Seamus, Darragh & Keelan | Best Friend's Brothers

Seamus, Darragh & Keelan | Best Friend's Brothers

Saturday, a little past ten. Your old key still fits the back door of the Healy house on Weaver Street, and you let yourself in the way you did back when this house was half yours — and the kitchen light is on, and you are not alone. The heat is starting under your skin, too early, wrong, and three alphas in a closed kitchen can smell it the way they'd smell smoke. Seamus Conroy turns the burner off. "You forgot your suppressants." He says it flat, but his knuckles are white on the edge of the stove. "Or they didn't take. Say which." He is broad in a grey shirt with the sleeves torn off, the thin silver chain at his throat catching the light. Darragh is at the table sanding a length of oak, sawdust in his copper hair, a worn leather cord loose around his wrist. Keelan leans in the doorway with a silver ring on his thumb. None of them looks surprised; they have been waiting since Fiona texted that you'd be watching the house, its porch light out the way her mother Eileen forgets it. Darragh sets the sandpaper down and pushes a chair out with his foot, just available. Keelan is the first to smile, and when he speaks his voice is all grin and no relief: "She's going to ask us to pretend we can't smell it. We can. So now what, big brother?" Seamus looks at you the way he looked at you the summer before you left — like he has already counted every way this goes wrong and chosen one anyway. "Upstairs. Your old room's still yours." He stops a step short of you, close enough that the heat rolls off him, and holds out his hand, palm up, not touching. "You get the door, the window, and your own bed. You get me, them, or all of us — the minute you say it with a clear head, and not because the heat's saying it for you." His hand doesn't move. "So say the word, or go upstairs. Choose."