Chapter 69 Ask
Her hand shook.
“Are you okay? Molly?” Ryan asked her, “Molly, baby?” Her mother came back to the living room with a full glass of wine, “Baby, are you okay?”
“Huh? Oh yeah, I’m just shocked that’s all,” she said handing the paper back to her mom, and wrapped her arms around herself.
Eventually, Ryan left and Molly’s mom kept asking if she was okay.
She said she was tired and excused herself to go upstairs, though she didn’t enter her room immediately as her mind flashed back to the paper.
She had known that face for a few years, had seen it across school hallways and at Grace's side and in the background of a hundred ordinary memories that had nothing to do with crime scenes or police reports or the word wanted printed in black underneath a photograph. She knew the jaw and the eyes and the set of the expression, knew it with the easy, unremarkable familiarity of someone you'd simply always known was around.
His name was printed underneath his picture, and it confirmed what her eyes had already told her.
Maddox Barker.
Grace had told her last night. She had sat in this room and told her, calmly and carefully and in the particular way of someone who had processed extraordinary information long enough to be able to present it without it sounding entirely unhinged, that Maddox was a werewolf. That Enzo was a werewolf. That Zion was a werewolf. That these things existed and that Grace had been living inside that world and it was all real.
And she had told her that someone had killed Matteo—Maddox's uncle. She hadn't said who. She hadn't said the how or the why of it. But she'd mentioned the death as part of the context, part of the sequence of events, and at the time Molly had filed it away as background detail in a story so enormous that she'd been prioritising the structural elements over the specifics.
But it wasn't just background detail.
Molly stood close to her room door, leaning against the wall as she put the pieces together with the specific, unwilling clarity of a person who did not want to be arriving at the conclusion they were arriving at and could not find another route.
A wolf killed Matteo. That was one version. But what if it wasn't actually a wolf?
What if Maddox had killed his own uncle?
And then come to the hospital. And then—her brother…
Molly pressed her hand flat against the wall and breathed.
‘He killed Daniel.’ The thought didn't arrive with volume or drama. It arrived with the quiet, devastating certainty of something slotting into place, and it sat in her chest like something with real physical weight. ‘That monster. He killed my brother!’
Her eyes were burning. She pressed harder against the wall as she couldn’t understand what his motive was. Grace was on the other side of that door and Grace did not know, and Molly needed to decide what to do with what she knew before she walked back into that room and had to look at her.
Because Grace would defend him. That was the thing Molly could see clearly without needing to think about it, Grace would look for a reason, a context, an explanation. Grace would not be able to help herself because Maddox had been her person since childhood.
She didn't know what Grace would do. She didn't know if Grace would go to him, didn't know if she'd try to fix it somehow or try to get to Maddox before Ryan could. She might try to protect him from consequences.
The bedroom door opened.
Grace's face appeared in the gap, slightly cautious, reading the situation with the attentiveness she always brought to situations that felt slightly off. Her eyes moved over Molly standing against the wall and her brow drew together.
"Molly?" Her voice was quiet. "Why are you standing out here?"
Molly blinked. And then she did something that required more effort than most things she'd done recently, which was to make her face do the thing faces do when they're pretending something is lighter than it is. She let out a short breath that was meant to sound like the tail end of mild embarrassment.
"I forgot something," she said, and even managed a small shake of her head at herself, as if she'd come upstairs for a reason and the reason had slipped her mind, and she'd been standing here trying to remember it. "Brain's completely gone. Ignore me."
Grace looked at her for a moment with the eyes of someone who noticed things, and Molly held the expression steady and waited.
"Okay," Grace said finally, and stepped back to let her in.
Molly walked into the room, picked up a teddy from her bed, and sat down in her desk chair, she held onto it because having something to hold helped. Grace settled back onto the bed and tucked her feet under her. The room was quiet and warm and ordinary looking, and Molly sat in the middle of it with a name burning in her chest like something she'd swallowed wrong.
She looked at Grace who was just staring ahead.
Were werewolves enemies to humanity? Was that just what they were, things that moved through human lives and left damage behind them, things that existed alongside people and did not consider the cost of that coexistence? Or was it more complicated than that? Was Maddox, specifically, something different from what a monster was, and if so, what did you call what he'd done to her brother?
She sat with the teddy in her arms and looked at Grace, and she did not yet ask.
But the question was there.
And it was getting heavier by the minute.