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Not because I understand what that means.

Because he does.

His gaze drops to the black feather still caught between his fingers. “They cut me off.”

“From Heaven?”

A broken laugh leaves him. “From everything I have been since the day I was created.” His hand falls. “I… I don’t know what that makes me now.”

“You.” He looks at me. “It makes you fucking you, Sentinel.”

His face twists, and I pull him closer when his legs threaten to give out again.

“I don’t know shit about Fallen angels. I don’t know what those wings mean or what those faceless fuckers took from you.” I wait until those gray eyes meet mine. “But I know who crawled into Hell beside me. I know who gave me his Grace when it could’ve killed him. I know who helped me seal that fucking chasm.” My hand locks around the back of his neck. “That’s my brother. And Heaven doesn’t get to decide otherwise.”

He laughs, and it comes out broken. “They took everything, Carnage. Ten thousand years of purpose, and I don’t even get to know why it mattered enough to burn.”

We sit there a long while, my shoulder pressed against his, neither of us saying much because there isn’t much worth saying to a man who just watched his own reflection stop existing. His breathing eventually evens out, and the shaking in his hands settles into something closer to stillness.

“I might have to go,” he says finally.

Every instinct in me goes on alert. “Go where?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.” He stares at his blackened hands like he’s never seen them before. “Somewhere that isn’t here, reminding you all what I used to be.”

I choose my next words the way I’d defuse something live. “You’ve been the best thing about this place since day one, altar boy.” My throat works. “Whatever you choose, you’ve already done more good here than they could ever ask of you anywhere else.”

He looks at me, and for one second, the composure cracks wide open, grief pouring through the gap before he wrestles it back beneath the surface, his jaw locked, his spine straightening like he’s still got wings worth holding up.

“I’m a King,” he says. “This is where I belong.”

I grab him and pull him against me, careful of the wreck of his wings behind him.

Sentinel goes stiff. Then his hand fists in the back of my shirt, and he holds on hard.

So do I. “I’ve got you, brother.”

His breath shudders against my shoulder. “Yeah,” he whispers.

Whatever comes after this, he won’t be facing it alone.

Chapter Thirty-One

ECHO

Six Weeks Later

Six weeks. That’s how long it’s taken for this place to stop feeling like a cage with better lighting and start feeling like the only ground I’ve ever trusted beneath my feet.

I’m leaning against the doorframe of the clubhouse’s Chapel, watching Raze pin a map of the eastern territory to the wall. At the same time, Scar argues with him about a supply route that’s apparently been contested since before either of them stopped aging. My voice sits differently in my chest these days. Not something to be hoarded, hidden, and rationed out in whispers to no one. It’s a tool. A weapon the Kings actually asked for, instead of one the Conclave tried to steal.

Last week I sang three enforcers into a stupor from across a parking lot so the brothers could walk in and finish the job without spilling a drop of blood that didn’t need spilling. The week before that, I caught a lie buried inside a rival pack’s alpha before he’d even finished the sentence, the false note of it scraping against my ear as if a nail dragged down glass.

Raze calls it an asset now. Calls me an asset, which twelve years ago would have sent me sprinting for the nearest border with my heart trying to claw its way out through my ribs.

Now it just makes me feel like I belong to something instead of being owned by it. There’s a difference, and I spent most of my life not knowing it existed.

“Where’s your hellhound?” Scar asks, not looking up from the map, one eyebrow doing all the talking his mouth doesn’t bother with.