“But you know,” Manny said, “things were tight for Mom and I back then. From day one, she’d been bound and determined that I was going to go to medical school and I was going to become a surgeon and I was going to be somebody. She was a nurse, and she was always taking extra shifts to afford my education. My main memory of her from my childhood was of how tired she always was. If she happened to have gotten pregnant again when I was away at school? I mean… there was no way she could afford to keep it given my costs.” He winced. “You, rather. Keep you. Sorry. I feel like I’m—”

“Don’t ever apologize. I’m the disrupter, not you. Besides… maybe she didn’t want to be pregnant with me.” As his eyes lifted to hers, Jo pictured the image of that haunted face. “Maybe it wasn’t that it was an unintended pregnancy. Maybe it was the result of…”

She couldn’t say it.

But given the way Manny squeezed his eyes shut, she didn’t have to.

“We could be half-siblings,” she suggested sadly. “Maybe Robert Bluff was not my father. Maybe… it was someone else.”

Manny rubbed his face.

“It would explain why she never wanted to tell you about me,” Jo said hoarsely.

Jo unhinged her arm lock and removed the cotton ball and the tape. Beneath the white puff, there was just the smallest of marks, a red dot that was already healing in her skin.

The idea that she had been worse than a mistake… that she might have been from some kind of sexual violence? That she could well have been something her mother had tried to abort and failed?

As tears came to Jo’s eyes, she looked around for something to wipe them away with.

Manny was the one who delivered the Kleenex to her, reaching to the counter and then extending the tissue box across the space that separated them.

And then he was getting up, and coming over. Hopping onto the exam table with her, he put a strong arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close.

“I am so sorry…” she said as she started to sob over the suffering of a woman she had never met.

* * *

On the other side of the exam room’s door, Syn sat on the concrete floor of the training center’s corridor. After Manny had properly stitched him up, he had stepped out, ostensibly to give the siblings privacy. In reality, he had needed time to think.

And then he’d heard every word Jo said. Every single one.

As she spoke about the circumstances of her birth—or what she feared might have happened—he knew what the answer to her question about feeding had to be.

Getting to his feet, he turned and faced the door of the treatment room. With a shaking hand, he laid his palm upon the closed panel, as if he could reach inside through the chains of molecules between them, the space that separated them, the distance between his heart and hers… and bring her something other than grief and chaos and misery.

Manny was the correct one to comfort her. Her blooded brother was a good man, a kind man… a strong man. She was safe with him. He not only could look after her; he should.

Still, it was a while before Syn could force himself to turn away. And when he finally did, he had to make his body ambulate down the corridor.

Every part of him wanted to stay with Jo. Make sure she was okay. Attend to her every need, bringing her the choicest food and cleanest drink, securing her a warm and dry shelter, along with clothes that were of fabrics and colors of her preference. He wanted to sleep with her up against his body, skin to skin, a dagger in his right hand, a gun under his pillow, a length of chain beneath the bed, to ensure her protection against anything and everybody that would hurt her.

He wanted to service all her bloodlust.

And help her through her transition.

And then… after a decade, or whatever it was… attend to her in her needing—

Like a needle derailed on an LP, there was a screeching in his head as the culmination of his fantasy was what decimated the very core of his desperate delusions.

There would be no servicing her in her time of fertility. He couldn’t ejaculate.

In the face of that reality, the rest of the building blocks of their hypothetical life together fell away, leaving nothing but devastation and desolation in the center of his chest.

But there was one way he could take care of her.

If the definition of love was putting the object of your affection before yourself, then there was one sacrifice that he certainly could make on her behalf. No matter what it cost him.

The training center was connected to the Brotherhood’s big house by a subterranean tunnel hundreds of yards long, the concrete turnpike for pedestrians linking the Pit at one end, where Butch and V and their shellans stayed, and the hidden escape route off the mountain at the other. Syn strode through its confines with purpose, hands dug into the pockets of his leather jacket, boots booming over the bald floor. Manny had done a bang-up job with his needle and thread routine—not that the various slices on Syn’s thigh and across his abdomen had mattered much to him—and by nightfall, the damage would be healed. As much as he hated to feed, he had taken one of the Chosen’s veins a week ago, so he was at full strength.

Thank God. He couldn’t have stood the idea of drawing the blood of another female now, no matter how professional and compassionate those sacred Chosen were. It might have been all but a medical procedure to them, but he didn’t want to get that close to anyone but Jo.

As he resumed considering her future, his thoughts became so deep that the next time he noticed anything around him, he was stepping out from under the grand staircase in the mansion’s foyer, his destination reached.

Things were fairly quiet, even though everyone was out of the field following the skirmish at the outlet mall. The Brothers had taken the lessers to the Tomb, wherever that was, but the rest of the Bastards and the other fighters were home—and you’d think there would be the normal commotion and conversation in various rooms. Nope. Things were somber as people played a little pool but mostly kept to themselves, and this made sense. There was a lot going on, and a lot at stake.

Trying to keep out of sight, Syn stayed behind the curve of the stairwell’s base and got out his phone.

There was only one person he wanted to talk to.

Well, actually there were two, but he was starting here.

Composing a text, he hesitated before sending the missive. Except he could see no other way out of his situation. After he hit send, he crossed his arms and leaned back on the gold-leafed balustrade.

A moment later, the flap door the staff used to access the pantry and kitchen swung open, releasing a chuckle of low laughter as someone muttered, “—yeah, well, sixty percent of the time, it works every time.”

“Ron Burgundy is a God,” somebody else said.

Balthazar stepped through and made sure the door closed. “Hey.”

Syn nodded and looked at his boots, noting that there was lesser blood on them. Then again, there was lesser blood down the front of his shirt. On the sleeves of his leather jacket. On his hands and under his nails.

“I should have taken a shower first,” he heard himself say.

“That shit doesn’t bother me.”

“Not before seeing you.” Before being with Jo, goddamn it.

“You okay, cousin?”