Unlike most people, Peter could pinpoint the exact moment his innocence had died. Maybe not the date or the time, but the circumstance. He’d been a child, barely old enough to walk to school on his own, and yet he’d been taking care of himself for years. The foster homes claimed the responsibility and took the checks, but there was never food on the table when he got home or anyone to see him off when he left and got himself ready for school.

There was always someone home when he got back, though. He craved the peace of coming home to an empty house. There was more companionship in the loneliness than there was in the fighting that carried on from the moment he walked in through the door and well into the night.

One night, the screaming had been louder than usual, and he had come out of the small bedroom he shared with two or three other children, depending on the month. The other kids didn’t understand him anymore than his foster parents did. These or any of the others he’d been passed around to.

He’d had a permanent family once, or so that was what they’d said. Their promises of forever had evaporated as soon as they realized he wasn’t going to return their hugs or call them mommy and daddy in a tongue that sounded harsh and foreign, but those words were close enough to the ones he’d known to feel like a betrayal. He barely remembered his own mother and father. He remembered being in a car driving and then hearing a woman’s screams as water came in through the windows like torrents, but the rest was a blur, including the happy memories he could sometimes access in dreams.

He’d smiled then. He couldn’t remember it, but he’d always felt it in his heart, like the memories were frozen behind a wall of ice that wasn’t melting fast enough for the family who’d begun the process of making him theirs. Making him American and apple pie and smiles that didn’t mean anything. As long as he said the words and they didn’t sound too Russian, they were happy.

The Vogels had wanted him to be someone he wasn’t, but the Browns didn’t see him at all. He was a number on a check, nothing more, and as long as he didn’t eat up too much of that check with his need for food and clothes and vaccines, they didn’t care what he did. In a way, it was worse than his brief life with his would-be adoptive parents. In a way, it was better.

Until that night. Until Mrs. Brown screamed like she never had before and the dirty gray wall went red with her blood. Peter had gone upstairs into the bedroom and taken out the gray box he and one of his foster brothers had found underneath the bed. The box contained a gun, and he’d seen Mr. Brown waving it around enough times at his wife to know the basics. Movies filled in the rest. Guns always ended fighting, in movies and in real life, sometimes only because Mr. Brown would use it to strike his wife down. Once because he’d fired it into the wall and her face had gone white in terror.

Peter had decided that Mr. Brown could use one of the reminders he liked to give so well. He’d decided it was time for the fighting to end.

The thing about guns in real life versus guns in movies was that in real life, people bled a lot. And they screamed. Mrs. Brown wasn’t hurt, but she’d screamed like she never did, even when her husband was beating her to within an inch of her life.

The silence he’d hoped for never came. Just more screaming. Sirens. Questions. The guilt never came either. He’d waited for it to set in, like the therapists said it would in their calm voices with their understanding eyes that never truly understood.

By the time Peter had been released from the group home, whispers of re-entering the foster care system made the decision to go out on his own an easy one. He had learned how to pretend like he understood the men and women who would never understand him, no matter how hard he tried. He had learned to say the right things and nod when they spoke about rationalizing trauma and feelings in every shade, from resentment to joy. Feelings that ran deeper in their minds than they ever would in his soul until he found his mate many years later.

When he’d found Lake, the other Alpha had taught him that what made him impossible for the well-meaning people in clean white coats and badges to understand him was what made him strong. Lake was the only person who had never expected him to be anything other than what he was.

Years later, John was the only person who had ever made him want to be something more. In the beta’s arms, he had learned that he wasn’t incapable of feeling all those things that had seemed impossibly complex and unfathomably deep so many years ago. John was just the only one who’d ever inspired them.

Love. Devotion. Fear. Pain. Rage. He had gone from living in an emotional landscape made up of hues of gray to blinding color in shades his mind wasn’t meant to process. The best and the worst, it was all magnified. Marking John, feeling that closeness between them, had brought him higher than any drug or the euphoria of a kill ever had. Losing him, hearing his screams on the answering machine and knowing there was nothing he could do to stop his mate’s suffering other than continuing to play this twisted game, it was more than pain. It was enough to tear his soul in half, and again each time he felt John’s pain through their link, until he was sure that there would be nothing left to piece back together.

Not if he failed.

He couldn’t fail. He wouldn’t. He had every connection, from Dean fucking Garza to the Roman Empire at work, exploiting every underground network and legal avenue to hunt the other Alpha down, but none of them had yet to generate a lead.

And so he played Lake’s game. He stalked and he hunted and he killed and he became the animal he had been before John’s light and goodness brought him sapience. He would go down to hell and kill the devil himself to take his place if it meant seeing John again. Even if it meant losing himself to the point where the beta would want nothing to do with him.

He had lived without John for three years and thought it torture. Now he knew what torture was. Torture was not living without him, it was living in a world where he was gone. If that happened, Peter knew there would be nothing left but the rage that only hadn’t consumed him yet because he was saving it all for Lake. For his brother.

For when he dragged them both to hell.