Jokull turned.
And then he laughed.
It started somewhere deep and rose quickly, spilling out of him in a way that had nothing of humour in it and everything of a man whose grip on something essential had just given way. It was loud and unhinged and indecent, bouncing off the rooftop and carrying down to the street below, wild enough and wrong enough that every armed man positioned around the building stopped what he was doing and looked up.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
The laughter went on a moment longer than anyone was comfortable with. Then it subsided, not into calm but into something quieter and more dangerous, a man standing at the edge of something vast and looking down into it without blinking.
Jokull turned to face his mother fully.
"You sure do love me," he said. His voice had changed completely, stripped of the laughter now, carrying something heavier beneath it. "And nothing you have told me tonight changes that. I genuinely respect it." He paused, and what moved across his face in that pause was not anger and not grief but both things occupying the same space at the same time. "But this was the wrong time to tell me. You understand that, don't you?"
Osmina said nothing.
"Because now," Jokull continued, slowly, as though laying each word down with great care, "I must carry two great guilts on my back for the rest of whatever comes next." He raised one finger. "The first. I just shot his wife." A second finger. "The second. My own mother betrayed him. For me. To protect me."
He let his hand fall.
"Everything about this is deeply decent in its own way, you know. The lengths that loving mothers will go to." He looked at her with eyes that had seen too much and felt too much in the space of a single conversation. "All loving mothers."
The rooftop held the silence between them.
Below, the guards returned to their positions one by one, the strange interlude of that unhinged laughter already folding itself into the night.
Jokull turned to the nearest guard and instructed him quietly, the way he gave all his most serious orders, without raising his voice. Within moments two men had taken Osmina by the arms and were moving her firmly toward the safe room.
"He will kill you!" Cosmina's voice tore through the hallway as the men dragged her away, high and desperate and breaking at the edges. "Ravi will not spare you, Jokull! He will not spare you!"
Jokull did not look back.
He walked out of the mansion and into the open night air, his hands loose at his sides, his pace unhurried. He stepped onto the road and crossed toward the bridge, the city quiet around him, and for a moment there was nothing but the sound of his own footsteps.
Then three bullets split the air directly above his head in rapid succession.
He dropped instinctively, every trained reflex in his body firing at once, and spun toward the sound. A motorbike had stopped at the far end of the bridge, its rider already dismounting, already moving toward him with a gun raised and a purpose that needed no announcement.
The helmet came off.
Ravi.
His eyes were red. Not the red of sleeplessness or cold air but the red of a man who had been crying with the kind of grief that does not ask permission and does not stop when you need it to. The gun was pressed forward, aimed directly at Jokull's head, and his hand was not shaking.
Jokull looked at him and smiled.
"Hey boo." His voice was light, almost warm. "What brings you out here tonight? No nose mask today?"
Ravi closed the remaining distance between them and pressed the barrel of the gun hard against Jokull's forehead. His teeth were clenched so tightly the words had to force their way through them.
"Why." It was not a question. It was something that had been building since the beach, since the sand, since the moment the air changed and she fell. "Why did you target Aine? Why her? Why?"
Jokull tilted his head slightly, the gun pressing harder against his skin with the movement, unbothered by it entirely.
"You are well aware that you were my target," he said. "If not for her you would be in the morgue right now. She made that choice, not me." A beat. His eyes glinted with something unconscionable. "Is she still fighting for her life by the way? Or has she made it to the morgue already?"
The smile stayed on his face.
"Jokull!!"
Ravi's voice broke open on the name, tearing out of him with a force that was no longer anger and no longer grief but something that lived beyond both, something that had no language and needed none.
"Why do you care?" Jokull said, his voice carrying that familiar lightness that had never quite reached his eyes. "We are mafia. We do not value human lives. That is the arrangement."
"But this is Aine," Ravi said. "My wife. Not an ordinary person."
"Ordinary or not, she is almost dead." Jokull tilted his head. "What makes her special? You bought her, remember. She was a commodity. That is all."
"I will blow your brain out this moment if you do not stop insulting her." The gun pressed harder. "I mean it."
"Then do it." Something shifted in Jokull's voice. The performance fell away, all of it, the smile, the lightness. making sure no one could see inside him. What remained underneath was raw and unguarded and exhausted beyond anything words could adequately hold. "Just do it. Blow it. There is so much going on inside my head right now that needs to be blown out anyway."
He laughed, but it was not the maniacal laughter from the rooftop. This was smaller and sadder and more honest.
"My mother just told me tonight that I am a bastard. That everything I believed about who I was and where I came from was a lie." He looked up at Ravi with eyes that had stopped performing entirely. "I spent all these years hating you. All of it, every single year, every act, every choice I made against you, built on nothing. On a misunderstanding. On a boy who felt forgotten and did not know how to survive that feeling except by turning it outward." His voice cracked at its edges. "And on top of all of that, I shot Aine."