Nick
The room reeked of sweat, stale alcohol and something sour that clung to the back of my throat the longer I stood there.
The curtains were half-drawn, trapping the humidity inside the narrow space, and the single bedside lamp cast a jaundiced glow over peeling paint and water-stained carpet.
Nothing had changed for James. Not the decay.
Not the self-pity. Not the quiet spiral of a man who had spent his life choosing the easiest poison in the room.
He would continue to be a burden on Ella until we stopped him.
I had left him with options. A case of bottles on the table. A small packet within reach. Alcohol or drugs. Slow failure or sudden collapse. The illusion of choice for a man who had never taken responsibility for any of them.
An image of my father rose uninvited in the dark corners of my mind.
His temper had always arrived before his fists, filling a room with dread long before the pain began.
He liked the anticipation, liked watching us shrink before he even lifted a hand.
Ella’s father was cut from a similar cloth, but instead of brute force, he wielded erosion.
He didn’t bruise you in one blow. He wore you down.
Borrowed from you. Drained you. Returned again and again until there was nothing left but obligation and shame.
How badly I wanted to step forward, slide my fingers around his rancid throat and feel the fight drain out of him beneath my grip. I could picture it clearly—the widening eyes, the useless clawing at my wrists, the sudden panic when he realised this time there would be no bargaining.
My fingers flexed at my sides.
That wasn’t the plan.
The liquor would erode what little function his liver still clung to, and the drugs would finish what years of neglect had already begun. He was a weak man, and weakness would be his downfall. I wasn’t here to grant him drama. I was here to close a chapter.
Would Ella cry for him?
The question lingered longer than I liked.
Did she know about her mother’s death-in-service payout? About how quickly grief had been converted into cash and then into oblivion? About how much of her childhood had been collateral damage to his self-destruction?
My jaw tightened.
My fingers itched again.
I turned away from the bed and moved toward the window, pushing aside the curtain just enough to let the moonlight cut through the stale air.
Silver light filtered past the trees outside, laying pale bars across the floorboards.
For a moment, I let my breathing slow and focused on something else—on the grainy black-and-white image saved on my phone.
The blurred outline of a head. The flicker of a heartbeat we had all leaned toward like fools.
The baby.
Something real.
Something that wasn’t tainted or harmed by evil.
It wasn’t that Alec or Rowan didn’t want their hands dirty. They would have stepped forward without hesitation if I’d said the word. But this was mine to settle. Not because of pride, and not because I needed the thrill.
Because I understood this particular kind of damage.
I enjoyed what I did. I never pretended otherwise. Business, protection, personal—the category didn’t matter. If someone needed to be eliminated, I did it without flinching. The clarity of it soothed something in me that had been restless since childhood.
But this piece of shit was bloodline.
And bloodline spreads if you let it.
I refused to let that rot seep any closer to our future than it already had.
I would never revert to that terrified child who counted the seconds between footsteps in the hallway.
Anger had burned that weakness out of me years ago and forged something harder in its place.
What got me through those years wasn’t hope.
It was calculation. It was learning where to stand, when to move, when to strike back, and what to protect at all costs.
Back then, I had protected my brothers.
Now, I protected Ella.
And what she carried.
This kill did not feel like indulgence. It felt like correction. Like sealing a crack in the foundation before it spread. One more wrong in the world quietly erased so that our family could stand without shadow.
Our children would never learn to read the temperature of a room before entering it. They would never flinch at raised voices or wait for the sound of a belt sliding free. They would not grow up measuring love in apologies.
They would be protected from the kind of men who mistook weakness for entitlement.
Ella, however, would still enjoy a bite of pain.
She came too hard when one of us tormented her just enough. There was fire in her that refused to die, even when she pretended to resent it.
My lips twitched despite myself as I stepped forward to James’s bed and took one final look at him. He stirred slightly, muttering incoherently, already reaching toward his bottle without opening his eyes.
He would finish this himself.
And for once in his life, that would be the right choice.
I moved toward the door quietly, pausing only long enough to ensure everything was exactly as I had arranged it. No signs of interference. No fingerprints where they shouldn’t be. Just a weak man and the consequences of a lifetime of poor decisions.
As I stepped out into the cool night air, the smell of damp earth replaced the stench of decay. The sky was clear, wide, indifferent.
Who would have thought that welcoming a child into the world would steady something in me that years of violence never quite could?
I swung onto my bike and let the engine rumble beneath me, the vibration grounding, familiar. I didn’t look back.
What mattered wasn’t inside that room anymore.
What mattered was waiting at home.
And I intended to keep it safe.
?
?
?
Rowan stirred first, the mattress dipping subtly as he pushed himself upright and dragged a hand over his face.
He caught my eye in the dim light and gave a brief nod before slipping out of bed, careful not to disturb the space between us.
Alec followed a moment later from the other side, slower, glancing down at Ella as if committing the rise and fall of her breathing to memory before he moved.
Neither of them spoke. The quiet was deliberate, protective, the kind of silence you learn to cultivate when something fragile rests in the middle of it.
The bedroom was washed in early grey light, the curtains not quite closed from the night before. Outside, the world was beginning to move—distant traffic, a bird cutting through the stillness—but in here everything felt contained.
I shifted closer once they were gone, sliding my arm more securely around Ella and brushing my palm across her forehead.
Her skin was cool now, the fever finally broken, the heat that had lingered for days reduced to nothing more than warmth beneath my touch.
The worst of the cold had passed. The cough still clung to her, surfacing now and then in rough little fits that left her annoyed and hoarse, but the ginger drinks Alec insisted on brewing seemed to be doing their job.
Good for her.
Good for the baby.
Her breathing remained slow and even, her lashes resting softly against her cheeks, but when I adjusted the duvet higher over her shoulder she shifted instinctively, moving closer without waking.
The curve of her back fit against my chest, familiar and grounding.
I let my hand trail from her forehead down to the swell of her stomach, resting there lightly, not pressing, just present.
I hadn’t expected this part.
The waiting.
The watching.
The quiet vigilance.
Violence had always been immediate. Decisive. Clean in its own way. This was slower, subtler—checking her temperature in the middle of the night, swapping out damp pillows, making sure she drank enough water even when she rolled her eyes at us. It required patience instead of force.
It required restraint.
She stirred before turning towards me. Her fingers twitched against the sheets before drifting upward, brushing lazily along my jaw and then settling at the back of my neck.
The contact was light, barely there, but it anchored me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
Not demanding. Not desperate. Just trust, even if she would never use that word.
My eyes closed briefly.
When I was younger, touch had meant warning.
A grip on the shoulder before a shove. A hand raised before a strike.
You learned to brace for it, to harden before it landed.
What got me through those years wasn’t comfort; it was endurance and the promise that one day I would be strong enough to dictate how and when pain was delivered.
This was different.
This was something choosing to rest against me.
I adjusted my hold, pressing a quiet kiss into her hairline where it smelled faintly of the shampoo she favoured. Floral. Clean. Hers. The scent clung to the pillow and to my skin, replacing the harsher smells of the world outside.
We didn’t need to tell her we cared.
We weren’t built for declarations over breakfast or whispered reassurances in the dark. None of us would stand at the foot of the bed and make promises wrapped in soft language. That wasn’t how we operated.
We showed up.
We stayed.
We did what needed to be done without complaint or negotiation.
When she coughed lightly in her sleep, I tightened my arm around her just enough to steady her without waking her fully. She settled again almost immediately, her hand remaining at my neck as though she feared I might disappear if she let go.
A few months ago, I would have shifted away from that kind of contact. I would have told myself it was unnecessary, distracting, a weakness that dulled the edge I relied on. Touch had been leverage, control, appetite — not something quiet and unguarded like this.
Now I let it stay.
I let myself sink back into the mattress, my breathing falling in time with hers. The house was quiet, Rowan likely downstairs already and Alec pretending not to hover while he prepared something unnecessarily complicated in the kitchen.
For once, there was no urgency pressing against my ribs. No immediate threat to neutralise. No perimeter to secure.
Just this.
The slow rise and fall of her chest.
The faint weight of her hand against my skin.
The knowledge that what we were building did not require noise to prove its strength.
Actions always spoke louder than words.
And I intended to keep speaking.