Chapter 20 - Benedict #2
The tanto. The heaviest of the three, the most deliberate.
This isn't a knife you throw casually. The weight demands commitment—a full body movement, shoulder and hip and wrist aligned, everything channeled into a single point of intention.
I've thrown this blade thousands of times, and it still requires everything I have.
I throw. The tanto crosses the nave in silence—or what feels like silence, the whisper of steel through cold air too soft to register as sound. It hits the center of the target with a thud that resonates through the stone floor and into the soles of my bare feet.
Center. Perfect.
I stand in the aftermath of the throw, arm still extended, and feel the thing that knife work always gives me—the brief, clean emptiness that follows total concentration.
No wall. No investigation. No dead father, no living woman, no dinner on Saturday, where every thread in my life will be sitting at the same table.
Just the stone and the steel and the silence and the target with three blades in it, proof that my body still knows how to do one thing perfectly.
I retrieve the knives. Wipe the blades. Throw again.
And again. For an hour, the church is nothing but the sound of steel hitting wood and my own breathing and the cold gray light through the saints in the windows, and I am nothing but a body in motion, precise and purposeful, and the noise in my head goes quiet the way it only goes quiet when I am doing the thing I was trained to do.
***
Gabriel calls at noon.
I'm at the workbench, cleaning the blades with oil and a cloth, the ritual that follows the practice.
My hands smell like steel and mineral oil and the faintly sweet scent of the leather case.
Gabriel's name on the screen interrupts the calm that knife work built, the way it always does—my eldest brother's gravity pulling me back into orbit.
"Saturday," he says. No greeting.
"I'll be there."
"Seven o'clock. Poppy's been cooking since Wednesday.
" A pause. The quality of Gabriel's pauses could fill a textbook on nonverbal communication—each one precisely calibrated, weighted with whatever he's choosing not to say.
"There's someone I'd like you to meet. A man named Harlan Cates.
He manages several investment vehicles for families in our circle. He's been asking for an introduction."
"An introduction to me? Why?"
"He says he has business interests that overlap with ours in the northeast corridor. He wants to discuss opportunities."
Gabriel's voice is level, informational, entirely neutral. Which means there's something beneath the surface that he's choosing not to share. Gabriel is never neutral by accident. Neutral is a choice, and Gabriel's choices are always strategic.
"What families?" I ask.
"Several. I believe the St. Croix family is among his clients."
The name lands in the quiet of the church like a blade hitting wood.
I keep my voice even. Years of practice—keeping my face steady, my tone unremarkable, my reactions invisible.
Gabriel trained me to lie by never telling me he was teaching me.
He simply created an environment where survival required deception, and I learned.
"I'll look forward to meeting him," I say.
"Good. And Benedict—"
"Yes?"
"Whatever you've been distracted by lately. Set it aside before Saturday. I need you present."
The line goes dead. Gabriel doesn't say goodbye. Never has. Conversations with my eldest brother begin and end on his terms, and the silence that follows is always his—shaped by his departure, defined by his absence.
I set the phone down. Look at the wall.
Harlan Cates. Manages investments for families in our circle. St. Croix among his clients. Gabriel introducing him to me specifically, at a family dinner, with a casualness that Gabriel has never applied to anything casually in his life.
Either Gabriel is testing me—probing to see if the St. Croix name generates a reaction, which would mean Gabriel knows more about my investigation than I thought—or Gabriel is genuinely conducting Brotherhood business and the St. Croix connection is a coincidence.
There are no coincidences with Gabriel.
I pick up the phone. Search for Harlan Cates.
The results are sparse—a LinkedIn profile with no photo and minimal detail, a mention in a trade publication about boutique wealth management, a registration with the SEC for a firm called Cates Capital Partners.
Nothing remarkable. The kind of digital footprint that could belong to a legitimate financial advisor or to someone who's been carefully constructed to look like one.
I screenshot the SEC filing. Print it. Pin it to the wall beside the law firm, below the monthly payments, next to the shell entities.
Another name. Another thread. The web is growing, and Saturday it's going to be sitting at my family's dinner table in the person of a man my brother wants me to meet.
The church, the cold, the light fading early. I stand at the west-facing window—Mary at the well, the blues deeper in this glass than in the east windows—and watch the light drain from the sky over Gowanus.
My phone buzzes.
Josiah: Gabriel's in a mood. What did you do?
I almost smile. Josiah—the middle brother, the one who mediates between Gabriel's control and my chaos. He's been playing this role since we were children, translating Gabriel's silences and my provocations into something the family could survive.
Nothing. I exist. That's usually enough.
He asked me if you'd been handling your obligations. I told him you had.
Thank you.
Don't thank me. I lied. You were late on Philadelphia by four days and you've missed two check-ins this month.
I covered for you because I didn't want to deal with the fallout.
But Benedict—whatever's pulling your attention, get it sorted before Saturday.
Gabriel isn't asking about your schedule because he's curious.
He's asking because he's already decided something is wrong and he's building a case.
Josiah. Direct where Gabriel is oblique. My middle brother doesn't circle. He walks straight to the point and plants a flag in it.
I hear you.
Do you? Because hearing me and doing something about it are two different things with you. They always have been.
I don't respond. He's right—and the fact that he's right, that both my brothers have now told me to be present on Saturday, to set aside whatever's distracting me, to fall back in line—it presses against the inside of my ribs like a hand squeezing.
The Brotherhood. The family. The obligations that existed before I had a wall or a woman or a reason to be distracted, and that will exist long after both have destroyed me or saved me.
I put the phone down. Look at the wall. Look at the window. Look at the bed where I'll sleep tonight alone in clean sheets that hold nothing of her, though my body insists otherwise.
Saturday. Two days. Lucy will be in the house where I grew up.
She'll see the hallways, the library, the portrait.
She'll sit at the table where my father sat, in the room where decisions were made that shaped the Brotherhood for decades, and she'll carry the knowledge of his murder underneath whatever dress she wears—carry it silently, carefully, the way she carries everything.
The professional who holds other people's weight.
Holding mine now. Not because I asked. Because she reached for it.
And across that same table will be Harlan Cates, who manages money for the St. Croix family, whose presence Gabriel has arranged with the deliberate casualness that my brother applies to things that matter most.
I go to the case. Take out the tanto. Carry it back to the nave.
Twenty feet. The target, scarred and waiting.
I throw until the light is gone and the church is dark and the target has become a sound rather than a sight—the thud of steel into wood, over and over, the rhythm of a man preparing himself for something he can feel coming but can't yet see.