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George nods, but I notice she looks a little green.
“Brutus?” I croak out. “Is he—”
Antony grins. “You want to see for yourself?”
“Hell yes.”
My cousin knows me better than I know myself.
Antony slides his arms under my good shoulder. Noah takes the other, and they slide me into a sitting position on the swing. I grit my teeth as the movement jolts my stomach wound, sending a flare of pain through my body. Eli packs pillows behind my head. Gabriel sinks into the swing beside me, his finger making delicious circles on my wrist. He watches me with those soulful eyes of his, and I see they’re ringed in distress. He flicks his gaze to an object in the middle of the field in front of the house, and I follow his eyes.
They’ve been busy while I slept, stacking firewood and broken bits of old furniture into a tall pyre. Brutus lies on top, his arms crossed on his chest. From such close range, my bullet made a mess of him. He’s unrecognizable, his features obliterated along with half his skull, except for the sacer brand on the back of his hand.
My father only ever gave that punishment to one person, and it cost him and my mother their lives. It seems fitting I’m the one to fulfill Brutus’ curse.
I stare at the body of the man who raped me, who took my family and my future from me. I expect to feel something – a sense of triumph, the sweet taste of karmic fucking justice. All I feel is the raw pinch in my stomach and shoulder from a bullet wound.
“Why are his legs like that?” The jagged end of a bone sticks through his blood-soaked trousers, and his other leg is twisted at a strange angle.
Eli nudges George. “Our resident forensic expert will tell you.”
George’s face turns an even sicklier shade. “Galen did most of the examination. I mostly watched and tried not to throw up.”
“She’s a natural.” Galen raises a beer to his lips and nods at George. “If you decide you don’t want to be a podcaster, you’ve got a bright future ahead of you as the doctor in a crime family.”
George shudders. “I appreciate that.”
I grin at George. Who knew our unlikely friendship that began when she lent me a fork in the girl’s bathroom would end up with her dissecting my enemies? “So, doc, what’s the verdict?”
George pushes a strand of bright-blue hair out of her face. My chest swells with admiration for her. It also swells with windpipe-crushing pain. But mostly admiration – I blew into her life like a hurricane and tore apart everything she’s ever believed in, and she’s still willing to cut up a corpse to get me answers.
That’s friendship.
“Someone broke both Brutus’ legs,” she says. “Mashed them with a sledgehammer, it looks like. And he’s got several other injuries. Cuts, abrasions… all this happened before you killed him.”
“So his legs were broken when we found him?”
George nods. “Recently, too. And they haven’t been set. He must’ve been in agony.”
I remember Brutus leaning against the pole in the shack. I didn’t think about it at the time, but he hadn’t moved at all, hadn’t tried to get away even as he stared death in the face. “If he’s this badly beaten up, how was he even talking to us?”
But I don’t need to ask that question, because the answer comes to me in a flash. The grey crystals in the silver bowl beside him. He was off his face on Grey Death.
“He had so much of that drug in his system, he probably didn’t feel a thing,” Galen says. “It might explain why he just sat there while you held that gun to his head.”
We all fall silent, letting this sink in. My thoughts swim – it seems as soon as I start to articulate what might’ve happened, the threads of answers flutter away from me, like butterflies hiding from the rain.
“If someone broke his legs, doesn’t this mean someone was holding him here against his will?” Noah asks.
No one answers. They don’t have to. The reality of that statement sweeps over us. Antony told Brutus to go into hiding to keep him away from me. Brutus spoke with Walter Hart, who told him about this place. But then what happened? How did one of the most powerful crime lords in the city end up trapped out here, high on Grey Death, with his legs broken?
Did whoever did this to him know we were on our way?
Was me killing Brutus part of someone else’s plan?
I can’t deal with these thoughts right now. It’s too much to consider when it hurts to breathe and my brain is full of cotton. But it’s no use – my father’s training cuts through the haze. We have to deal with this.
“We need evidence,” I say. “The Triumvirate need to know Brutus is dead.”
