Chapter 7
Either I’ve just taken a step toward the slow decay of my intellect, or I’ve outed myself as a believer to a very deranged man.
Cassian looks at me with narrowed eyes and the kind of stillness that sets something uncomfortable running along my spine. His jaw shifts once. A slow drag of muscle pulling tight beneath the skin.
He didn’t flinch when I stepped out from behind that corner. Not even slightly.
Talon did. He blinks at me with wide, exhausted eyes, and his hand slides toward something on his belt. A knife, I assume. Or a gun. Something that can hurt me.
“Excuse me,” I say, and put my hands where both of them can see them. “I overheard your conversation.”
A mistake, perhaps.
But my heartbeat is quickening, and there’s a rush through my limbs, a sharpening of the world’s edges, and something inside me clicks quietly into place. Something I haven’t felt since before my mother died.
Purpose.
“I can help you,” I say.
“What,” Cassian says, “exactly do you think you can help with?”
“Resuscitation. Inducing cardiac arrest and reversing it.”
Talon stiffens. Cassian’s shoulders don’t move.
“We don’t need your help,” Cassian says. “We can manage everything ourselves.”
I tilt my head slightly.
“Better than a doctor?”
A flicker passes through his mismatched eyes. Irritation first, then something else. The uncomfortable realization that, for all his certainty about the metaphysical, the physical is still someone else’s domain.
Talon laughs once. Humorless and frayed. “Why the glum face, man? You should be happy. You convinced a fucking doctor with your crazy talk.”
Cassian shoots him a look. Talon lifts both hands. “What? Just saying.”
His hand isn’t near his belt anymore.
Cassian returns his attention to me. “I know basic first aid.”
“From what I heard, basic first aid won’t give you the results you’re looking for.” I look at the milky white of his damaged eye. Hold there for a moment. “You died. And one of your eyes didn’t recover.”
His shoulders tighten.
“That’s an ischemic injury,” I say. “When the heart stops, retinal cells die before almost anything else.”
I take a step closer. Slow enough not to challenge whatever instinct for violence lives inside him. I’m sure it’s there. Both of them carry it.
“What does that mean?” Talon asks.
“It means he was gone too long. Just on the edge of permanent damage.” I glance at Cassian’s blind eye again. “A moment longer and that wouldn’t be the only deficit he carries.”
Talon goes still.
“So what, you’re saying if he had stayed dead, like… thirty more seconds, his whole body would’ve just… shut down?”
“Yes,” I answer.
Talon whistles and turns toward Cassian. “Did you know that?”
Cassian doesn’t reply. His attention is on me. Entirely. His stare doesn’t shift or blink or soften.
And I find that I don’t mind it.
His suspicion is logical. I would be suspicious of me too. I can respect it.
“Who are you?” he asks. “Why are you here?”
Who am I.
A kindred soul, perhaps. A fellow murderer with a drive for justice.
“My name is Nathaniel.”
Talon rolls his eyes and shakes his head. His gaze drifts toward the grief counseling room, then falls to the floor.
Cassian’s jaw shifts again.
“You’re going to give me more than that,” he says. “You should know I’m capable of handling people who get in my way. So if you’re some delusional grief-stricken sicko, I suggest you get back inside.”
A warning. Interesting. From the conversation I overheard, he gave me the impression of a man willing to accept help from wherever it came. Desperate, even.
But here he is. Guarded in every way except one.
“I’m a doctor,” I say. “Forced to be here by my employer because of a recent tragedy.”
“What tragedy?”
“Is that necessary for you to know?”
“Yes.”
I stare at him.
“Why?”
“You don’t seem to grieve,” he replies. He crosses his arms and the motion makes him look even bigger than moments ago.
Physically, he’s much stronger than me. Stronger than Talon beside him, for that matter.
But if he makes one move against me, all I need is a second to reach the sedative in my pocket.
I lower my hands another inch.
“My mother was murdered,” I say. “By a drunk she once helped at the hospital. Talking about it with a room full of strangers doesn’t do anything for me.”
I say it looking Cassian in the eyes. He tilts his head. His nostrils flare. He’s not the man of many words anymore. But something in him shifts, something as imperceptible as my pain.
Recognition.
“Alright,” he says. “Let’s say I believe you. Why would you help us? What do you get out of this?”
I think about it.
What is it, indeed.
I’ve spent my life applying structure where chaos reigns.
Imposing order on failing bodies, collapsing systems, the slow entropy of tissue and time.
And yet somewhere along the way, something slipped loose inside me.
My mother’s death severed whatever tether I had to the world’s narrative.
She believed in helping people. That’s exactly what killed her.
“You saw something after you died,” I say. “Something I cannot see. But as a doctor, I know this: when two systems give conflicting results, you test them. You examine where they diverge.”
If what happened to my mother was not just human cruelty but cosmic neglect—
I need to check.
“And you think killing him is… what?” Cassian asks. “A diagnostic?”
“Yes.”
Talon’s eyebrows shoot up. “A diagnostic?”
“I want to stop your heart and restart it. I want to be there when it happens. And I want to control every second of it so that if it works, I can understand it fully.”
Talon’s cheeks hollow out.
“I didn’t agree to anything yet,” he says quietly.
None of us respond to that. It’s not my place to convince this man.
Frankly, it may be in my best interest to convince him not to.
Committing crime alone is one thing. I can make sure my hands don’t shake and my mind doesn’t falter.
But committing crime with someone unhinged, someone whose sanity hinges on whether he interprets the universe correctly…
That places me in unnecessary proximity to unpredictability.
But it seems like my best interest doesn’t matter anymore.
Something about standing here anchors me more firmly than any hospital corridor or operating room ever has. Cassian’s scrutiny. Talon’s frayed bravado. The raw pull of whatever strange logic binds them.
“Whether you do this or not is your choice,” I say to the ginger. “But it seems like your friend here is going to find someone else regardless.”
“We’re not friends,” Talon interrupts.
“Your acquaintance, then.” I turn to Cassian. “If the experiment is inevitable, better it be done properly. I want to be the one to conduct it.”
Talon lets out a thin, incredulous laugh. “Fucking hell.” He starts pacing. “Here I was, for the first time in a long while, wondering what might happen if I take care of this good old noggin.” He knocks the side of his head. “Apparently this whole thing is a sign it can only get worse from here.”
“Grief counseling is not a good place to take care of your mind,” I say.
My eyes trail his pacing figure, but my mind is somewhere else. On Cassian.
He said the system needs to be fixed. But I wonder.
“What did you do with your sister’s killer?” I ask.
A fissure of something raw flashes through his eyes. I mean the question in good faith. Or in as good a faith as my morals allow. Which is quite far from most people’s.
I did not allow my mother’s killer to live. Could someone who has seen the other side let the killer of someone he loved walk away?
Curiosity makes me ask. But I know the question is nearly impossible for him to answer.
We just met. I ambushed them. I positioned myself as someone who holds a solution to his problem.
But if he did what I think he did—if he killed his sister’s murderer and then became fixated on changing the system of life and death—then I am nothing but a liability.
What stops me from going to the police and turning this hallway into evidence?
Nothing.
Nothing except the same thing that brought me out here. Curiosity. And curiosity is not a virtue. Something tells me this man is more careful than he is curious.
So it’s up to me to take the risk.
“I murdered my mother’s killer,” I say, still looking into his eyes. “Left his body to look like the booze did it.”
What is he going to do now?
Talon is the first to react. He stops pacing. Looks around to check if anyone heard us. To be honest, I don’t know if anyone could have. I didn’t check.
“Jesus,” Talon mutters. “Are you out of your mind?” He looks at Cassian. “You met your fucking match.”
“At least whisper shit like this, man,” Talon tells me.
Cassian inhales and breaks eye contact to check the surroundings too.
If someone did hear me, that would be unfortunate. But I covered my steps well enough. Words muttered outside grief counseling are not a confession. I could have been so grief-stricken I ventured too far into my own mind.
“You don’t seem surprised,” I say.
“I knew you were listening,” Cassian replies. “Talon admitted to having killed people. So have I. You stood there through all of it before you showed yourself.”
“Figured I’m like-minded?”
“Figured you’re a freak,” Cassian says.
I smile. “Isn’t that the same thing?”
Talon doesn’t smile. I watch it happen in real time. Gone is the man who came here to grieve. Something sharp and brutal takes his place.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
I turn to him.
“Don’t lump us all together like we’re the same breed of fucked up.” His voice is low and flat. “You don’t know why I did what I did. You don’t know shit about me.”
I nod slowly.
“Alright,” I say.
He’s right. I can’t pin a single note to him and call him studied. But taking another person’s life, for whatever reason, requires some form of derangement. I believe that.
These two don’t have to. We don’t need to agree in order to cooperate.
“So, Nathaniel,” Cassian says. “You want us to trust you. But right now, all I’ve heard is theory. You say you’re a doctor. You say your mother was murdered. You say you know what happened to my eye.”
His jaw shifts a fraction.
“You haven’t shown us a damn thing.” He stares at me. “Show me something real.”
I reach into my coat and pull out my hospital ID. Laminated card, photo, name, the hospital’s crest. I hold it up between two fingers.
Cassian takes it. Turns it over. Runs his thumb across the surface.
“This doesn’t prove anything,” he says. “I’ve met people who carry fake badges.”
“You think I’m walking around with a counterfeit hospital ID,” I say. “At a grief counseling session. In a church.”
He stares at me.
“I’ve met worse maniacs.”
“So have I, for that matter,” Talon agrees quietly.
I look at Cassian. He hands the ID back, and I slide it into my pocket. My fingers brush the syringe on the way down. For a brief, clinical moment I consider showing it. Proof of a different kind. One that would leave no doubt.
But no. I should keep that card unplayed.
I exhale through my nose.
He wants something real. Something that can’t be laminated or forged or explained away in a hallway. And the only thing I have that fits that description is in my apartment. Equipment. Supplies. The kind of setup no grief-stricken civilian has any reason to own.
The risk is obvious. Two men I met fifteen minutes ago, both killers, walking into the space where I live. Where I keep everything.
But I’ve already stepped out from behind that wall. Already spoken. Every line I’ve crossed tonight has been a point of no return. And the strange part is that I don’t want to go back.
The thrill is still there. Running just beneath my skin.
“Come to my apartment,” I say. “I have equipment that will answer your questions better than any card.”
Cassian’s eyes narrow. “Your apartment.”
“Yes.”
“And you think that’s going to settle it.”
“Won’t it?” I ask. “Will you still have doubts?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His jaw works once. He looks at Talon, who shrugs with his whole body. A gesture that says don’t ask me, man.
Cassian looks back at me.
“No,” he says. “I won’t.”
Talon blows out a breath. “This is the most stupid fucking thing I’ve ever heard.” He digs his keys out of his pocket. “We can take my car.”
And that’s it.
Alea iacta est.
The die is cast.