Fall (Saints and Sinners #4)- Katherine Rhodes Page 0,1

this house is clean since you couldn’t bother to come home on time.”

I blinked. I had been looking forward to a movie and dinner with him, but… Maybe I should have just come home and done the paperwork another day. “I’m sorry.”

“Go clean your mess up and go sleep in the other room. I don’t want your ass in here while I try to get some decent sleep.”

“All right,” I said, and grabbed the cell phone, heading to the bathroom.

“And if you need stitches, don’t make any noise when you leave and come back,” he snapped.

I pulled the door closed and wondered if maybe I was spending too much time with the agency stuff.

Wren

I tossed the mail down on the counter and let out a breath, then ran a hand down my face.

Ben Sheehan was a mess.

Since the beginning, I had been working with the hardest cases from the Pipeline. Some of the kids had been in there for years, and they were going to need years and years of therapy. They couldn’t hear certain sounds without reacting to them instinctively.

Those habits were hard to break because until now, they had kept them safe and alive.

But Ben Sheehan was…different.

He was willful, disrespectful, defiant. He refused all kinds of therapies, he wouldn’t talk to nurses or social workers. The doctors were all at a loss and I couldn’t even consider bringing him home until we had a breakthrough.

The one and only time I had brought Timothy and Tabitha to meet him had ended in them running out of the room. Ben tried to follow and spit on them, and he spit out a line of curses that no eight year old should have known.

Hell, I wasn’t even sure I should have known them.

Slowly but surely we had his room stripped down at the hospital to only things that were bolted down: the bed, the dresser. The curtains had even been taken down and replaced with a cling film on the outside. He’d tried to make a rope out of the curtains and choke one of the orderlies.

The orderly had been a massive human, so there was no damage done, but…he’d still tried.

We’d tranquilized him more than once. Just to give everyone a break—including him. I felt guilty as hell, but the director and I had talked it out at length, and brought Fischer in to consult on the effects on his mind.

The rest it afforded far outweighed the small risks.

Ellie was the only one who could get him to listen, but it wasn’t her job to raise her brother, no matter how much she thought it was.

Still, there were a few times I’d brought her over to see if she could calm him down or get him to listen. It would work, for about a day. And then he would wind up all over again.

I needed to do some serious research on other cases like his.

I didn’t want to refer to the child we were planning on adopting as a case. I wanted to get through to him, to give him back what he lost in that house.

As much as I could.

“Forms,” I grumbled to no one.

I walked down the stairs to the basement. We’d set up a practice room for everyone when it became apparent that we were all going to be using swords in our secondary roles as…

I had no idea what we were.

Slumping on the steps, I was completely overwhelmed. Ben, the other kids, the three men suddenly sharing my bed, the fact that the actual fucking devil was my twin brother. Breaking up a massive, massive sex trafficking ring, destroying people, rescuing people.

I wanted a vacation. I ran my hands down my face. A second later I felt the flicker of the power that Hades held, and looked up.

Lily stood there in workout clothes, holding her own sword with red flames flickering on the blade.

“Care to spar?”

I stood. “How did you fucking know?”

She walked with me to the room, and pulled the door open for me. “I have been your best friend for millennia, Temperance. I know you.”

Closing the door softly, I sighed. “I wish I could remember. I’d like to have something like that.”

Lily grinned. “You will. I’m sure you will. Miriam’s remembered.”

“What.” It wasn’t a question. I didn’t even raise my voice.

“She remembered,” Lily said. “Everything. Yesterday. Laxmi said she spent the whole day just walking through the house screaming and yelling. She didn’t know what to do or who to call, so she called