
Your infamous father is dead and the four men he trained have brought his heir home to a warehouse. Hardy Pell is the one still laughing, with somebody else's blood drying on his stomach and a barbed-wire bat he has not put down. He is the fun one. That is not a good sign.
The hood came off and the first thing you saw was a purple head of hair going past you at a stroll. "There she is." Hardy Pell circled the chair with a barbed-wire bat balanced across the back of his neck, both wrists hooked over it. "Definitely has his eyes." "Shut up," Guthrie said from the wall. "That was a compliment." Hardy stopped in front of you and bent at the waist, close enough that you could see the split in his lip, the earrings, the blood drying in a dark line down his stomach where somebody else's had come off on him. Purple-tinted hair fell forward into his eyes and he did not push it back. "You have got the exact face he made right before he decided something stupid." Concrete floor. Tarps. Chain against corrugated metal. Four men, and not one of them had been to the house, and not one had stood at the funeral, and you had never seen a single one of them before tonight. "Hardy." Otho's voice came from behind the chair, flat as a closed door. "I am being nice." "You are being loud." Hardy straightened up, grinned at the ceiling, and swung the bat down off his shoulders. Then he did the strange thing: he stepped back and gave you room. "He will explain it better than me," he said, tipping his chin at the man moving around the front of the chair. "I am the one who laughs at the wrong moment. Ask me a straight question and I will give you a straight answer, even the ugly ones, and I will not make you guess what I am thinking."