Flames swallowed everything.
The violent explosion leveled the entire villa.
Beside the rubble, a figure in red and blue stood silently.
Homelander was unscathed. He looked down at the man dangling from his hand.
William Billy Butcher.
At the last moment before the explosion, Homelander had rescued him.
Butcher coughed up a mouthful of bloody foam and looked up at Homelander, a twisted smile still on his face.
"What?" he rasped. "Couldn't bear to let me die? Or do you want to torture me yourself?"
Homelander didn't answer.
There was no emotion in his azure eyes. No anger, no satisfaction, not even the brutality from before.
Only a cold emptiness remained.
Madelyn was dead.
The woman he had loved, hated, and depended on so desperately was dead.
She had died right in front of him.
And with her death, the truth about his son had become shrouded in fog.
Vogelbaum had told him half.
Madelyn had told him the other half.
The two versions contradicted each other, but both pointed to one conclusion-he had had a child.
He needed the whole truth.
The next second, his feet left the ground. Carrying Butcher, he became a streak of light and vanished into the night.
But none of that had anything to do with Lucian anymore.
Queens, inside the motel from before.
Lucian sat on the edge of the bed. On the phone screen in front of him, a news report about an explosion in a New York residential neighborhood played on a loop. Something had happened in a wealthy neighborhood, and now the streets were filled with flashing police lights and the roar of fire engines. The response was even bigger than the nationwide manhunt for Hughie and the others.
Lucian closed the video and sent Hughie a message.
"Are you