“And just before everything went black,” he whispered, “I heard someone. Outside the window. Close. Whispering.”
“What did they say?”
His eyes opened. Found mine. And in them I saw fear – real fear, the kind Rowan almost never permitted himself, because fear was a luxury that people who raise their younger siblings cannot afford.
“Your name,” he said. “Over and over. Marlowe. Marlowe. Marlowe. Soft, like a lullaby. Like whoever was doing this wanted the last thing I heard to be a reminder of why it was happening.” He swallowed. “And then everything went dark.”
The room fell silent. The machines beeped their steady, indifferent rhythm. The oxygen hissed. And I sat beside my brother’s bed and understood, with a clarity so sharp it drew blood, that every terrible thing that had happened today – the poison, the video, the hospital, Sterling’s performance – had been orchestrated with the single, obsessive precision of a man who would rather destroy everything around the object of his desire than accept that it was no longer his.
The last piece of the pattern clicked into place.
And the sound it made was deafening.
“He lured me.”
I said it to the room. To the machines. To Rowan’s tired face and the oxygen mask and the fluorescent light that hummed overhead like the world’s least sympathetic audience.
“That bastard lured me. All of it – the poison, the noise, leaving you on the floor of my room, sending me that video from an unknown number, timing his arrival at the hospital before mine – it was a trap. A piece-by-piece, methodical, step-by-step trap, and I walked straight into it like a character in a horror movie who opens the door everyone in the audience is screaming at her not to open.”
The fury was a physical thing now – I could feel it in my jaw, in my fists, in the muscles of my back pulling tight enough to crack. I was pacing. Three steps to the window. Three steps back. The room, which had felt small before, now felt microscopic – a box I was trapped inside with a rage that needed space to breathe and wasn’t getting any.
“When you slammed the door,” I said, thinking out loud, reconstructing the timeline the way a detective reconstructs a crime scene – because that’s what this was, a crime scene, and the crime was my brother’s body, “he was furious. Rejected. Cast out. And Sterling doesn’t process rejection the way normal humans do – he doesn’t grieve it or accept it or learn from it. He retaliates. Rejection is a wound to his ego, and his ego is the only organ he’s ever cared about.”
I was pacing faster now. The sneakers squeaked on the hospital floor.
“So he went around the house. Found my bedroom window – he’s been to our house, Rowan. Multiple times. He knew the layout. He knew about the trellis. He probably knew which window was mine from the time he drove me home and I pointed at it like an idiot.” The self-recrimination was acid in my throat. “He climbed up. Opened the window – just a crack, just enough. Made noise to draw you upstairs, away from the front of the house, into a contained space. And when you were standing in my room, breathing, distracted, looking for an intruder who was no longer inside-“
“He released something,” Rowan said. Quietly. No longer arguing. Just completing the sentence, because the picture I was painting was too detailed and too logical to deny.
“A gas. Through the window crack. Something fast-acting. Something designed to incapacitate in minutes and kill in an hour.” I stopped pacing. Turned to face him. “And then he left. Climbed down. Took out his phone. Filmed you through the window – lying on the floor of my room, choking on your own blood. Sent the video to me. Drove to the hospital. Paid the bill in advance. And sat down to wait. Because he knew. He knew exactly what I’d do. He knew I’d see that video and I wouldn’t call the police, I wouldn’t call Caelum, I wouldn’t think – I’d just run. Because that’s what you do when the person you love most in the world is dying on a screen in your hand. You run.”
The silence that followed was so complete it had its own sound – a ringing, like the aftermath of an explosion.
Rowan stared at me from behind his oxygen mask. The doubt had drained from his face like water from a cracked vessel, replaced by a grim, cold understanding. He wasn’t arguing anymore. He was doing the same thing I was doing – seeing the pattern, seeing the intention, seeing Sterling not as a desperate ex-boyfriend but as something more deliberate and more dangerous.
“He told me himself,” I continued, and my voice had gone flat now, drained of everything except the facts. “At the hospital. He pulled me into a hug and said: ‘I’ll do anything just to see you.’ He wasn’t confessing love. He was confessing method.”
“Marlowe-“
“I promise you, Rowan.” I stopped. Stood at the foot of his bed. Looked him in the eyes with everything I had – every ounce of the girl he’d raised, the woman I’d become, the sister who would burn the world to a cinder before letting someone hurt him again. “I will not take this lightly. He will not get away with this.”
Rowan studied me for a long, careful moment. I could see him weighing his response – the big brother’s eternal calculation, the balance between protecting me from the world and protecting me from myself.
“Marlowe,” he said, and his voice was calm in the way that experienced people’s voices are calm when they’re about to say something you don’t want to hear, “what exactly can you do to him? You know his family. Old money. Connected to judges, to politicians, to people who make problems disappear for a living. Whatever you do, wherever you take this, they’ll have lawyers there before you finish the sentence.”
“Dorian has it on camera. The gun. The lobby. The threats.”
“And Sterling’s father has people who make cameras stop working and witnesses forget what they saw.” Rowan’s voice was gentle but unyielding. “I’m not telling you to give up. I’m telling you to be smart. Because going at a man like Sterling head-on, without proof, without protection, without a plan – that’s not justice. That’s a suicide mission.”
I wanted to argue. Every cell in my body wanted to argue, wanted to be the kind of person who could walk into Sterling’s world and tear it down with nothing but righteous fury and the truth. But Rowan was right, and the rightness of it sat in my stomach like a stone.
He must have seen the struggle on my face, because his expression softened. That big-brother softness – the kind that says: I know you’re hurting, and I’m going to pretend everything is fine so that you don’t have to carry my pain on top of yours.
“Look at me,” he said. “I’m perfectly fine. I’m doing well. See? Breathing and everything.”
The lie was so gentle, so carefully constructed, that it hit me harder than the truth would have. Because I’d heard the doctor. Not the announcement in the hallway – the earlier conversation, the one I’d overheard through the cracked door while waiting to be allowed in. The words were still lodged in my memory like shrapnel:
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.