"Ravi, go back. Do not come closer."
He was already crossing the sand toward her, his eyes moving between her face and Tesni's still form on the ground. "Aine, what is wrong with Tesni?"
"Do not come closer." She threw her hand out. "Go away. Tesni is in this condition because of you. Go back, Ravi. Please."
"Aine, calm down. Talk to me."
Her heart was beating wrong. Too fast and too loud, crowding out every other sound until the beach, the waves, Ravi's voice, all of it fell away and what remained were the images she had spent years learning to outrun. Her mother. Her mother's face. The particular quality of silence that follows something that cannot be undone. They came one after another, overlapping and relentless, and the ground beneath her feet began to tilt.
She was dizzy. The world was sliding.
Then something moved in the bushes to her left.
Her body understood before her mind did. Every sharpened sense she possessed swung toward the sound and locked onto it and she knew, in the deepest part of herself, what it meant. She lowered Tesni gently to the sand.
And she ran.
He saw her coming toward him and for one suspended moment he thought she was running to him.
Then her hand found his arm and pulled, sharp and decisive, dragging him sideways out of the space he had been standing in and replacing herself in it.
The bullet came before he could make sense of what she had done.
He heard it. He felt the air change. And then she was falling and he was already moving, catching her before the sand could, going down onto his knees with her weight in his arms, her face turned up toward the sky.
"Aine."
She did not answer.
"Aine."
He raised his eyes toward the treeline. A figure rose slowly from the undergrowth, unhurried, as though time belonged to him. The face that emerged was one Ravi knew better than almost any face in the world.
He held it in his gaze for one long, burning moment.
Then he looked back down at Aine.
The pain in his eyes was the kind that does not have a name and does not ask for one.
The theatre doors swung shut behind the gurney and Ravi's hand fell away from the frame where it had been pressed, white knuckled and desperate, as though he could hold the doors open through sheer will alone.
"Please." His voice had been stripped of everything. "Do not lose her. Do not lose her quickly, Aine. I need you to fight."
The doctor turned briefly without stopping. "We will do everything we possibly can."
"Aine." He said it to the closed doors, to the space she had just been taken through. "I need you. Please do not go."
Then the doctors were between him and the doors and he was being guided back, gently but firmly, and there was nothing left for him to hold onto.
Hayland stood back and watched.
Ravi was at the theatre doors, completely still now, which was somehow worse than if he had been moving. His face had gone a deep, furious red, the colour of something burning from the inside. His hands were shaking at his sides. His eyes were fixed on the doors with an expression that Hayland had no word for, something that lived in the space where grief and rage had collapsed into each other and become indistinguishable.
A tear tracked down his face. Then another.
"Prepare my bike," Ravi said.
His voice was quiet. That was the most frightening thing about it.
Hayland stepped forward carefully. "Ravi. Can you ride in this condition?"
Ravi turned and looked at him, and whatever Hayland saw in his eyes settled the question of whether to argue.
"Just get me my bike." Each word came out measured and absolute. "Damn it."
Hayland held his gaze for one more moment. Then he nodded.
"Sure."
"Are all the guards and hitmen in their positions?" Otz asked.
"Yes sir," his subordinate answered.
Osmina descended the stairs and stopped. The entire ground floor of the house had been flooded with armed men, positioned at every entrance, every window, every shadow that the building offered. She turned to Otz.
"What is going on here?"
"Mrs Ozanne, we may be under attack at any moment. Please get to the safe room with the little girl."
"What about Jokull?"
Otz's expression shifted almost imperceptibly. "He has refused to come down," he said, and pointed upward.
Osmina looked up. Then she climbed.
The roof offered the longest view in the neighbourhood. The building stood taller than everything around it and from up here you could see almost the entire stretch of the coast, the beach below, the dark water beyond it, the world laid out in all its indifference. Jokull stood at the edge of it with his back to her, his eyes fixed on the distance, still and silent as though he had been there for hours.
Perhaps he had.
"Dear," Osmina said carefully, "we are under attack. Please come with me to the safe room."
Jokull did not turn. "Why are you doing this?"
The question landed quietly, but it was not a small question. It carried the weight of everything that had gone unasked between them for a very long time.
Osmina was still for a moment. Then she answered him plainly, without performance, without looking away.
"Because I love you. So much that I would lay my life down for you without a second thought."
Jokull was quiet. Then he turned and looked at her, and his eyes moved across her face with the slow, searching quality of someone looking for something they are not entirely sure they want to find.
"Have you done anything large enough," he said, "to deserve my love in return?"
"I never planned on telling you this," Osmina said. "But if I say love, then I truly do."
She stopped. Drew a breath. And then she said the thing she had been carrying for decades, quietly, the way one sets down something very heavy after a very long walk.
"You are not the child of Ozanne. My late husband."
Jokull turned slowly and faced her.
"Yes," she said, holding his gaze without flinching. "You heard exactly what I said. You are not Ozanne's son. You are the son of my love. The man I still cherish to this day." She paused. "It is a long story. But you deserve to hear it."