He pushed the door.
Benedict sat on a thin mattress on the floor, back propped against the wall, blanket pooled around him like a discarded skin. His posture had the fragile angle of soone held together by instinct alone. He looked up as they entered slowly, too late. The pupils were blown wide, rimd in red.
He slled wrong.
Not the usual sharp, controlled violet-ash scent Benedict once used like a weapon.
This was a chemical burn and spoiled sweetness, pheromones collapsing in on themselves, eating their host from the inside.
He didn’t say anything when Trevor entered.
He just stared, breathing too fast through his nose, like every inhale scraped.
Trevor stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He didn’t look back at Lucius or Sirius. They already knew this part wasn’t theirs.
"You know, this is a total letdown." Trevor said, his voice tinged with the disappointnt of a man preparing for bloodshed. "I thought there would be so closure by killing you." He stopped in front of the mattress, his perfectly shined shoes inches apart from filth.
Benedict blinked up at him, lids heavy, tracking movent like it cost him sothing. His mouth twitched, neither smiling nor in pain.
"This is what you ca for?" Benedict whispered. "To watch fall apart?"
"No," Trevor said. "That part already happened. I’m just here to make sure you stay down."
Silence stretched into a thin, brittle thread.
Trevor’s scent shifted, almost imperceptible at first. The cedar was still there, but it had sharpened into sothing colder.
He crouched and lowered his eyes to Benedict’s level. "You know... I’ve thought to co for you earlier, to fight you while you were in your pri. But I’ve started to rember sothing I shouldn’t and... you didn’t deserve it."
Benedict laughed, the sound brittle and fragile as old paper. "It doesn’t matter. Do your worst. It will get repeated again and then we take it over."
"Ah... yes. Yerofey’s journal was telling sothing about this, but..." Trevor paused and looked at the watch on his hand. "This ti Lucas had awakened in a temple and... he’s happy, content with his life."
"So you think that it is enough?" Benedict huffed. "He is not the only one that can do it. There are priests that would do it again, with or without Lucas. There is another dominant oga male to suffer."
Trevor traced his teeth with his tongue. "You are talking about Christopher." He laughed. "Dax already wiped the temples while you were hiding. So did Caelan and I. Did you think that the silence is just because they betrayed you?"
Benedict’s eyes flickered at the na Christopher, a small but noticeable twitch.
Trevor’s mouth curved into sothing that was not a smile.
"Yes," Trevor said, as if they were discussing weather. "The temples burned. The priests scattered. And the ones who tried to run found out that I am very good at following scents."
His pheromones shifted again, filling the small chamber.
The cedar went from forest-floor warmth to sothing like the choking smoke.
Benedict’s shoulders tightened in anticipation of the pain that he knew would follow.
"You’re lying," Benedict whispered, but it had no spine to it. "You wouldn’t risk..."
"We didn’t risk Lucas," Trevor cut in. Tone even. Calm. More lethal for it. "We risked everything else. And it turns out everything else is... very disposable."
Benedict swallowed. It sounded like it hurt.
Trevor let the quiet sit. He let Benedict’s mind chew on the parts he couldn’t decide were true.
Then he leaned in, one hand braced on his knee.
"Lucas survived you in two lives," Trevor said softly. "And in this one, he didn’t just survive. He walked past you. He loves, Benedict. Fully. Freely. And you don’t appear anywhere in the picture."
He rose with the sa elegance with which he entered rooms bearing the title of Marquis. "Just so you know, Christopher couldn’t do what you wanted anyways. The only ones that can bring back the past are those that have the pheromone siren ability."
Benedict knew. He had known what Lucas was from the beginning and used him every step of the way.
The cedar in the room filled the air with almost unbearable pressure, as if a building were about to collapse. Lucius and Sirius lifted their hands to their collars outside the doorfra, already stepping back.
Trevor didn’t touch Benedict.
The pheromones tightened like a vise around the lungs. Benedict’s breath caught once or twice, and his body attempted to recoil, but there was nowhere to go. The mattress rustled beneath him, weak and useless, already damp with the remains of a man who had been unraveling for days.
Trevor stood over him, watching, expression untroubled, almost bored. Benedict’s fingers clawed at the blanket, then at the floor, then slowed. His chest shuddered and stalled, and the rasping stopped.
Silence settled in the end and Trevor found the end underwhelming. He would have preferred a fight, sothing to get the pain he felt in the last year off. Sothing to avenge Lucas’s suffering, but that would give Benedict a grand death. This suited him better.
He turned toward the door.
"Burn the house," he said, voice level. "Everything in it. Don’t bother cataloging anything. There’s no value left."
Lucius nodded once, a small motion that made decisions appear effortless and delegated responsibility for them to others.
Sirius stayed at the doorfra, shoulders rigid with almost rage. He watched Benedict’s body like a man cataloging an inconvenience. For a mont the farmhouse felt like a pocket of the world that had been turned wrong and would forever sll of sothing burned-out and wrong.
Trevor turned his back on the corpse in the sa way he used to cover battle maps. He walked to the window and drew the curtain aside. Outside, the fields sagged into bruised twilight. ’A pale train of smoke would not look out of place there,’ he thought.
"Lucius," he said without looking at him, "make it clean."
Lucius’s face was a mask of efficiency. "We’ll handle it. We’ll take care of the n who watched him too."
Trevor’s hand found his coat pocket and rested there for a mont, fingers tightening against the tablet he’d brought. He thought of Lucas sleeping and Sebastian’s small, steady breath.
"You’re sure," Lucius said, the question small as a knife’s edge. "There’s no..."
"No," Trevor interrupted. Not crossly, simply with that finality that didn’t invite argunt. "There’s nothing else. We close this Chapter once and for all."
Sirius stepped forward then, as if to offer sothing that might be a small grace. He bent slightly, voice low. "You did good," he said. It wasn’t comfort so much as acknowledgnt.
Trevor’s mouth twitched into a smile. "We’ll see they don’t speak of it."
Outside the compound, boots moved. n with tarps and fuel and the hollow eyes of people who had been ordered to do hard things took the house apart thodically. A quiet detachnt settled over the team; the work was efficient, almost ritualized. Lucius oversaw it with the sa calm that had once made Trevor rely on him in war rooms and courts.
Trevor stepped back into the cold and let the air bite his lungs awake. He stayed for a mont, feeling the world as if it were a map he could fold and tuck away. Then he walked to the car with the others at his heels.
On the drive back, the town slipped past in a grey blur. Trevor sat with his hands folded, watching the thin line of breath that showed when he spoke. He thought of small dostic things: Windstone’s perfected fried chicken, Lucas’s stubborn refusal to be fussed over, and the way Sebastian’s fingers found his collar without knowing what they were doing.
He let himself imagine Windstone in the kitchen, scolding a trainee for over-seasoning, the absurdity of it a tiny, private comfort.
"Will you be ho before dark?" Lucius asked.
"Yes," Trevor said. "That is my plan."
Sirius glanced at him. "You’ll tell him?"
Trevor let the question hang like a coin on its edge. He had promised Lucas sleep, a promise and armor in one.
"Yes, I will tell him," he answered.
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