“Earlier today,” he said. Each word was a stone placed carefully on a bridge that might not hold. “Someone came to the house.”
My chest tightened. The room contracted.
“Who?”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were wet.
“Sterling.”
The name landed in the room like a body falling from a height.
Sterling. Who’d texted me this morning. Who’d been waiting at the hospital. Who’d paid for Rowan’s treatment before I arrived. Who’d pulled a gun on Dorian. Who’d been dragged unconscious from the lobby by a bodyguard twenty minutes ago.
Sterling, who’d come to my brother’s house – the house where I grew up, the house where my parents’ ghosts still lived in the floorboards – and poisoned the only person on earth whose existence made mine bearable.
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. The fury was too large for words. It filled the room, filled my body, filled the space between my bones. It was a fury so total, so absolute, that it went beyond anger into something older and darker – the feeling of a creature whose den has been invaded, whose young have been threatened, whose response to the threat is not flight but the patient, calculated, irreversible decision to destroy.
I looked at Rowan. His eyes were closing – the effort of speaking, of remembering, of staying conscious, finally exceeding what his poisoned body could sustain. His hand was still in mine. His breathing was shallow but steady. The machines were doing their work.
“Rest,” I whispered. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
His fingers relaxed in my grip. His breathing slowed. Sleep took him the way water takes a stone – gently, inevitably, drawing him down to a place I couldn’t follow.
I sat in the plastic chair beside his bed, holding his hand, and stared at the wall, and thought about Sterling.
About the gun, and the hospital, and the poison, and the text messages this morning that now looked less like a desperate ex-boyfriend and more like a man setting pieces on a board.
About the video of Rowan choking on his own blood, sent from an unknown number, timed perfectly to bring me running to a hospital where Sterling was already waiting with a paid bill and an embrace.
About the pattern emerging from the chaos – not random events, but choreographed ones. A plan. Sterling’s plan. To hurt Rowan. To lure me. To remind me that even now, even married, even behind the walls of Caelum’s world, he could reach the people I loved.
The fury didn’t fade. It crystallized. Became something harder and colder and more permanent than emotion. Became a decision.
Sterling had made his last move.
I just didn’t know yet what mine would be.
“Why,” I said, and the word came out like a blade being drawn, “would you let Sterling into our house?”
Rowan’s eyes sharpened beneath the oxygen mask – a flash of the old Rowan, the one who didn’t take accusations lying down, even from a hospital bed. The monitor beside him beeped a little faster, as if his heart rate was personally offended on his behalf.
“I didn’t let him in.” His voice was stronger now, fueled by indignation, and I could see the effort it cost him – the way his chest expanded a millimeter too far, the way the oxygen mask fogged with each emphatic word. “I was on the couch. Watching TV. Minding my own business – which, for the record, is something I’m excellent at. Then somebody knocked.”
“And you just opened the door.”
“I opened the door because that’s what people do when someone knocks, Marlowe. It’s a social convention. I wasn’t expecting Satan in a polo shirt.”
Despite everything – the hospital, the poison, the gray pallor of his skin that made him look like a photograph of himself rather than the actual person – I almost smiled. Almost. Because that was Rowan: dying in a hospital bed and still finding the energy to be sarcastic, still finding the angle that would make me laugh instead of cry, because making me laugh had been his primary job for as long as either of us could remember.
“So you opened the door,” I said. “And there he was.”
“There he was.” Rowan’s jaw tightened. The muscles worked beneath skin that had grown too thin, and even the simple act of clenching seemed to require a negotiation with his body that his body was increasingly reluctant to grant. “Standing on our porch. Our porch. The porch Dad built, the one with the loose board on the left side that we never fixed. And Sterling’s standing on it like he has every right to exist there, like the ground belongs to him just because his shoes are touching it.”
I knew that porch. Every creak and splinter of it. The spot where the wood had warped from the rain the summer I was seven. The place where Mom used to sit on August evenings with a glass of lemonade and watch the lightning bugs come out. The railing Rowan had gripped the night our parents died, his knuckles white, his face a mask I’d never seen before and would see many times after. That porch was ours – ours in the way that places become yours not through ownership but through the accumulation of memory – and Sterling had stood on it and asked for me like I was something that could be collected.
“What did he want?”
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.