"Yes." He stood and straightened his jacket with both hands. "I want to see him in the state I always knew he would end up in. And I want him to see, wherever he is, the version of me he never believed I would become."
Hayland nodded slowly. Then, after a pause, "Why are you marrying her?"
Ravi looked at him. "I am keeping her."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one I have." He picked up his phone from the table. "What is my current ranking?"
Hayland glanced at the board on his screen. "First. Still first."
Ravi looked at it for a moment.
"Good," he said.
"Ryan is still holding second place," Ravi said, his eyes on the screen. "And there is a new name sitting at third. Goes by JK."
Hayland looked up. "Do you know him?"
"No."
"What about your father's organisation? His gang?"
"Dissolved." Ravi set the phone down and stood. "Let us go."Aine looked up from across the room. "Where?"
"That is not your concern. Get dressed."
The mansion sat behind iron gates that opened without being touched, the kind of entrance that had been designed to remind visitors of exactly where they stood before they had even knocked. Every person moving through it wore black and the particular expression people wear when they are performing grief in front of others.
Aine stepped out of the car when he told her to.
Ravi came around and linked his arm through hers in a way that left no room for interpretation or distance, his posture arranged into something that announced her presence beside him as deliberately as a signature. He walked inside and moved through the rooms with the ease of someone who had grown up inside these walls and found them smaller than he remembered.
The body was received and carried away with ceremony.
An older woman appeared at Ravi's side with a warmth that seemed to belong to a different house entirely. "Ravi dear, will you dine with us before you leave? Your brother is back." She smiled. "And your sister has been desperate to see you."
Ravi looked at her for a moment. "Lead the way."
The dining room filled slowly. Aine sat beside him and kept her eyes on the table and the hands in her lap and the middle distance, all the places that were not his face. Then the doors opened again and men in white entered the room, arranging themselves with the quiet efficiency of people who answered to someone specific.
A figure came through behind them and sat down.
Aine turned.
The air left her body.
He was right there. Directly across from her, close enough that she could see every detail of his face, the face she had replayed from memory every night since the rain, the face she had been terrified she would never see again outside of her own mind.
Jokull.
Her hand moved to her stomach on its own. The tears came before she could catch them, pressing hot against the backs of her eyes as she gripped herself and breathed.
He looked at her and everything he did not say filled the space between them completely.
Then he raised one hand and the men behind him filed out of the room without a word.
He looked across the table. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"Take the mask off," he said. Quietly. Precisely. "You coward."
Ravi turned his head toward him with the unhurried patience of a man who had heard worse from people who were no longer in a position to say anything. "I will let that pass today." He turned and pressed his lips briefly to Aine's cheek, the nose mask still in place. "My wife is sitting beside me. I am in a generous mood."
The word landed across the table like something thrown.
Jokull went very still. "Wife."
"Yes."
His eyes moved to Aine. All the steadiness he wore fell away from them for just a moment and what sat underneath it was something far more honest and far more painful.
"Aine." His voice dropped. "Tell me. He forced you."
She looked at him across the table. She could not speak. She nodded once, the smallest motion, barely perceptible, but he was already watching for it and he caught it.
She swallowed and found her voice from somewhere. "Jokull." She was still trying to make sense of it, the room, the mansion, the black clothes, the woman who had greeted Ravi at the door. "What are you doing here?" The pieces were assembling themselves against her will. "If the man who died was your father then you and Ravi are—" She stopped.
"Yes," Jokull said.
The word sat in the room and nobody moved around it.
He turned his head slightly. "Cosmina. Please leave us."
The small figure who had been sitting quietly at the far end of the table slid off her chair immediately. "Yes, Brother Jokull."
The older woman rose with her. "I will go with her." She left without looking back.
The room contracted into the three of them.
Ravi looked between them slowly, something shifting behind his eyes that had not been there a moment ago. "You two know each other."
It was not a question.
The gun was in his hand before the sentence had finished landing.
Jokull looked across the table at the man wearing his father's name and his family's history and held the barrel level with his chest.
"I have been waiting a long time," he said quietly, "to find the person who took her."
"I am afraid the person you are looking for is now her husband," Ravi said, without moving.
Jokull shifted his eyes to Aine. Everything in his expression changed when he looked at her. "Come here. You are safe. Come to me."
"Put the gun down first." Her voice was steady but her eyes were not. "Jokull. This is not who you are."
"Just come. This is not the first time I have held one of these."
She did not move.
Ravi's hand closed around her arm.
Something snapped.
Jokull pulled the trigger.
The shot crossed the table and found its mark and Ravi went down with a sound that filled the entire room, his body hitting the floor with the weight of someone who had not seen it coming despite knowing it was always a possibility.
Aine was on her feet. "Jokull, why did you do that?"
"Come with me. Now. We are leaving."
He reached for her arm and she pulled it away.
"Let go of me."
He stopped. "What is wrong?"
She looked at him, really looked at him, in a way she had not allowed herself to since he sat down across from her, and what she found in his face was both him and not him simultaneously.
"I did not fall in love with this," she said. Her voice was not raised. It was worse than raised. It was precise. "I did not fall in love with a gun and a trigger and a man who shoots first and justifies it after. You know my fears. You know everything about me. And you stood there and pulled that trigger like it was nothing." She shook her head. "What he did was wrong. I am not standing here defending him. But you were not supposed to do that."
"In this world you do not negotiate," Jokull said, the words coming out harder than he intended. "If someone moves against you, you move first. That is survival."
"You are a mafioso." She said it slowly, the shape of it still foreign in her mouth. "You have killed people."
"I can explain everything—"
"Keep your explanation." The words came out quiet and final. "I trusted you. I trusted you with everything I have and you have been someone entirely different this entire time."
"Aine." He stepped toward her and when he spoke again the hardness was gone. "Look at me. He hurt you. You have bandages on your head still. I am not going to stand there and do nothing. I will never do nothing when it comes to you. Let me take you home. I will keep you safe, I swear it."
"There is no difference between the two of you," she said. "You both kill."