Majeston #2
Hearing my name in his voice brought more memories than anger.
Smoke-filled bars. Yuki laughing between us before life became complicated enough to steal the sound from her.
Masina young, sharp, and full of questions nobody around her had been prepared to answer.
Men sitting at tables talking about money they hadn’t earned yet and power they couldn’t fully comprehend.
Back when Marius was only ambitious, not consumed.
Back when his charm had seemed natural instead of practiced, and the darkness in him still knew how to stay hidden when company came around.
I remained in the doorway, studying him with the same patience he was trying to use against me. “Marius.”
“I was beginning to wonder if you’d make it.”
“You knew I was coming?”
“I knew somebody would.” He lifted his glass and took a measured sip, never breaking eye contact.
“Kade is too emotional when it comes to that woman. Cassian has spent his entire life wanting to prove he isn’t me, which means eventually he’ll do something stupid just to convince himself. Isaiah likes dramatic entrances. Yuki would’ve sent a small army and called it subtle.”
His eyes moved over me again, slower this time. “You, though? You always preferred handling your own problems.”
I stepped in the room and let the doorway remain open behind me. Marius noticed. Of course he did. He had always paid attention to exits, entrances, windows, shadows, and anything else a person might use against him.
“You got cameras outside?” I asked.
“Had.”
“Security?”
“Had that too.”
“Where are you men?”
“Loyalty is an expensive luxury when the money stops moving.” His jaw tightened for half a second before smoothing over. There it was.
Not regret. Not concern over anyone who might have died, been arrested, or decided preserving their own lives mattered more than defending his. Just irritation that people he had purchased no longer considered themselves owned.
I looked around the room again, taking in the glass, the bottle, the weapon on the table, and the stillness of the house surrounding us. “All that money. All that power you spent your whole life collecting, and this where you ended up?”
Marius laughed, swirling the whiskey in his glass. “You came all this way to critique my living arrangements?”
“No. I’m just appreciating the irony.”
“What irony would that be?”
“The great Marius Myles sitting alone in a house nobody wants, waiting on somebody to decide whether he gets to see tomorrow.”
His smile remained in place, but I watched the muscles along his jaw tense.
He could tolerate threats. He had built his identity around surviving them.
What he couldn’t tolerate was being diminished.
To Marius, hatred was still a form of importance.
Fear was proof of power. Even revenge allowed him to remain at the center of someone else’s life.
Pity was the one insult he had never learned how to carry.
“You think I’m afraid of dying?” he asked.
“I think you’re terrified of being forgotten.”
A clock ticked from somewhere deeper inside the house, every second landing louder than it should have.
Marius lifted the glass to his lips but paused before drinking, his eyes narrowing as though he were reconsidering the man standing before him.
Maybe he had expected rage. A weapon shoved into his face.
Questions barked between threats. Something familiar enough for him to manipulate.
I didn't come to give him anything familiar. He finally took the drink and placed the glass back onto the table.
“Close the door.”
“For what?” His eyes flicked toward the hallway behind me.
“You expecting company?”
“Maybe.”
“You bring Kade?”
“I didn’t bring anybody.”
“Then who exactly are you leaving the door open for?”
“The truth.”
A chuckle rolled from his chest. “Still talking in riddles.”
“Still pretending you don’t understand plain English.”
His hand inched to the arm of the chair but stopped several inches from the pistol. The movement wasn’t accidental. It was a reminder. A subtle display meant to establish that he still had choices. I lifted my weapon and aimed it directly at his chest.
“Don’t do it.” Marius looked at the barrel before leaning back again.
“You came here to kill me.”
“If killing you was the only reason I came, you’d already be dead.” The muscles in his face shifted, something between irritation and curiosity passing through his expression.
“Then why am I still breathing?”
“Because I waited too long for this conversation to rush it.” Outside, wind pressed against the side of the house, making the old windows groan in their frames. The sound moved through the walls like something trying to get inside, but neither one of us looked away.
Thirty years sat between us.
Thirty years of choices, lies, disappearances, and children left to inherit wars they had never started. Through it all, Marius had continued moving as though everybody else’s suffering was nothing more than evidence that his life mattered. He finally gestured toward the chair opposite him.
“Have a seat.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Still stubborn.”
“And you're still breathing.”
“For the moment.”
Up close, I could see the exhaustion beneath his eyes.
He had covered it well, but not well enough.
Good. I wanted him tired. Not helpless. There was no satisfaction in speaking truth to a helpless man.
I needed him awake, coherent, and arrogant enough to believe he could still defend every decision that brought us here.
“You look disappointed,” he said.
“I’m trying to figure out what I expected.”
“And?”
“I expected more.”
His eyes hardened. “Careful.”
“Or what?”
He tilted his head slowly. “Don’t let this little advantage confuse you. I’ve watched stronger men than you walk into rooms believing they had control.”
“And I’ve watched weaker men than me spend their whole lives convincing everybody they did.
” Anger flashed behind his eyes, hot and immediate, but he smothered it before it could spread across his face.
Marius had always believed anger was most useful when hidden.
He had taught that lesson to his sons. To Yayo.
To every man who ever mistook his attention for mentorship.
He reached for the whiskey bottle instead of the weapon and poured himself another drink.
“You want one?”
“I’m good.”
“You sure? You look tense.”
“I’m standing across from the man who slept with my wife, destroyed another, terrorized our children, and shot at my pregnant daughter. Tense seems reasonable.”
His hand stilled around the bottle. Not because of everything I named. Because I said our children. A subtle smile returned to his face.
“There it is.”
“There what is?”
“The reason you came.” He set the bottle down, and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs.
“I knew this was about Yuki.”
“This ain’t about Yuki.”
He studied me as though the words themselves had offended him.
In Marius’s mind, everything returned to her.
Yuki was the prize he believed had been stolen.
The woman whose rejection became another wound he could blame for what he chose to become.
Even decades later, after everything he had done, a part of him still needed to believe the war had started because two men wanted the same woman.
It was easier than admitting he had ruined every person who had ever tried to love him.
“You expect me to believe you traveled all this way, stepped into my house with a gun in your hand, and none of this is about your wife?”
“I came because for thirty years, everybody around you has been forced to answer for your choices except you.”
“Masina answered for them.”
“Kade answered for them.”
His fingers tightened around the glass.
“Cassian answered for them. Yayo answered for them. Ysis answered for them. Yuki answered for them. Every child you touched through that system answered for them. Every family you broke. Every person you buried. Every man and woman who had to rebuild their life after you decided the pain was useful.”
His face had gone completely still. “You sat at the center of all that destruction and called yourself powerful because nobody made you explain yourself.”
The old house creaked around us.
Marius didn’t blink. Neither did I.
“So no,” I continued, lowering the weapon only slightly, not because I trusted him but because I wanted him looking at my face instead of the barrel. “I didn’t come here about Yuki.”
“Then what exactly did you come for?”
I thought about the question longer than necessary, allowing every year between us to settle into the answer.
I thought about the young men we had been before money, pride, jealousy, and fear turned our lives into something none of us could recognize.
I thought about the hospital where Yuki had once sat beside me, promising forever like the word was simple.
I thought about the first time I realized something in her had changed and how long I blamed myself before learning another man had been feeding on every crack in our marriage.
I thought about Ysis sitting at that table telling us what survival had cost her.
I thought about Yayo hiding a lifetime of abandonment behind jokes, smoke, money, and violence.
I thought about Marius sending bullets into a celebration filled with women, children, and his own blood because someone had dared to move forward without him.
Then I looked at the man responsible for all of it.
“After thirty years, I finally got time.”
Marius leaned back, the glass forgotten in his hand.
“For what?”
“To ask you why.”
Marius never answered. Instead, he studied me the way men like him always studied people, searching for hesitation, looking for the fracture where conviction became uncertainty.