Chapter 45 Lance #2
I can stand. I’ve stood through worse. But my legs don’t move, because standing means letting go of this kid, and letting go of this kid means trusting that the world outside this cage is different from the world inside it, and if the last few months—the last few years—have taught me anything, it’s that corruption bleeds into the mundane, everyday things.
Percy pulls back. His face is blotchy and streaked, snot and tears and blood from where his own knuckles split against my ribs.
“Is it real?” he asks. “Are they really here?”
“Yeah. They’re really here.”
“So I don’t have to—”
“No. You don’t have to do anything. Not anymore.”
His chin trembles, and he nods, and then he lets the agent help him to his feet.
I watch them drape a shock blanket around his shoulders, and my vision goes hazy, because he looks so small inside it, and I think about the first time Benjamin brought him downstairs at the tavern, scared shitless and trying to hide it, and how I wished with everything in me that I could get him out.
I didn’t get him out. Someone else did. But he’s standing.
He’s breathing. And the knife is on the ground where it belongs.
I force my own legs to work. When I stand, the warehouse tilts sideways for a second before it rights itself, and my hands are shaking.
Not trembling—shaking, the kind that starts in your wrists and works up through your forearms and makes you feel like you’re vibrating apart at the molecular level.
I press them flat against my thighs and hold them there until the shaking becomes something I can hide.
Art.
I scan the warehouse. Agents are swarming. Spectators are face down on the concrete with their hands behind their heads. I see Brutus’s table, glass shattered on the floor, but his chair is empty.
He’s gone.
But Art isn’t.
He’s standing near the service entrance with two agents flanking him, and he’s not running.
He’s not resisting. His hands are raised, palms out, cuffs around them, and he’s talking.
I can’t hear the words over the noise, but I can see his mouth moving, and there’s something about his posture that doesn’t match a man being arrested.
It matches a man turning himself in.
His shoulders are loose. His weight is even. There’s no tension in his jaw, no darting of his eyes toward the exits. He’s not calculating an escape. He’s not performing calm for the agents the way he performs it for everyone else.
He’s relieved.
And that guts me worse than anything he’s done, because I know what relief looks like on Art when he’s been carrying something too heavy for too long. I see it in the mirror every morning.
Art was wrong when he said he wasn’t in a cage.
His may have not been concrete and chain-link, but the kind made of a father’s expectations and a debt he didn’t know how to pay and a best friend who loved him too much and power he loved too much to let go of.
He built his cage out of silence and twisted intentions, and he sat in it night after night letting others build its reinforcements while I bled beneath his bar.
It doesn’t excuse him. Nothing excuses it.
But watching him stand there, spine straight, handing himself over to people who will most likely put him in an actual cage with actual bars, I understand something I didn’t before: This is the first honest thing Arthur Penngrove has done since the night he let my father pawn my body to pay for his mistakes.
“Lance.” An agent crouches beside me, a woman with calm eyes. “We need to get you out of here. Can you walk?”
“What’s happening to him?” I nod toward Art.
She follows my gaze. “That’s not your concern.”
But it is. It’s been my concern since we were four and he cried on my shoulder because his dad forgot his birthday, and I took him to the creek to catch tadpoles until the sun went down.
Art’s eyes lock on me. His lips stop moving. His Adam’s apple bobs. And he mouths four words.
Silver Spoon Survivors’ Club.
Tears spring to my eyes, and my throat swells shut, and I can’t fucking breathe.
“Founding members,” I mouth back.
This is a shitty ending to our story, but real life doesn’t always get wrapped up in a red bow. Sometimes it’s left cracked with memories, and matching scars on the palms of two boys who thought a blood oath could protect them from the world.
They guide Percy and me toward the entrance.
The walk is longer than it should be. Twenty, maybe thirty feet from the cage to the doors, but every step feels like I’m dragging the last six years behind me, chained to my ankles, scraping across concrete.
The sounds change as we move—the shouted commands fading into radio static, the stomp of tactical boots giving way to the crunch of gravel, and then the cold hits me.
Night air. Real air. Not the recycled, sweat-soaked, blood-tinged air of a fighting pit, but outside air, sharp with the first signs of winter and exhaust fumes and the distant salt of the harbor.
I stop in the doorway. Just for a second. One foot on concrete, the other on the asphalt, standing on the threshold between the world I’ve been trapped in and the one I’m not sure I know how to live in anymore.
But I know I want to try.
The sky is black and wide and full of nothing, and it’s the most open space I’ve seen in five days, and my chest constricts so hard I brace a hand against the doorframe.
“Sir?” The agent touches my elbow. “Are you all right?”
No. I’m not all right. I haven’t been all right in six years, and the fact I’m standing here instead of lying on a concrete floor doesn’t change the wiring in my brain that’s still waiting for the lights to flicker.