"I just want to see it.One time.Before..."He trailed off, but they both knew how the sentence ended.
Isla looked at the observation deck, at the camera silhouetted against the floodlights, at the composition that Harold Benson had captured fifty years ago.She thought about the three photographers who had died to create Ethan's twisted monuments, about the families who would never understand why their loved ones had been turned into "living postcards."
She thought about her father's old watch, the one she'd inherited when her parents died—how she'd kept it even though it didn't work anymore, because it was the last piece of him she had left.
And she thought about Ethan Benson, bleeding out on the frozen ground of Enger Tower, asking for one last look at the legacy that had consumed his entire life.
"Can you walk?"
"If you help me."
She shouldn't do this.Every protocol, every procedure, every lesson she'd learned in her career told her to stay where they were, to focus on stabilizing the victim until backup arrived, to treat this like any other crime scene where a suspect was down.
But Ethan wasn't a suspect anymore.He was a dying man.
And she was the only one with him.
Isla holstered her weapon and reached down, pulling Ethan's good arm over her shoulders.He cried out as the movement jostled his injured side, but he gritted his teeth and pushed himself up, leaning heavily against her as they took their first stumbling steps toward the stairs.
The observation deck felt miles away, each step a battle against ice and cold and the weight of a man whose body was failing with every heartbeat.Ethan's blood soaked through her parka, warm against her skin for a moment before the cold stole that heat too.His breathing was shallow, ragged, punctuated by wet sounds that spoke of internal damage beyond what she could see.
But he kept moving.Kept pushing toward the camera that waited at the top of the stairs.
They reached the observation deck just as Ethan's legs gave out.Isla caught him, lowering him to the stone floor with as much gentleness as she could manage, her own body trembling with cold and exhaustion.He lay there for a moment, his eyes closed, his chest barely moving.
"Ethan."
His eyes opened.Found the camera.
"Help me up."
She did.One more time, one more impossible effort, pulling him upright and supporting him as he staggered toward the tripod that held his father's legacy.His hands—shaking, bloody, barely under his control—reached for the viewfinder.
"The composition," he whispered, his eye pressed to the glass."My father spent two years waiting for the perfect conditions.The lights of the city, the curve of the harbor, the way the tower frames everything into thirds."
Isla watched him adjust something—a minute correction, the kind of detail that probably mattered in ways she would never understand.
"It's close," Ethan said, his voice wondering."So close to what he saw.So close to—"
He pressed the shutter.
The camera clicked—a soft sound, almost lost in the wind, but somehow the most significant noise Isla had heard all night.Ethan sagged against her, his weight sudden and complete, his eye still pressed to the viewfinder.
"Let me see," he breathed."The image.Let me see it."
Isla reached around him, her bloody fingers finding the camera's display button.The screen lit up, showing the photograph that Ethan Benson had just captured—the last image he would ever take.
It was beautiful.The city lights of Duluth spread out below, the harbor curving toward the distant horizon, the stone of Enger Tower framing everything with the precision that had made Harold Benson's composition famous.The floodlights cast their cold glow across the observation deck, turning the ice crystals in the air into diamonds suspended in frozen time.
A perfect recreation of a perfect photograph.
Except.
Ethan made a sound—something between a laugh and a sob—as he saw what Isla had already noticed.A smear across the image, a blur that disrupted the careful composition in its center.Red and dark, the color of something that belonged inside a body rather than on a camera lens.
Blood.His blood, transferred from his fingers when he'd reached for the viewfinder, smudging the glass that was supposed to capture his father's final legacy.
"No," he whispered."No, no, no—"