Chapter 21 – Finn - I Don’t Pray
I bail on the neuro floor because the air in that hallway feels like a glove over my face. Too many whispers, too many eyes, too much fluorescent mercy. I don’t wait for the elevator. I take the stairs. I’m not a fucking passenger while strangers decide how deep they’re going to cut my father.
Door bangs, stairwell echoes, and there’s concrete under my shoes.
Two flights down to shake the ghosts off, two flights up because I need sky.
I shoulder through the last crash bar onto the top deck of the parking structure.
Wind hits me hard enough to sting. The town spreads out, flat roofs, stitched streets, that thin zipper of blue trying to pry the morning open.
I pat my jacket for the cigarettes I promised I don’t carry anymore. Muscle memory’s an asshole. I could light one but I refuse to give in to my desire. Huh, ironic.
Downstairs, they’re prepping my father for the saw and the suction and all the instruments they swear aren’t medieval.
I try not to picture it. I try not to picture him small.
I don’t pray. Fluorescents lie. Concrete tells the truth.
I put my hands on the low wall and let the grit bite my palms until the itch under my skin has a shape.
The phone buzzes.
Unknown: I know what you did.
Well. Here we are. I’ve been receiving these texts for a while now but today, my focus narrows and two frames slide into place in my head without me asking for them.
Frame one: the neat sin. The one I engineered.
Fabricated threads, believable enough to leave fingerprints.
Flirty. Stupid. Exactly the kind of carelessness a man like Julian would think he deserved to get away with.
I paid for that. I signed off on the cadence, the typos, the timestamps.
A perfect cut on soft meat. That doesn’t keep me up at night. I don’t regret solutions that fit.
Frame two: the basement. Wrong man, wrong night, wrong fucking angle. Not a plan. Not a show. Concrete is a bastard; it gives nothing back. That small, final sound a skull makes when it learns physics—no one writes a song about that. You feel it in your teeth. You don’t forget.
I had brought him downstairs because I wanted answers, not blood.
He came willingly enough, mouth full of names and a grin he didn’t earn, like a man who believed he could sell me my own past at a markup.
The basement smelled like damp paint and cold concrete.
The bulb overhead buzzed and stuttered the way cheap lights confess.
He had that look some men wear when they think fear is a coat that only fits other people.
He started with the official line, heart attack, and I told him my mother didn’t have a cardiac history, that her last EKGs were cleaner than a sermon and her resting heart rate could make a marathoner flinch.
“So try again,” I said. He did what liars do: he changed subjects and pretended it was an answer.
I pressed. I asked names, places, who paid who to stand where and say what. He gave me air wrapped in syllables. I gave him the wall.
It wasn’t elegant, the kind of violence with choreography or a point.
My fist met his ribs, his shoulder met the concrete, his breath broke into pieces and skittered across the floor like dropped coins.
He laughed once, wet and nervous, then tried to turn it into swagger.
“You don’t want this truth,” he said. “You won’t like where it points. ”
“I don’t care if it points at me,” I told him. “Say the name.”
He spat red in the circle of light and said nothing worth keeping. I put him upright and asked again. He sagged, then stiffened, like a man choosing between pride and survival and picking the one that would hurt me more.
I hit him again, open hand this time, the sound thunderous and stupid in the low room.
He grinned with a split lip and said a first name that didn’t matter, then a street that never met the map, then a time that contradicted the report I’d memorized until the paper tore.
I could feel the lie the way you feel a splinter when you press your thumb against it—small, exact, insisting.
He lunged for the steps like a rabbit trying a new hole. Reflex is faster than thought; I shoved him back, just to stop him, just to reset the board. His heel skated on dust, his movements went unnatural, and the back of his skull found the edge of the lowest stair.
The sound was small. Not cinematic. Not even dramatic.
Just a dull, private thud you feel more than hear, like a door closing two rooms away.
His eyes lost focus in a way I recognized and hated.
He blinked at me, once, twice, as if he could make the moment pick a different ending. Then his body chose the floor.
I knelt. I said his name, one of the names he’d offered, anyway, and it didn’t come back.
I pressed two fingers to his neck and felt the pulse stutter, then argue, then fade like a bad radio station losing the hill.
“Don’t,” I said to him, to the concrete, to the universe that delights in timing, “not yet.” It wasn’t a prayer.
I don’t do those. It was a demand I wasn’t allowed to make.
He didn’t give me a name. He didn’t give me anything. He took the one thing he had left—the truth—and carried it out of reach.
I sat there for a long minute with my hands open and empty, breathing through the metal taste in my mouth, the buzz of the bulb, the way the basement made every choice feel like it would echo forever.
I wasn’t a killer. That sentence arrived by itself, unhelpful and earnest, like a volunteer with the wrong flyer.
It didn’t change the floor. It didn’t change the air.
It didn’t change the fact that a man who might have known why my mother’s heart “stopped” when it had no good reason to had just left me with more silence.
We hid it well. That’s the part no one wants to hear.
Not because it’s clever. There was nothing clever about it.
But it worked. No diagrams, no blueprints, no alibi rehearsals.
Just a decision with exact corners, the kind you don’t put down once you pick it up.
The world didn’t check on him. Not like anyone was going to miss him.
Men who sell lies for a living don’t have attendance taken.
When it was done and when the room remembered how to be a room and not a verdict, I washed my hands until the skin tightened and went upstairs and stared at my reflection until the shape of my face felt like a rumor.
I slept two hours and woke up with the same sentence in my mouth: I didn’t mean to kill him.
It rattled around like a bright orange life jacket—keeps your head up, tells the world you’re drowning.
I put it away and went back to hunting, because that’s what I had left: the work, the ache, the promise that I would still find the name, even if I had to pull apart the city brick by brick to get it.
Then I filed the memory where it lived, behind a glass labeled DO NOT TOUCH, and touched it anyway every time the night got quiet enough to hear it breathe.
Wrong number. Cowardice.
Delete.
Get in line. Cute. Useless.
Delete.
Who is this. Bait they want me to bite.
Delete.
I look up. Cameras in smoked bubbles above me blink red. Security cart hums on the level below. Wind drags at my collar. I forward the number to the one person who makes other people’s secrets beg.
Me → Eric: Trace this. Now. Priority one.
Me → Eric: FORWARDED: “I know what you did.”
His reply lands so fast it feels like he was already watching.
Eric: On it.
Eric: Separate thread: movement on your mom’s case. Name is Waren. Last seen at your hospital… last night, and again this morning. Neuro floor.
Waren. New label. Old problem. The sound of the name tastes like rust. My mother’s death is the only file I keep open even when I’m sleeping.
Heart attack, they said. Like hell. No history.
No warning. Just a neat box to bury her in and a shrug.
I’ve been prying that box open with my nails for years.
She had been getting sick for no reason. Doctors had no idea why she was feeling the way she was feeling. She started getting exhausted quicker and stopped doing all the things that brought her joy. Until one day, on a run with me, she dropped.
Me: Where exactly?
Eric: Near the family lounge. Pulling stills now. Thirty seconds.
This hospital isn’t big enough for all of this and yet… look at that, everyone found a seat.
I lean back against the low wall and let the wind take some of the heat out of me.
Everything hurts. My father is somewhere under a stadium light and a stranger’s steady hands.
I refuse to stand in a waiting room performing patience for a clock.
I’ll wait here. Concrete at least tells me what it is.
My phone buzzes.
Eric: Trace is bouncing—MVNO nest. I’ll peel it.
Eric: Stills incoming. First one’s hallway cam is grainy. That him?
I open the image and look at it. A desaturated corridor, timestamped. Mid-forties. Hair cut like he did it himself. Scar splitting the left eyebrow hairline. Pitted cheek. Cheap jacket that thinks it’s tough. Hands in pockets the way men do. Eyes not on the camera. Eyes on exits.
Me → Eric: That’s him. Keep eyes on. No engagement. Not yet.
Another buzz.
Eric: Copy. More stills in 10… 9…
I scrub a hand over my face.
Second image arrives. Closer angle.
Waren isn’t alone anymore. Eleanor, pearls, posture, that practiced calm she wears like a uniform, is in frame, chin up the way she makes it when she refuses to give ground.
The camera sees what she thinks it hides: the tremor in her hand.
She’s talking. Waren’s smiling, the greasy kind that doesn’t touch his eyes.
A third still lands before I can breathe. Wider shot. And there, turning in, close enough to see the set of her mouth…
Ariane.
My heart drops. That’s a new trick. She’s between them, angled like she’s both shielding and on the verge of shoving someone through a wall if she has to.
Chin tipped. Shoulders loaded. Her attention pinned to Waren’s mouth like she’s measuring the distance to break his teeth if he says the wrong thing.
Good. I want him to say the wrong thing. I want to be there when he learns it.
“What the fuck,” I say to the photo.
I can’t stop looking at her. She looks like she shouldn’t be anywhere near this, near men like Waren, standing in the crosshairs of anything I’m about to set in motion.
My phone vibrates in my hand. I almost throw it because my muscles want to hit something that hits back.
Eric: One more still—phone-cam, not the hospital feed. Someone close. Sending.
The image pops. Crisp. Someone stood within arm’s reach to take it.
Waren has his hand braced on the wall near Eleanor’s shoulder like he owns the square foot of air she needs to breathe.
Eleanor’s smile is the kind she uses when she’s buying time.
Ariane is turned just enough that I can see the line her jaw makes when she tries not to be afraid.
Waren’s eyes are wrong. There’s heat in them that doesn’t belong on this floor.
My grip tightens until the phone creaks. For a second, the old part of me, the one built for breaking, stands up and says I need to go now.
Me → Eric: Track him. If Waren leaves neuro, notify me first. If he talks to anyone else, I want faces.
Eric: Already on it. About that unknown number—still chasing. Spoofed through three layers. Might be unrelated, might be bait. Don’t spook.
Me: I’m spooked when I say I’m spooked. Keep digging.
Wind pushes against my chest. Somewhere below, a nurse laughs in a way that sounds like she needs to. I look at the photo again. Who is this guy?
I slide the phone into my pocket because if I keep it in my hand, I’ll start dialing people I can’t afford to warn.
I look at the door back into the stairwell.
I could go down there and put my body between Waren and everything he’s looking at.
I could walk into that corridor and make a very public problem out of a very private man.
There’s a small part of me that wants the scene, wants the cameras, wants the excuse.
I shove that part into a corner. The work isn’t noise. The work is precision.
I push off the wall.
My father is under a light. My phone has a number with teeth I haven’t seen yet. A man named Waren just smiled at my family in a hospital corridor. Ariane’s mouth is set the way it gets when she’s bracing to hold something heavy and invisible.
What the fuck is this man doing here.
I have a pretty good idea I’m going to find out.
I head for the door, hand on cold metal, and descend.