I let out a small, humorless breath. "That's the least romantic sentence anyone has ever used as an apology."
"It's not an apology yet. It's the start of the truth."
That shuts me up more effectively than I want it to.
He keeps his hands at his sides. "My family taught exorcism before they taught comfort. Salt lines. Binding rites. How to tell a human soul from something wearing one. How to use a cross as a focus instead of a leash. Exorcists aren't a church order, no matter how much the Church likes to pretend anything useful belongs to them. We're family lines. Old rules. Old wounds. People who learned the dark had teeth because something bit first."
His voice is clipped, almost flat. Facts first. Bloodless things he can stack in a safe order.
"The Church used us when it needed us," he continues. "Respected the power when it was convenient. Resented the part it couldn't own. My father taught me that if I knew the variables, I could keep the circle intact. If I watched closely enough, moved fast enough, controlled enough, I could keep people alive."
"And did it work?" I ask softly.
His jaw tightens.
There's my answer.
Ira looks down at his hands. The knuckles are scraped raw. I didn't notice that before. I was too busy looking at the places he lied and not the places he bled.
"There was someone," he says. "Before the shop. Before Cain. Someone I thought I'd protected."
The room changes. The air doesn't move, but I feel the floor tilt beneath the sentence. Ira doesn't look at me when he says it. He looks past me, toward a place that isn't in the library.
"I was away on a cleansing. Simple job. I'd checked the wards before I left. Reinforced the doors. Salted the thresholds. I thought I'd done enough." His voice stays steady until the last word. Then it thins. "I came home and there was no body. No blood. No sign of a fight. The tea on the table was still warm."
My throat closes.
"I went to the priests first," he says. "Then to contacts. Then to anyone who owed me enough to answer. They told me it was a demon. They told me sometimes the dark takes what we fail to guard. Later, I found enough to know that was a lie. The Church had identified a conduit and taken what they wanted. Used the soul until there was nothing left to reach."
He finally looks at me, and the control in his face cracks so cleanly it's almost soundless.
"My rites can cleanse human souls," he says. "They can call to what lingers. They can separate rot from spirit if there's enough spirit left to find. There was nothing. No body. No grave. No ghost."
The last word breaks.
It's small. Barely more than a fracture in the back of his throat. That's what undoes me. Not the story, though the story is terrible enough to put ice under my skin. It's the sound of Iralosing control over one word after holding himself still through knives, wards, blood, and my anger.
I start crying before I decide to. Tears slide hot down my face, humiliating and unstoppable. Ira sees them and takes half a step forward before he catches himself.
"Soren," he says.
I shake my head because I don't know whether I'm warning him away or asking him not to stop.
He stays where he is. For once, he lets the distance be mine.
"I thought if I knew enough, if I locked down enough, I could stop it from happening again," he says. "I know what that sounds like. I still did it."
"You made us into the locked door," I say.
"Yes."
The anger is still there. It doesn't vanish because grief enters the room. I can understand a wound and still hate the thing it made him do. I can ache for the man who came home to warm tea and no ghost and still be furious at the man who looked at Aven this morning and decided peace mattered more than truth.
"I'm here," I tell him, and my voice breaks because I hate that he needs to hear it and I hate that I need to say it. "Aven is here. Cain is here. But if you keep building walls around us, Ira, you'll lose us inside them. That's still losing us."
"I know."
"Do you?" I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, angry at the tears, angry at the softness in me, angry that love doesn't make cleaner shapes. "Because knowing and stopping aren't the same thing."
