39. Knox
THIRTY-NINE
KNOX
Fury’s fingers trace one of the bees fanned across my left pectoral.
We’re lying together on Holden’s couch after a workout in the garage. An old treadmill, a mat, a pair of adjustable dumbbells. Enough to train Fury. My gear is still at my apartment.
She ran three miles today without stopping, up from two and a half last week. Her form is getting better. Feet landing midfoot instead of heel-striking, arms loose, chin level.
I stripped off my sweat-soaked shirt before lying down. Now she’s pressed against my side, damp hair cooling my skin, one leg thrown over mine. Her fingertip circles the bee.
“This one’s my favorite,” she says.
“You said that about the last one.”
“They’re all my favorite. That’s how favorites work when everything is perfect.” She shifts and presses her lips to the bee. Warm mouth on scarred skin. “I love this tattoo.”
It’s for you.
Her finger moves to the next one. This bee is perched on the purple flower, wings folded.
“This one looks sad,” she says.
“Bees don’t have facial expressions.”
“This one does. Its wings are droopy.”
“They’re folded.”
“Droopy.” She presses her mouth to it. “It’s okay, Miss Bee. You’re doing great.”
I watch her kiss the tattoo as if it will make the bee feel better. She works her way across my chest. Each one gets a fingertip trace and a press of her lips.
When she runs out of ink, she keeps going. Her thumb follows the clean shrapnel ridge along my ribs before her mouth presses there too. Then she moves back over my heart.
“I can feel your heartbeat through your skin,” she murmurs.
“That’s how heartbeats work.”
“Shut up.” She bites me gently. “Let me be romantic.”
I put my hand in her hair and hold her against me, staring at the ceiling while she maps my body with her mouth.
The texts to Fury have tapered off. There have only been two in the last week, both from the spoofed Brock number, both deleted without showing any of us. She thinks we don’t know. Milo told me this morning. She’s swallowing the poison alone.
She’s wrong. But I know better than to force it. Fury fights harder when she feels cornered. The trick is to leave the door open and wait for her to walk through it.
I’ve been doing that my whole life. Waiting. The field taught me that. Twelve men in a ditch on the wrong side of a border, and the ones who made it out were the ones who could sit in the dark and not move until an opportunity presented itself.
Fury shifts against me. Her thumb moves in slow circles over the lowest bee.
“You’re tense,” she says.
“Mm.”
“More than usual. You’ve been grinding your teeth in your sleep.”
“It’s the case,” I finally admit. Because I don’t lie to her.
“Stephen and The Lodge stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re frustrated.”
“We’re waiting on Fenrir. Milo found an encrypted app on Jake Petersen’s phone last night. Before that, every lead was a dead end. Whoever this person is, they know how to disappear.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Her thumb stroking the bee.
“What if they’re not disappearing?” she says. “What if they’re waiting? Like you do.”
She could be right. Patience is a tactic. I use it. Whoever is out there might be using it too. Sitting in the silence. Watching us work.
Choosing their moment to act.
“That’s the thing. We just don’t know.”
My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I don’t move. Fury’s head is on my chest and her hand is on my ribs and right now, in this quiet, I can pretend the world outside this couch doesn’t exist.
It buzzes again.
With a sigh, I reach for it. The screen shows a number with no contact name. I know the number anyway. Everyone in the unit knows it, but none of us have stored it, because you don’t put Odin’s encrypted line in a phone that could be seized, searched, or cloned.
Odin doesn’t call. In five years of working for him, he has never once called my phone.
I answer.
“We have trouble.”
“Define trouble,” I say, sitting up straighter, one hand on Fury’s back.
“Fenrir got into the app this morning—the one Milo found on Jake Petersen’s phone,” Odin says.
“Shit. How bad is it?”
“Milo was right to flag it.”
Fury is watching me. She can’t hear Odin’s words, but she can read my face, and whatever she sees there has already drained the color from hers.
“The Lodge was a discussion board,” Odin continues.
“Men sharing methods, trading photographs, congratulating each other. It was disgusting, but semi-passive. The Kennel is active. They’re not simply talking about hurting women.
They’re running a coordinated operation.
They share target profiles with photos and locations.
Geographic zones with assigned operators. Schedules. After-action reports.”
“After-action reports?” I repeat, and the words taste like bile.
“Detailed accounts of assaults. Written up like mission logs. Filed by username and region. Some of them include photographs and video.”
My hand tightens on the phone. The plastic groans.
“How many users?”
“We don’t know yet. This seems to be a fraction of a bigger network.
There are thirty-seven active accounts for this geolocation.
Some are legacy Lodge members who migrated.
Others are new. The platform has a vetting process.
You can’t join without an invitation from an existing member and a contribution, which means proof that you’ve participated. ”
“Participated,” I say. The word doesn’t fit in my mouth. Too small for what it means.
“SMAN69 is among them. Same username. Active posting as recently as yesterday.”
“Shit.”
“Yes.” Odin’s voice tightens by a fraction, the most emotion I’ve ever heard from him. “It’s bad, Knox. We’re following up, but this is stretching far wider than we knew. This isn’t one man. It’s an abuse syndicate.”
I look at Fury.
Someone built a system to hurt women like her.
“What do you need from us?” I ask.
“Meeting. Tomorrow. Full team.” Odin pauses. “And Knox. Bring Sage. She needs to hear this.”
The line goes dead.
I set the phone down. Fury is sitting up now, both hands in her lap, her damp hair framing a face that’s gone from soft to steel in the space of a phone call.
She’s watching me with the kind of focus she gets when she’s already decided she’s going to fight and is waiting to find out what she’s fighting.
“What is it?” she asks.
I don’t soften it. She doesn’t want soft.
“Fenrir got into the encrypted app Milo found on Jake’s phone. It’s called The Kennel.” I let the name sit between us. “It’s a coordination network for predators. They run operations. They file reports on what they’ve done. Share photos.”
Her jaw tightens. Her hands curl into fists.
“SMAN69 is on it.”
“That’s who you believe Stephen is, right?”
I nod.
“Are they . . . ” She pauses and clears her throat. “Are they posting about me?”
“I don’t know.”
She’s quiet for a long time. The house breathes around us.
I watch her face. The anger isn’t the hot, reactive kind. It’s the cold kind that calcifies. That gets filed and sorted and stored in a place where it becomes fuel instead of noise. I’ve seen it in men who go to war. I’ve never seen it in anyone who looks like Fury.
She reaches for the knife on the coffee table, where she left it before her run. Flicks it open and holds it in her palm. Looks at the blade. Runs her thumb along the flat the way she ran her thumb along my bees five minutes ago. The same patient attention. The same careful study.
“How many?” she asks.
“Thirty-seven. Fenrir suspects more.”
“And they’ve been doing this—actively hunting women like it’s some kind of game—while everyone else goes to work and eats dinner and pretends the world is fine.”
I don’t answer because she’s not asking me. She’s talking to herself. Working through it the way she works through everything. Piece by piece. Brick by brick. Building the house she’s going to burn down.
“I want to see it,” she says. “The platform. The profiles. All of it.”
“Odin wants us at a meeting tomorrow.”
“Good.” She snaps the knife shut. Her eyes are gray and steady when they meet mine. “Promise me we get to burn it all down.”
“I promise.”
“And we kill every single one of them.”
“Fury.” I reach for her. Pull her into me. She comes without resistance. I hold her there, her heartbeat against my ribs, over the bees and the sage. “Every last one.”