16. Silas
“Silas, damn it, get out of your head.” Dean coughs into my lap, and even though my pants are black, I know that’s a blood clot.
“The ambulance will get here in...” God, how long at eight miles out if they’re doing around fifty miles per hour...
“It doesn’t matter when they get here. We both know I’m not walking out of this.” He coughs again into my lap.
I don’t hear him. In my head every number is spinning. I’m trying to find a combination that keeps him alive for seven more minutes because I called the ambulance two minutes ago.
“I need you to take care of Karina,” he rasps through his teeth, and at the mention of her name, I look down at him.
“You’ll take care of her yourself, Dean.” I press down on the wound as hard as I can.
I know it hurts like hell, but I need to stop the bleeding somehow.
Why didn’t I tell him not to go today? Why didn’t I turn down this contract? I should’ve listened to my gut.
The report. That stupid, endless report that refused to come together no matter how many times I restructured it.
I was supposed to be with him tonight. Dean was alone with that man because I was sitting at my desk fighting with numbers that should have taken me thirty minutes and instead took me fifty.
By the time I got here, he was already on the floor of the warehouse, that snake who shot him long gone.
I should have known. I should have been there.
“Hey. Silas. Look at me,” he whispers, and I want to scream at how pale he is right now.
“Don’t you dare,” I tell him through my teeth. I can see it in his eyes. I know what he wants to say, and I’m not going to let him.
He’s all I have left in this world. He’s the only father figure I ever had, even if he’s my brother. He’s the only one who ever pushed my mind toward solving things, the only one who saw I was good at something and gave me a purpose.
The only one who stepped between me and our father all those times he mocked me for always having my nose in a book about algorithms.
“I know you’re going to do what needs to be done when I’m gone, but Si...” He taps my temple three times with one finger. “Promise me you won’t let this,” his hand drops to my chest, “lose every argument.”
“I’ll promise you that if you hold on for five more minutes,” I say, my voice thin because the tears are building in my eyes.
A smile spreads across his face, and I already know his last words are being saved for her.
“Tell her I’ll love her from wherever I end up, and that I’m going to miss her Sunday omelets every single week even though they were burnt to hell.” He tries to laugh.
I try too because Karina’s omelets deserve their own chapter in a medical textbook on gastritis.
His eyes lose focus, and I start shaking him.
“Dean... Dean, open your eyes. Open your eyes, damn it. Don’t leave me too.”
I don’t know how long I hold him. I don’t know how many seconds pass, I don’t know how long before his body starts losing its warmth, but I know when I hear voices around me.
I watch through a daze as the paramedics lift his lifeless body and call it. Time of death: 2:14 a.m.
I’m taken to a police precinct, but I know exactly what to say.
I tracked his GPS when he didn’t come home, and that’s how I found this address. I don’t know what my brother was involved in. I don’t know who shot him. I found him already injured on the concrete floor of that warehouse.
Four lies and one truth. I will not stop looking for the man who decided to end my brother’s life rather than pay us $7,600 to clean some money.
I don’t know how I’ll find him yet, but I have a name.
Rastovski.
Coming back here always does this to me. The memory of that night floods in the moment I arrive, like the air itself is forcing me to relive it on a loop.
I hear his laugh before I see him, and for five full seconds I have to stop and force myself not to turn around and leave.
They need you, Silas.
Dean’s voice is always loudest when I come back to where we grew up. Pennsylvania was home for eighteen years, and even though I’ve been to places a thousand times more beautiful, there’s something in the air here. A comfort. A familiarity. A nostalgia.
Allentown has a population of roughly 125,000 people and covers eighteen square miles. It sits at an elevation of 338 feet, and it’s where the most important people in my life live.
Karina appears in the doorway with that look that tells me she’s missed me and wishes I’d come back for good.
Her arms open automatically, and without meaning to, I’m hit with the scent of roses and vanilla. Her hair tickles my cheek, and I allow myself exactly eighteen seconds of that feeling of home.
She has dark circles under her eyes. I make a note to find out why later, though I have a strong suspicion because the most likely cause comes launching himself around the corner at full speed.
“Hey, buddy. You driving your mom crazy again?”
Sebastian’s smile could split his face in two, and I feel a small, familiar ache somewhere behind my ribs. He is nine years old and physically unable to occupy a room without also somehow occupying every corner of it simultaneously.
And God help us all when he turns that energy into stubbornness.
“Silas, are you staying the night?” he asks, and a knot forms in my throat because I don’t come here often enough. Because he needs a father, and all I can offer is a temporary stand-in.
“This time, yeah. Come show me what you’ve done with the Lego set I left you last time.”
I watch him take off down the hallway at a sprint, while Karina steps up behind me and whispers, “We miss you, Silas.”
I rest my hand lightly over my chest because, no matter how far I go, this place brings every mistake I’ve ever made back to the surface, and every promise I still haven’t kept.
I spend the entire afternoon with Sebastian, who is absolutely determined to walk me through how the motor he attached to his latest little robot works, and without meaning to, some of the weight I always carry lifts a little.
Because his eyes, my eyes, light up when he talks about how long it took him to put the pieces together and how none of his classmates could have done it.
Karina sits on the couch and watches us with the same warm expression she has every time I visit.
When I manage to pull myself away for a few minutes, I find her holding out a mug of green tea.
“How are the classes going? Have you settled in okay?”
I know what she wants to hear. She was against it when she first found out I was considering the position at the university in Ciudad de México, specifically because the distance would make visits even more rare than they already were.
“Fine. There’s potential,” I answer, and without meaning to, two green-brown eyes appear at the edge of my mind.
“Someone with potential?” she asks because my reaction didn’t slip past her.
I’ve never lied to her. She always knew when I was about to, so I learned early to just tell the truth.
“Yes.”
I don’t have anything more to give her than that. Amalia Sanchez is one of my students. Brilliant, but a student. She needs to learn to use her mind for herself, needs to stop being so accommodating. So fucking good to everyone.
“Wow, there really is someone with potential,” she says, and I catch something sad in her expression, so I stop looking at her.
“Karina, you and Seb are my priority.”
She nods, but this subject is always going to hurt her.
Before she leaves the kitchen, her hand comes to rest at my temple, and she taps it gently three times with one finger.
“That can’t give you answers to the things you don’t understand, Si. Look a little lower for those.”
I just nod because I’ve never known how to listen to whatever that thing in my chest is trying to tell me. With the two of them it was always easy, that connection was always clear.
But as I finish my tea, eyes on the street outside with its sparse evening traffic, I realize those hazel eyes are taking up too much space in my head.
And that’s a problem because I can’t afford to forget where my priorities lie. And not one of them has a bun with too many strands escaping it and the most aggressively colorful wardrobe I have ever seen collected in one place.
Use your head, Silas. You saw what happened the last time you didn’t.