"We kill to survive. It is not the same as what he did to you—"
"Is it not?" She looked at him. "Tell me honestly. Even if I come with you right now, you will still be this. You will still be a mafioso."
He held her gaze. "Yes. I tried to walk away from it. But what belongs to me cannot be separated from me. I understand that now."
"Then I am sorry." She stepped back. "I cannot go with you. I do not know who you are anymore."
The floor came up to meet him before he heard it.
Ravi's boot connected with the side of his head and Jokull went down hard, the gun skidding across the floor away from his hand. Ravi stood over him, one hand pressed to the wound in his chest, his breathing controlled and measured in a way that should not have been possible.
He looked down at Jokull with something between contempt and what might, in different circumstances, have been respect.
"You have killed people," he said, his voice unhurried despite everything. "So have I. The difference is I never act without certainty." He crouched down to Jokull's level. "If you want to kill someone in this world, a chest shot leaves variables. A headshot does not." He straightened slowly. "Consider that your welcome to the life you chose.Welcome to the dark world".
He looked at her again when he thought she was not paying attention.
Her eyes were red and swollen, the tissue doing very little against the steady work of everything she was holding. He reached into his pocket, pulled a white handkerchief out and held it toward her without a word.
She looked at his hand. Then at his face. Then she took it slowly.
"Thank you, sir."
"There is no need for that." He settled back, one hand still pressed lightly against his chest where the bullet had found him. "We are married now. You can call me Ravi."
She looked at the tissue in her hands. "Sure."
A moment passed between them, not uncomfortable exactly, just honest in the way that moments between people who have stopped pretending tend to be.
"Why did you not go with him?" he asked.
She was quiet for long enough that he thought she might not answer. Then, "I do not know why I did that. I just." She stopped. Started again. "I got angry when he shot you."
"Performing your duties as a wife already?"
"Spare me that " The words came out flat and immediate.
He said nothing.
She looked at the window across the room and when she spoke again it came out slowly, like something being unfolded carefully after being kept in a very small space for a very long time.
"He chose violence over what we had. He stood there and told me he wanted to save me and then he pulled a trigger like saving me and shooting someone in front of me were the same thing." She pressed the tissue against her eye. "I still do not know if I love him. That is the thing I could never quite hold onto in our relationship. He always felt like he had more faces than the one he was showing me. I asked him so many times if there was something I needed to know about him and he always said he was just a normal person trying to build something new." She exhaled slowly. "I will not pretend that him coming back to this world to find me means nothing. It means something. It means a great deal and I appreciate. But the look on his face today when he held that gun." She shook her head. "That was not someone fighting for me. That was someone who has fallen in love with this world and nothing, not even whatever he feels for me, is going to pull him back out of it."
She turned the handkerchief over in her hands.
"If he had told me from the beginning that he had history like this I would not have left. I would have stayed. I would have loved him anyway. That is what makes it worse." She looked up suddenly, as if she had only just remembered where she was and who she was talking to. "I do not know why I am telling you any of this. I hate you too."
Ravi looked at her. "I have killed far more people than he has."
"I know that," she said. "But you were never pretending to be something else. You were exactly what you showed me from the beginning. Terrible and real." She almost laughed, a small broken sound. "He covered everything behind a school president title and a smile and a personality that made me feel like the world was smaller and safer than it actually is."
"He could have just told me." The words came out quieter now, carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who has arrived at the centre of their own grief and found it smaller and sadder than the anger that surrounded it. "That is all he had to do. Just tell me."
A silence settled.
Then she looked at him with the expression of someone who has just caught themselves doing something they did not plan to do. "Why are you even listening to me?"
He looked back at her for a moment.
"You look beautiful when you cry, Aine," he said simply.
"Stop pacing," Hayland said, crossing the room and steering him firmly toward the chair. "You need to rest. The wound has not closed properly."
Ravi sat because his body agreed even if the rest of him did not. "I do not feel well."
"You were shot. That is generally the reason."
"It is not the bullet."
Hayland looked at him and waited.
Ravi was quiet for a moment, his eyes on the floor, his hands loose between his knees. When he spoke it came out with the same flatness he applied to everything, as though he were reporting an anomaly in a system he could not yet locate.
"Ever since I first saw her I have been obsessed. I was prepared to do anything to anyone to have her. I hurt her deliberately. I calculated exactly how much pressure it would take to make her docile. To make her mine the way an object belongs to a room." He paused. "I knew what I was doing and I did it without difficulty."