Cain #2
My father had always made violence sound administrative.
A transfer. A preservation measure. A family necessity.
He could have ordered a throat cut in the same tone he used to request more wine.
I remember Ellis at the foot of the tower stairs, dressed too well for the hour, mouth curved around some careless remark while his eyes tracked the priests in the hall.
He'd looked at me once before they took him below.
Only once. I'd mistaken that look for resentment.
I'd wanted it to be resentment because resentment meant he was alive enough to hate me.
"He was my brother," I say.
Aven's eyes flash toward me. "He knows."
The answer isn't comfort. It's worse. It means Ellis has been standing inside that fact for longer than I've been willing to look at it.
The cold in the corner pulses, and Aven bends slightly as if a hand has pressed between his shoulder blades.
He grips the edge of the cartography table, breathing through his teeth.
The connection is hurting him now, not in the way the ordinary dead hurt him with their hunger and noise, but with the strain of holding a spirit too old, too bound, too jagged around the edges.
He tries to say something and stops, his eyes unfocusing as Ellis pushes more through.
"Aven," I say, and step toward him.
He shakes his head hard enough that a curl slips over his eye. "Don't touch me. If you touch me while I’m holding him open, the bond makes him clearer, and he's already—" His voice catches. He presses his bloody hand harder to the table. "Cain, they used him alive first."
For a moment, the words don't enter me. They remain at the threshold, waiting for a mind still trying to bar the door. Aven doesn't wait. He can't. Ellis is inside the room now, inside him, inside the old silence I've wrapped around my brother's absence.
"They drained him," Aven says, and every syllable seems to cost skin.
"Not all at once. Rites under a chapel. Silver basin.
Chain through the throat, but not metal, not exactly.
Impure magic. They kept taking pieces and calling it sacred extraction.
When his body failed, the binding held what was left. "
Bound.
Dead should have ended it but being bound is the continuation of ownership past the mercy of a pulse. It's the hand closing again after the body has already paid everything it had.
I cross the space before I decide to move.
The rug gives beneath my boots, the candle flame bends toward the corner, and Aven makes a small sound behind me that might be warning or grief.
I lift my hand into the empty place where his gaze has been fixed, fingers spread as if I can find a shoulder, a sleeve, the edge of a jaw I remember from childhood before my family sharpened both of us into different weapons.
There’s just nothing and then cold slips around my fingers and vanishes, leaving my skin aching, Aven behind me making a sound so wounded that I turn before I can stop myself.
His eyes are wet. "He flinched."
That breaks what the rest only cracked.
My body chooses the chair because the floor can't be trusted.
I sit with my hands open on my knees, staring at the place my fingers passed through Ellis and trying to understand the size of the failure.
I left the tower. I crossed the ward. I burned through the gate with my skin blistering and my blood boiling, believing I was tearing myself free of my family's last claim on me.
I hadn't known the gate recognized me because it had been fed by him.
I hadn't known my escape passed through what remained of my brother.
Aven kneels in front of me before I can tell him not to.
The movement is too fast to be careful, and his knees hit the rug with a dull sound.
He takes my hands, blood and linen and all, and folds his fingers around mine with a stubbornness that feels like refusal.
I grip him too hard. I know it from the way his breath catches, but he doesn't pull away.
He shifts closer instead, anchoring me with a body already carrying more grief than any living thing should have to translate.
"He says he's sorry," Aven whispers.
I look at him because the corner gives me nothing.
"For what he said before they took him," Aven continues, his voice roughening as he listens and repeats in the same breath. "For making you think he hated you more than he missed you. For being cruel because anger was the only thing they let him keep that still felt like his."
Ellis's cruelty had kept me alive in the tower.
I see that now with a clarity that has no mercy in it.
I kept every sharp word because sharpness meant he hadn't been smoothed into obedience.
I kept his resentment like proof. He'd thrown it to me as a rope, and I'd mistaken the burn in my palms for punishment.
"Tell him I thought he was safe," I say. The words come out stripped. There's no elegance left around them, no old polish, no careful distance. "Tell him I thought they wanted me and that meant he'd escaped the worst of it. Tell him I would have come back if I'd known."
Aven's mouth trembles, but he turns toward the corner and gives Ellis the words.
Not perfectly. Grief makes language human, and Aven is too human in this moment, bleeding through the bandage and shaking from a dead man's voice in his bones.
The answer takes longer. I watch it arrive in him piece by piece, each fragment changing his face before he can decide how to pass it on.
"He says you were in a cage too." Aven swallows and tightens his hands around mine. "He says you don't get to apologize for not opening a door when they'd already broken your hands."
A sound leaves me. It's almost a laugh, but there's no humor in it, only the old recognition of my brother's mouth finding the cruelest possible route to kindness.
Aven listens again, and some small, terrible softness enters his face.
"He says he chose you. When they made it ugly, when he was angry, when he knew one of you was going to be used worse.
He says the cages were always going to take one of you, and he wanted it to be the one who could still get out.
" His voice breaks there, and he looks down at our joined hands as if the next part hurts too much to deliver while looking at me.
"He says you were always the one who kept looking at the window. "
The bond ruptures.
I don't mean for it to happen. I would have spared them if I could, but grief isn't obedient once it finds the deepest room.
It moves through every tether we've made, through blood and essence and whatever strange light Aven has dragged into our shared dark.
The library seems to inhale around it. Books shift on the shelves.
The candle gutters. Somewhere beyond the door, Soren wakes with a sharp flare of magic, and Ira moves like a weapon pulled from sleep already in motion.
Ira reaches the library first. His hair is rough from sleep, his chest bare, a knife in one hand and murder already written into the set of his shoulders.
He stops just inside the doorway because there's nothing to strike.
His gaze moves over Aven on his knees, my hands locked around his, the blood on the linen, the empty corner, and the space at my sides where the bond is still screaming.
The knife lowers before his hand does. He understands enough to know violence has arrived too late.
Soren comes behind him in a thin sweater that's slipped off one shoulder, his red hair flattened on one side and wild on the other.
Green-white magic sparks around his fingers, then dies the moment he sees my face.
For once, he doesn't fill the room with sound.
He steps around Ira as if afraid sudden movement might shatter whatever's left of me, his eyes fixed on Aven because Aven is the one with the terrible task of making the invisible real.
Aven turns just enough to give them the shape of it. "Ellis is Cain's brother," he says, and his voice is so tired it barely clears the space between us. "Adaro sold him to the Church. He's dead. They bound him."
Soren's hand rises to his mouth, but he doesn't cover the sound quickly enough.
It escapes anyway, a small, raw thing that belongs to grief before pride can dress it.
Ira closes his eyes for one heartbeat. When he opens them, the weapon in him has changed direction.
He sets the knife on the nearest shelf with careful precision, then crosses to the chair and sits on the arm beside me.
His hand settles at the back of my neck as his thumb rests at the base of my skull, steady enough to remind my body that it still has edges.
Soren folds into my other side. There's no grace in it.
He lowers himself against me, one knee pressed into the cushion, one hand gripping my shirt at the ribs as if he can hold me in the room through sheer contact.
His forehead rests against my shoulder, and the first tear soaks through the fabric almost immediately.
He doesn't apologize for it. He doesn't pretend it's anything else.
Aven remains in front of me. He's the only one looking directly at the corner because he's the only one who can.
Blood has marked both of our hands now, smeared where my fingers close over his and his close over mine.
His body trembles with the strain of the connection, but he stays kneeling, still translating, still holding the place between the dead and the living while it cuts him open.