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I know all of that.

I just can’t make myself care about any of it as much as I care about listening to Thessaly.

My hellhound pushes forward, and some buried part of me expects the usual blast of heat, the claws behind my ribs, the instant demand to fight whatever has gotten too close.

Instead, the bastard settles.

The realization should scare the absolute fuck out of me. This beast has spent my entire life prowling beneath my skin, ready to tear apart anything that looks at us sideways, and now there’s nothing. His claws stop scraping. The hellfire in my veins cools to something almost pleasant. Even that constant restless need to move, fight, hunt, or do something starts draining out of me.

For the first time in my life, my hellhound feels completely at peace—almost like he isn’t even awake anymore. And that peace is so fucking good I almost let myself sink into it.

Thessaly takes another step backward, and the water surges higher around her knees.

My body instantly follows.

One boot moves over the gravel before I decide to lift it, but by the time I notice, the other is already coming forward. There’s no alarm attached to it, no question about why I’m walking toward a woman I wanted to rip to shreds thirty seconds ago.

Going to her feels right.

Thessaly’s harmony curls higher, those layers folding together until I can’t tell whether the sound is coming from her anymore. It’s in the trees, in the mist, inside my chest, vibrating through my bones until every part of me seems to be moving to the same rhythm.

Somewhere beside me, another boot scrapes across gravel.

Then another.

I drag my eyes away from Thessaly long enough to see Raze moving several feet to my left. His arms hang loose at his sides, his face strangely blank as he walks toward the water. Maul is already ahead of him, with Wreck and Ruckus coming behind, and Sentinel moves beside us with his wings hanging relaxed at his back.

Every brother in the fucking yard is walking.

That should be enough to break through.

It isn’t.

Their footsteps blend into Thessaly’s song until even the steady crunch of boots over gravel becomes part of it, supernatural creatures moving toward her without a single one of us questioning why.

Thessaly watches us come, and when a smile slowly touches her mouth, something deep inside me finally twitches.

I know that smile.

I’ve worn that fucking smile.

It’s the look of someone watching a fight go exactly the way they knew it would.

Water rushes in from between the trees, spilling over roots and rocks before gathering around Thessaly. More joins it every second, spreading across the gravel in front of us and getting deeper despite there being no fucking river, creek, or anything else up there capable of producing this much water.

Still, my feet keep moving.

“Carnage!” Echo’s voice reaches me from behind, faint beneath Thessaly’s harmony.

Something in me pulls toward it.

My head starts to turn, but Thessaly’s song swells before I make it halfway, warmth flooding through me again and washing Echo’s voice beneath it.

My eyes return to Thessaly—I need to get closer.

I couldn’t explain why if someone put a gun to my head. There’s no command in the song, no voice telling me to walk into that water, but the need has somehow worked its way into my muscles until my body is already obeying something my mind never agreed to.

Echo yanks hard on my hand. “Carnage!”