Epilogue #2
Roe is already on the dais, beret pulled low, and now the center of everything, acting as interim-magistrate. He nods when he spots us coming closer, like he’s been waiting.
As we cut across the tier, hands clap us on the back; someone hoots, another slaps my shoulder hard enough to sting.
Ever since that fight a month ago, everyone seems to know who I am, and it's weird as fuck. Maybe it’s because Max claimed me in the middle of the Pit—publicly, loud, beautiful—or maybe the rumor mill had me pegged before that.
Having the champion of Ibitha stalking your ass is a juicy bit of gossip; people eat it up.
You’d think Max would be used to the attention by now.
He says he isn’t. “You make me look more approachable. It’s bad for my rep,” he muttered once at my bar when some idiot came up and asked how to sharpen a sword.
Max blew smoke in his face and rammed his dagger between the fool’s fingers on the counter.
The guy scuttled off real quick after that and no one else bugged him that night.
Besides Sami, of course, who’s now always glued to his side when I have to work.
He could never fill that Tass-sized hole in Max’s heart, or in ours. But I see the corner of his mouth twitch into a half-smile at Sami’s antics now and then, like a demon getting chased off for a minute.
It’s never gone, though. It’s just quieter, folded into the small things. A laugh that breaks too soon, a touch that lingers where it shouldn’t, a silence that still tastes like salt whenever she’s mentioned.
We carry it with us, like a scar that keeps us honest.
Yeah, I’m still at the resort. Like I said before: I like it. Unlike Max, people are my thing. I’m good at it. I care. And I feel partly responsible for Joyeus’s demise. She didn’t die at our hands, but she did die because we got too close.
She did a lot of terrible things for the wrong reasons.
She used people, squeezed them for power and money, fed on desperation.
But she also kept a roof over some people’s heads and food on their plates.
When she died, the funding that paid for that died with her.
The money stopped, and suddenly the staff who’d relied on her were adrift.
Even if the way she ran things was rotten, a lot of those people were really lost without the place she’d built.
Bars don’t exist just for booze and noise, they’re islands on their own.
A place to laugh, to fall apart, to be human for a few hours.
There will always be a need for that. There will also always be people willing to work there, even in the Den, if it’s their choice.
And I want them to have that safe place, to have that choice. The choice so few of us were ever given.
I’m giving it to them now.
Yup. I don’t just work at the bar. I now own the damn resort. There’s still a lot to do, a lot of things to make right, but I can’t wait to make that place a safe haven, which of course also is profitable.
Factually, Max owns it. He bought it—bartered for it when Joyeus’s affairs were settled—and paid for it with that small fortune he’d stashed under the loose floorboard Tass told me about.
I tried to stop him, but for some stupid reason, he enjoys making me happy, and helping people makes me happiest. Besides getting railed by my boyfriend, maybe. Which is also one of the things on the top of his list.
Which includes dismembering Walkers and laughing when they crawl over to him with just one arm, of course. He’s that kind of bastard.
Anyway, the thing that’s about to happen? It’s going to make him really fucking ecstatic.
We arrive at the dais for the Nine, now narrowed down to the Five.
Turns out it wasn’t just Joyeus and Noura.
The heads of Medical and Logistics, and a couple more high-up assholes, were in on it too.
Greed ran through half of the council; Noura was only the loudest. They didn’t just want the island; they wanted a foothold on the mainland, power and profit and people in their pocket.
And it wasn’t only greed we found. They promised illegal passage to desperate people in exchange for loyalty, a place on the island, a debt to be paid.
Guys like my colleague Ben got snatched up when the time came, hauled to the facility and used as test subjects.
Not exposed to the red rain, not bitten by a Walker…
they were injected, experimented on. Different solutions, different dosages, testing whether they could make the Touched controllable, or stronger, or somehow useful.
They were trying to build an army of Touched. Stronger, faster, with sharpened senses.
At least that’s what they wanted. What she wanted. They never figured out how to make the Touched live longer, or reliably controllable.
Thank fuck for that.
Now she’s being dragged out to face trial. The crowd boos like a storm when she steps up, and honestly, I can’t help it. I smile. Not because I’m cruel, but because finally, finally, she’s put before the stand where she convicted so many, innocent or not.
Sami takes his seat next to Roe, acting as interim commander until they settle everything, and Max and I go stand by the lever that pulls up the gate.
“Glad you two could make it.” Roe has to raise his voice over the crowd’s booing before he focuses on me. “Thank you for bringing him back in one piece, son.”
I scoff at the word son. He insists on it, even though I told him the first time he called us both that it was weird.
“Why?” he’d asked then, sitting on our couch in the apartment, broad arms spread over the cushions.
My cheeks had gone red. “I mean… then your sons are fucking each other.”
Max had put his fist to his mouth, trying to hide a snort behind a cough. Roe stared for a second, then he busted out laughing. A real, surprised laugh. Sami looked up at him and gave this… tender half-smile, and for a second the room felt softer than it had a right to be.
I loved that laugh. I don’t know the man that well, but I hadn’t heard him laugh like that before. Ever. Especially since Tass…
“Gods, Kieran. Every time I talk to you, I like you better,” he’d snorted, digging in his backpack. “Wait. I have something for you.”
He pulled out two rubber ducks he said were still at his place but belonged to Tass. One scowled—all angry beak and scrunched brow—and the other was red with little yellow dots and a green leaf for a hat.
A fucking strawberry rubber duck.
Max almost teared up all over again, muttering that Tass had always fucking loved strawberries, and he’d wondered for years where those stupid fucking ducks went.
Now they sit on our windowsill with the rest like a dumb little duck army.
Sometimes I catch myself looking at them like they’re a map back to something we’ve lost.
I don’t know. It kinda feels like she’s watching over us, waiting for us. And right now, with Roe in front of me and Max at my shoulder, that feels like enough to keep moving. To get this part over with so we can continue with the rest of our lives. Rebuild this place into something better.
Starting with sentencing this bitch.
“Noura El-Amin.” Roe’s voice cuts through the crowd and the roar drops into a dangerous hush. “You stand accused of crimes against this island and its people. What do you have to say for yourself?”
She’s small as always, that fucking wisp of a woman, but she plants her feet and stares back like she owns the world. No robe, just tattered clothes and a dagger clenched in a fist. I have to respect the nerve of it. “One law broken means one Walker,” she says flatly. “I accept that.”
Yes… one Walker for every time you enter the Pit. But she doesn’t know what kind of Walker she’s getting.
“So it shall be.” Roe’s hand cuts the air and the words fall like a command. He nods to Max, who’s lighting up a smoke as if he’s got all the time in the world before pulling the lever for the gate.
It rattles, iron grinding as it rises. Max mutters a low, cruel little prayer under his breath, and I can feel the shape of his smile even before I look up. He inhales on his smoke, that delicious curl at the corner of his mouth.
“Gods, I love that sound,” he murmurs as Noura’s scream rips out, the sound she makes when she sees what’s waiting for her. Chompy moves like a nightmare made of rot and teeth, all terrible grace, and the crowd forgets how to breathe.
But I don’t look at the Pit. I can’t. I only stare at him. At those sin-as-fuck lips as he breathes smoke out, at the wicked wildness burning in his star-flecked eyes while he watches his pet tear the woman apart.
His expression is pure, filthy glee.
I love him. Completely. Irrevocably. Demons and all. The madness and the mercy, the monster and the man. He is blood and breath and bravery, and on this ruined island we found each other.
We chose each other.
When her screams finally die, when the last wet sound drops away and the crowd’s roar creaks back like something waking, Max turns to me and grins that dangerous, gentle grin. He presses his forehead to mine and for a long beat, there’s just us.
“It’s over,” he says, and the words are everything.
He kisses me then. Not gentle, not soft, but full of smoke and shadow and promise. A kiss that tastes like victory and like the terrible things we’ve survived. It’s everything and nothing, fierce and quiet all at once.
It’s hope. A raw, feral, and impossible hope for a better life in this fucked-up excuse for a world, but I take it with both hands, hold on to it, and will never let it go.
– THE END –