His legs gave way.
He went down onto the ground, his body finally refusing to hold the weight of it all upright any longer. And then he wept. Loud and unguarded and entirely undone, the way people weep when they have held something too long and too tightly and the hands finally give out.She was the only reason I was trying to leave all of this behind," he said from the ground, his voice breaking apart on every word. "My only drive. The only thing I was moving toward." He looked up at his brother. "You should just kill me, Ravi. Please. I am asking you. I am begging you for it. I am being tormented. Just do it already. Please."
Ravi stood over him.
Then, slowly, he lowered the gun.
Something had changed in his face. Something that had no clean name but lived in the territory between fury and devastation, between a brother and an enemy, between a man with every reason to pull the trigger and a man who could not.
"My precious thought me to value human lives I can't believe you didn't learn anything from her",he replied.
How do you even expect me to kill you?" Ravi's voice came out hard and scoured clean of everything soft. "You want me to waste my bullets on you? And even if I did, would it bring her back? Would it?" He leaned down, forcing Jokull to look at him. "Answer me. Do not be pathetic in front of me."
Jokull looked up at his brother from the ground. am sorry, Ravi." The words came out stripped of everything except what they were. "I am truly sorry. Please forgive me."
Ravi looked at him for a long moment. Something moved through his face that he did not try to name or hide.
Then Jokull rose.
"Thank you for forgiving me," he said quietly. "I think my purpose here is finished."
Ravi frowned. "Jokull—"
"Send my message to Aine." He spoke over him gently, without urgency, as though he had all the time in the world. "Tell her I have always loved her. That I will always love her. And that when I am reborn I will love her the right way. Not the wrong way."
He turned toward the barricade of the bridge.
"Jokull."
He was already moving. By the time Ravi's legs responded, by the time his hands reached out, Jokull had already climbed the barricade and stood at its edge, and he turned one last time and looked at his brother with a smile that was the saddest and most genuine expression he had ever worn.
Then he let himself fall.
"Jokull!"
Ravi's voice tore out of him and across the water and dissolved into the night. He reached the barricade and looked over and saw nothing but the raging river below, dark and fast and utterly indifferent, swallowing the place where his brother had been as though he had never existed at all.
Hours later the rescue team arrived and swept the water methodically, their torches cutting across the current in long deliberate arcs. Ravi stood at the barricade and watched them work in silence.
Eventually the officer approached him.
"Mr Ozanne." He held out a sea shirt and a bracelet. "This is all we recovered."
Ravi looked at them.
"It could be that he was drifted elsewhere," the officer continued carefully. "Our teams further downstream are reporting the same. Nothing recovered beyond what you see here."
"Where could he be?" Ravi asked. His voice was very quiet.
The officer paused, choosing his words. "The current in this river is exceptionally strong. Another river meets it just ahead, which increases the force significantly. There is a high probability that he was pulled into that convergence." He stopped. "And if that is the case, sir, then the likelihood is that he has been disintegrated by now."
Ravi looked down at the shirt and bracelet in the officer's hands for a long time.
Osmina swayed without warning.
The maid was at her side before she reached the ground, hands steadying her by the arms, guiding her back toward the sofa with practiced urgency.
"Ma'am, please, water," she said, pressing a glass into her hands.
Osmina drank. Slowly. Then she lowered the glass and sat very still, her eyes fixed on nothing, her breath coming in shallow and uneven intervals.
"Call Jokull for me," she said finally. "Please. I want to hear his voice." Her hands tightened around the glass. "Something does not feel right. Something is wrong with him, I can feel it."
The maid stepped away and tried the number. She tried it again. Then she returned, her face carefully arranged.
"Ma'am, his phone is not going through."
Osmina closed her eyes. The tears came without her summoning them, sliding down her face in silence, one after another, as though they had been waiting behind her eyes for exactly this moment.
"My heart is not sitting right," she whispered. "I pray Ravi does not lay a hand on him. I pray."
The maid stood beside her quietly for a moment. Then she spoke, gently but plainly.
"Ma'am, Mr Jokull went out to meet Ravi alone. Without a single weapon. And despite everything, he shot his wife." She paused. "I pray Ravi finds it in himself to forgive him."
A small voice broke through from the corner of the room.
"Mama." Cosmina sat with her teddy bear pressed against her chest, her eyes wide and wet, her chin trembling with the effort of holding herself together. "Brothers do not fight each other, do they? Brother Ravi would not hurt Jokull." She looked between the two women with the terrible hopefulness of a child who already suspects the answer but is not yet ready to receive it. "Would he?"
Nobody answered her.
Every guard at the entrance snapped to attention the moment Ravi appeared at the gate. Guns were raised. Fingers hovered. The air around him was so dense with something unnameable that not a single man could bring himself to pull the trigger. They simply watched him walk through the gate and into the compound as though the weapons in their hands were decorative.
Only Otz found the courage to step forward.
"What brings you here?"
"Where is Osmina," Ravi said. It was not a question.
"The safe room."
"I wish to see her."
Otz held his gaze for a moment. Then he turned and went to get her.