When the last knot is tied and the bandage is secure, the silence of the room settles over us like a shroud. I don't move. I stay hunched over her, my hand resting near her head, my eyes tracing the line of her throat.
Slowly, her eyelashes flutter. The ice-blue of her eyes is clouded with pain and exhaustion, but as she focuses on me, the fog begins to clear. She doesn't look at the bandages. She looks at the dried blood on my collar.
"Deimos," she breathes, her voice a fragile thread.
"I'm here," I rasp.
She shifts slightly, her gaze drifting toward the tray full of surgical instruments.
"The man in the mask..." she starts, her voice gaining an edge of curiosity.
"You called him Charles. He’s your father."
She’s putting the pieces together inside of her mind. I freeze. The name feels like a curse in the air of my sanctuary.
"He said things, Deimos," she continues, her eyes searching mine, demanding the truth I’ve spent years burying.
"He talked about you. About a game of trust. He said you were the one who..."
She stops, the weight of the accusation hanging between us. She’s not afraid of me, she’s curious about the boy I used to be. And for the first time in my life, I don't have a lie ready to protect myself.
I stay hunched over the surgical table. My fingers are still stained with her blood, a permanent mark of my failure. I look at the small cross hanging from my neck, the one piece of cold metal that never leaves my skin. I don't look at her eyes. I can't. If I see the pity in them, I might actually break.
"My father didn't believe in sons," I begin, my voice a hollow rasp that barely carries in the vastness of the warehouse.
"He believed in instruments. Tools. He spent my childhood carving away anything that looked like a feeling, teaching me that an emotion is just a lag in reaction time."
I reach up, my thumb tracing the rough edges of the silver cross. It’s crude, handmade, and completely out of place against the expensive silk of my tuxedo.
"My mother... she couldn't survive him," I continue, the words feeling like stones in my mouth.
"The marriage, the secrets, the Elite. It fractured her. She turned to a fanatical kind of faith to fill the holes he left in her mind. She became obsessed with protection, with icons."
I pull the chain slightly so the cross catches the harsh LED light.
"She made this for me. She put it around my neck and told me it would keep the darkness from swallowing me whole. She gave it to me just hours before he decided she was no longer useful to the family legacy."
The memory of the night and the blade flashes behind my eyes, but I shove it back into the dark. I can't tell her the rest. I can't tell her that I was the one who carried the instrument for him to end her life, thinking it was a gift, a game, a way to make them both happy.
"He killed her to prove a point, Mali," I hiss, my grip tightening on the edge of the table until the metal groans.
"He killed her to show me that love is a tether that only leads to the grave. And now, he thinks he can use you to prove it all over again."
I finally look at her, my obsidian eyes burning with a dark, obsessive light.
"But he’s wrong. He thinks that you’re my weakness. He doesn't realize that you’re the purpose of my existence."
I lean in, my forehead resting against hers for a fleeting, desperate second.
"I am never letting you get hurt again. I am going to find every hand that touched that ledger, every man who whispered yourname in that vault, and I am going to erase them. Starting with him."
I watch her carefully, my pulse is in an uneven rhythm against my ribs. She sits on the edge of the surgical table, the ruined silk of her dress draped over her like the wings of a fallen bird. Her eyes are wide, glassy with a mixture of exhaustion and a deep, aching pity that makes me want to flinch away.
"I'm sorry," she breathes, her voice barely a thread in the vast, hollow silence of the surgical room.
"I'm so sorry."
The words hit me harder than the recoil of a rifle. I don't want her sorrow. I want her safety. I want the world to stop bleeding into the sanctuary I built to keep the darkness out.
