The sound he makes through the gag isn't a word. It's recognition, and it's the sweetest thing I've heard since Wren first said my name.
“Hello, Prophet,” I say.
I cross the rug and crouch to his level.
“You used to tell me the Lord sees all.” My voice comes out level. I pull the gag down so he can answer, because the room is soundproofed and Jonah builds things right. “Turns out you were correct. He just took his time.”
“You—” he gasps.
“Me,” I answer slowly. “And my brother Logan, you'll remember him too. You'll remember his fire.”
He remembers. His face sinks, and then the pleading starts—scripture first, because it's the only language he has, verses spilling out of him in that soft recitation voice, the lullaby voice, the voice that lives in my scars—and I stand up and fold the workbench down from the wall panel.
The restraints hold, just like Jonah promised.
I do his hands first. The hands that held the blade, the hands that turned gentle after, the hands that patted myhead like a dog's while his friends applauded from their chairs. I use the mallet, and I take my time, knuckle by knuckle, and he screams into the parsonage until the gospel radio is completely drowned out.
Around the fourth finger, he tells me God is watching. Around the seventh, he stops making sentences at all.
I feel it working, the old weight shifting, the thing Marek promised, something heavy leaving me. But it isn't joy. It isn't even satisfaction, not the way I rehearsed it in my head a thousand times. It's a chore. It's the necessary, unglamorous work of putting down something dangerous, the way you'd handle a rabid animal, and my heart isn't in this room at all.
My heart is four hundred feet away, asleep in a bed I built with my own two unbroken hands.
I finish the second hand and step back, breathing hard, mallet loose at my side. Harlan hangs against the bench restraints, gray-faced, mumbling into the wood.
“Look at me,” I tell him.
He looks. He sees me, sees the man I turned into, and knows I'm the one who survives. I hold his watery eyes and wait to feel the years balance out.
What I feel instead is Wren tracing my scars with a feather.This is soft with nothing before it.
The lock was already open. She opened it days ago in a trailer that smells like hay instead of lemon polish, and I've been carrying around a key I no longer need.
“Logan,” I say. “Your turn.”
My twin steps past me, unstrapping his kit, and the light in his eyes is the light from the night the Sanctum burned. He has his own list. Zach's name is at the top of it. What happens next in this room is his, and it's earned, andHarlan starts screaming again before the first flame even touches him, because he remembers the fire too.
I watch for a while. I owe Logan that, and I thought I'd want to see the end—thought I'd need it, the confession, the last breath, the proof.
I check the time.
It's not even midnight. If I go now, I can shower off the smell of this room and be lying beside her before one. She sleeps on her left side with her hand tucked under her cheek. In the new bed, there's enough room that I can lie facing her with two feet of safe air between us and still be close enough to count her lashes.
“Logan.”
He looks up from his work, sweat on his forehead, forearms lit orange. “Need a break?”
“Finish it.”
He blinks. “We agreed you'd?—”
“Finish it. Take everything you need. Don't wait for me.” I roll my sleeves down over my scars, and it feels like closing a book. “I have somewhere to be.”
My brother stares at me across the body of the man who broke us both. And then, slow as sunrise, understanding moves over his face, and the grin that comes with it is the softest thing that has ever happened in this room.
“Go home, brother,” he says.
I step out into the night air, and it tastes like a different country.