And that guts me worse than anything he’s done, because I know what relief looks like on Art when he’s been carrying something too heavy for too long. I see it in the mirror every morning.
Art was wrong when he said he wasn’t in a cage. His may have not been concrete and chain-link, but the kind made of a father’s expectations and a debt he didn’t know how to pay and a best friend who loved him too much and powerheloved too much to let go of. He built his cage out of silence and twisted intentions, and he sat in it night after night letting others build its reinforcements while I bled beneath his bar.
It doesn’t excuse him. Nothing excuses it.
But watching him stand there, spine straight, handing himself over to people who will most likely put him in an actual cage with actual bars, I understand something I didn’t before: This is the first honest thing Arthur Penngrove has done since the night he let my father pawn my body to pay for his mistakes.
“Lance.” An agent crouches beside me, a woman with calm eyes. “We need to get you out of here. Can you walk?”
“What’s happening to him?” I nod toward Art.
She follows my gaze. “That’s not your concern.”
But it is.It’s been my concern since we were four and he cried on my shoulder because his dad forgot his birthday, and I took him to the creek to catch tadpoles until the sun went down.
Art’s eyes lock on me. His lips stop moving. His Adam’s apple bobs. And he mouths four words.
Silver Spoon Survivors’ Club.
Tears spring to my eyes, and my throat swells shut, and I can’t fuckingbreathe.
“Founding members,” I mouth back.
This is a shitty ending to our story, but real life doesn’t always get wrapped up in a red bow. Sometimes it’s left cracked with memories, and matching scars on the palms of two boys who thought a blood oath could protect them from the world.
They guide Percy and me toward the entrance.
The walk is longer than it should be. Twenty, maybe thirty feet from the cage to the doors, but every step feels like I’m dragging the last six years behind me, chained to my ankles, scraping across concrete. The sounds change as we move—the shouted commands fading into radio static, the stomp of tactical boots giving way to the crunch of gravel, and then the cold hits me.
Night air. Real air. Not the recycled, sweat-soaked, blood-tinged air of a fighting pit, butoutsideair, sharp with the first signs of winter and exhaust fumes and the distant salt of the harbor.
I stop in the doorway. Just for a second. One foot on concrete, the other on the asphalt, standing on the threshold between the world I’ve been trapped in and the one I’m not sure I know how to live in anymore.
But I know I want to try.
The sky is black and wide and full of nothing, and it’s the most open space I’ve seen in five days, and my chest constricts so hard I brace a hand against the doorframe.
“Sir?” The agent touches my elbow. “Are you all right?”
No. I’m not all right.I haven’t been all right in six years, and the fact I’m standing here instead of lying on a concrete floordoesn’t change the wiring in my brain that’s still waiting for the lights to flicker.
But Percy is watching me from three feet away with that blanket cocooned around him, looking at me like I’m the only steady thing in his world, so I nod and let go of the doorframe and walk out.
A paramedic approaches with a penlight and checks my pupils and presses her fingers to my ribs and shines the light in my ears while I stare at the warehouse entrance and try to feel something other than numb. She’s saying words—concussion protocol, possible fracture, we’d like to transport you—and I’m nodding at the right times because I’ve gotten very good at performing cooperation while my mind is somewhere else entirely.
It’s in a brownstone kitchen in Boston. It’s pressing a mop handle into a pretty girl’s hands. It’s watching her count to seven and knowing I’d give anything to be one of the things she remembers.
Please be alive. Please be safe. Please don’t hate me for leaving.
A black SUV pulls up, and the passenger door opens, and Leo DeGrance steps out. He’s in a suit, looking more like an attorney than the last time I saw him, and behind him, getting out of the back seat with her hair wild and her eyes red and her hands shaking, is Genevieve.
She’s running before her feet fully hit the pavement.
I catch her. I don’t know how, because my body is broken and my ribs are screaming and there’s blood on my face and my hands and my tape, but I catch her, and she slams into me with enough force to send me back a step, and her arms wrap around my neck and she buries her face in my chest and she’s crying sohard her whole body shakes. I hold her. I hold her the way she held me the night I fell apart in her arms, the way we’ve been holding each other since the first time she let me and I realized I couldn’t let go.
“You’re an idiot,” she sobs into my chest. “You’re the biggest self-sacrificing idiot I’ve ever met.”
“I know.”