A beast he hadn’t known lay inside of him woke up and snarled.

It felt good. Damn good.

The rage spread out from his lungs, roaring into his ears and turning his hands into fists. Alain Webster. Too bad the son of a bitch was dead, leaving nothing behind upon which Sam could vent his fury.

Even if Alain hadn’t hit her—and it sure as hell looked like he had—he’d left her with a goddamn warren of mental cuts and bruises. Seducing her, discarding her so cruelly—the man didn’t deserve to be dead. He deserved to have his face pounded in. To be left in the gutter with every bone in his body broken. To be shot in the stomach and spend hours bleeding out in agony.

And where the hell had her parents been, exactly? Happily marrying her off to the scum who had preyed upon her?

Sam kicked the snow away as he stalked through it, the anger finally burning the cold away. His blood pounded in his chest, demanding satisfaction against a man long rotting.

She’d been sixteen when she’d met him. Younger than Maggie. She’d been younger than his goddamn sister, and when he imagined someone doing to Maggie what that bastard had done to Alva—

He’d tear him apart. And he’d laugh while he did it.

He was shaking when he reached the front door of his rental house, banging through it and slamming it behind him. Out of habit he turned towards his workshop.

Time to get himself back under control. He took a calming breath, and another, which did absolutely nothing. He wanted to hit something. How did Alva deal with it, knowing the man who’d hurt her was beyond punishment? Of course, he had been murdered. That was something.

It was an ugly enough thought to jar Sam. This was not him. He didn’t think things like that. He turned the idea around in his head, but no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find a damned thing wrong with it. He wasn’t glad the man was dead, but only because it meant Sam couldn’t kill him himself.

He sat down on the wooden stool in front of his worktable, blindly grabbing the first thing that came to hand. Some copper wire. Fine. He uncoiled it and promptly sliced his hand open.

“Goddamn it,” he snarled, throwing the wire across the room.

“What the hell?” Henry’s voice, sleepy and irritated, came from the doorway.

Sam scowled and glanced over his shoulder. “Sorry,” he said curtly. Henry was still in his pajamas, and Sam hoped he would go back to bed and let him simmer.

“Please don’t concern yourself,” Henry said. “I love being woken up first thing in the morning after a midnight train journey and having coils of wire hurled at my head.”