “He always hears everything.”
“Damn vamp ears.”
Bennett shoves Rhett’s side. “Now focus.”
I turn away from them before my expression betrays me, because something has shifted behind my ribs that feels dangerously close to warmth.
Wreck pushes back from the table across the room.
He rolls his shoulders, a slow, purposeful rotation, and when he raises his hands and cracks his knuckles, the sound is louder than it should be.
Stone bleeds up from beneath his skin in patches, pale gray spreading across his knuckles, his forearms, the ridge of his jaw.
The wendigo is surfacing. Not completely, he’s keeping it leashed, barely, but the hunger that lives in his hollow eyes sharpens into something with a specific shape, and the temperature in the six feet around him drops three degrees.
He is already thinking about what comes next, and his body is already answering.
Thorn simply turns from the table and walks to the wall, where he stands with his back to the room and his hand resting flat against the timber.
His fingers splay wide, and faint, thin roots push out from the gaps between the planks and curl gently around his wrist, the building acknowledging him, or him acknowledging it, the silent communion of a forest spirit checking in with whatever sacred geometry lives in old wood.
Then he drops his hand, folds his arms again, and says nothing.
His silence isn’t emptiness, it is the kind of quiet that sits in ancient things, of things that have been here long before any of us and expect to remain long after.
That stillness settles firmly into my chest.
I want this.
The thought arrives without warning, without the careful scaffolding I would normally build around something that inconvenient. It doesn’t come with qualifications or disclaimers. It just sits there, blunt and certain… and I let it.
Not the fighting or the danger, though both of those things live in me in ways I stopped pretending were simple a long time ago.
I want this.
The organized chaos of brothers who move around each other like they were made to occupy the same space.
The way Wreck and Thorn don’t need to speak.
The way Flux trusts that when he comes back through that window, there will be somewhere to land.
The way Ruckus sits on the floor making luck charms for people who would probably walk through fire for him, and does it without anyone asking, because it never occurred to him not to.
Even the way Rhett and Bennett’s bickering is, underneath it, a kind of care. A reassurance they’re both still here, still themselves.
I have not had a ‘this’ in a very long time.
“Hey.” Roxy materializes at my elbow and steers me by the arm, away from the doorway and down the hall toward the kitchen, where the noise drops to something manageable.
She hands me a mug and leans back against the counter, composed, like nothing in this club is new to her anymore.
She doesn’t open with small talk. “How are you actually doing?”
“I’m fine—”
“Calypso.”
I exhale, looking down at the mug. “I’m terrified. And I’m trying not to be.”
“Fear is useful.” She tilts her head slightly. “You know that, it keeps you sharp.”
“There’s a difference between useful fear and the kind that makes you second-guess every exit strategy you’ve ever built yourself.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but something in her eyes does, a softening that isn’t pity, just understanding. Understanding shaped by having been in this exact place, knowing there’s no way through it but straight ahead. “You’re thinking about tomorrow.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“We are. But you’re thinking about it differently than the brothers.” She pauses, letting that sit. “You’re thinking about what you’d be leaving.”
The accuracy of it lands somewhere undefended, and I press my palm flat around the mug, letting the heat ground me.
She’s right. That’s exactly what it is, not just the calculation of risk, but the specific, unbearable weight of having something worth losing for the first time in a very long time and knowing it.
“Don’t tell me to be careful,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to. You’re the most capable person in this building, and you know it.
” She pushes off the counter. “I was going to say… whatever you’re trying not to feel tonight, let yourself feel it.
It doesn’t make you weaker. It makes you more certain about what you’re fighting for.
” She squeezes my arm once, then heads back toward the main room.
I stand in the kitchen for another thirty seconds with the warmth from the mug moving up through my hands, and I let the thought settle fully, the one I’ve been holding at arm’s length since I walked through that door tonight and saw all of them doing exactly what they are.
I want this family.
Not as a temporary arrangement or as a professional alliance. Not as a situation where I keep one foot out, just in case the floor gives way.
All of it.
The chaos, the weight, and the warmth of it.
All of them.
Back in the main room, Wreck is pointing at the tunnel entry coordinates on the map, his voice dropping further as the final logistics take shape.
Maul nods and steps away to make calls, assigning perimeter teams with clipped efficiency, trusting the people on the other end to do exactly what they’re told.
Flux has shifted back to his primary form and is pulling the last of the city security feeds offline, his groundwork making us ghosts before we’ve taken a single step.
Across the room, Rhett finally looks up from the weapons crate, his attention catching on Calder near the hallway. The kid is hovering just inside the space, quiet, watchful, taking everything in without drawing attention to it—kitsune instincts.
Rhett’s jaw tightens slightly as he watches him, then his gaze flicks across the room toward Scar just as the call gets made.
“Prospects stay here as clubhouse security.” There’s no room for interpretation.
Rhett exhales through his nose, already shaking his head. “C’mon, man!”
Scar doesn’t even look at him. “It’s not a discussion.”
Rhett pushes to his feet anyway, stepping away from the crate, the movement sharp enough to draw attention. “We should be going with you!”
Scar’s gaze lifts, the kind that doesn’t need to raise volume to shut something down. “You’ll be where I tell you to be.”
Rhett doesn’t back off. “We’re ready, Scar.”
“That’s not the question.” A beat of tension snaps tight between them.
“We can handle it,” Rhett pushes, his voice edged… unwilling to be sidelined.
“You can follow fucking orders,” Scar replies, flat and final. “Start there.”
Rhett’s mouth tightens, like he’s got three more arguments lined up and knows none of them are going to land.
Behind him, Bennett doesn’t even look up from the blade he’s been working, his tone calm, almost bored. “We are prospects.”
Rhett shoots him a look.
Bennett keeps going, dragging the cloth slowly along the edge of the blade. “We follow orders.”
“Since when do you care about fucking orders?” Rhett mutters.
That earns him a faint glance. “Since Raze will kill us if we don’t,” Bennett says evenly.
There’s no humor in it, and Rhett huffs out a breath, scrubbing a hand over his jaw before glancing back toward Scar, like he’s considering pushing it one more time.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he jerks his chin toward Calder. “You heard him. Lock it down.”
Calder straightens immediately. “You got it.” The words come out quick and sharp, like he’s been waiting for something to do.
Rhett watches him for a second, then nods once, tension still sitting under his skin but contained now, redirected into something useful.
Bennett finally looks up, just briefly, his gaze moving between them before dropping back to the blade. “Try not to die out there,” he says, like it’s an afterthought.
The room settles back into motion around them.
Calder’s voice, when it comes, is quiet enough that it nearly disappears under the low hum of the room around them. “Anyway… someone needs to protect the club girls.”
The silence that falls between Rhett and Bennett is small and weighted. They look at each other, and something passes between them, an unspoken exchange, the kind that comes from knowing each other well enough to skip the words.
Rhett turns back to Calder. “The kid’s got a point.”
“Agreed,” Bennett says.
Neither of them argues again.
I watch Scar move through the room, red eyes tracking everything at once.
His centuries of surviving things that should have ended him, and he is still the most certain thing in any room he walks into.
His movements are quiet and controlled, carrying the kind of assurance that comes from knowing exactly what he is and what he’ll do.
Tomorrow we go into the dark.
And for the first time, I’m not wondering if we will survive it.
I’m wondering what’s going to survive us.
Because whatever is waiting down there…
It hasn’t met us yet.