"Ravi." Hayland appeared in the doorway, his voice carrying something careful in it. "Tesni is awake. She would like to see you."
Tesni was sitting up when Ravi entered, her face pale but her eyes alert and already searching the room behind him.
"Where is my sister?" she asked. "Your assistant told me I cannot see her."
"Hayland is a friend, not an assistant." Ravi settled into the chair beside her bed. "Aine has been shot. She is in the hospital receiving treatment."
Tesni went very still. "And who is there with her right now?"
Ravi said nothing.
"Who is sitting with her while you are here?"
"No one at the moment."
Before the words had fully left his mouth Tesni had pulled the drip from her arm and swung her legs off the bed. She was halfway to the door, limping and determined, before Ravi caught her.
"Let me go." She pushed against him, her voice fracturing at its edges. "She needs me right now. Let me go to her."
"She will be fine," Ravi said. "I promise you."
Tesni stopped pushing. She looked at him, and what moved across her face was not grief but something older and harder and more deliberate than grief.
"What do you even know." Her voice came out low and stripped of everything decorative. "You are a mafia. A killer. Does human life mean anything to you at all?" She did not wait for an answer. "Aine's life has been destroyed. Since the day you came into it she has not known a single moment of peace. Every time, every single time, she is caught inside some chaos that exists because of you. This is your fault. All of it. She is fighting for her life right now because of you."
She held his gaze without flinching.
"You are standing here telling me she will be fine. But would she not be more fine if you simply were not in her life? Would that not be the most genuinely caring thing you could do for her? To leave?"
Her legs gave out beneath her. She slid down the wall slowly, breathing hard, the drip mark still fresh on her arm, her body not yet strong enough to hold the weight of everything she was feeling.
floor.
He gathered her against his chest and held her there, one hand steady at her back, and when he spoke his voice had shed everything except what was true.
"I understand how you feel. My priority, just like Aine, is you. You are not fully recovered. You still have your surgery ahead of you." He held her a little closer. "Let us leave the rest to the doctors. I believe we will have your sister back. I need you to believe it too."
Tesni said nothing. But she did not pull away.
He carried her back to the bed and settled her gently against the pillows, then stepped into the corridor and called the nurse to come and check on her.
The surgery began at midnight.
Ravi and Hayland sat in the corridor outside and waited.
By six in the morning neither of them had slept.
Then Hayland's phone rang.
He listened for a moment, then lowered it and turned to Ravi. "Osmina has arranged a burial service for Jokull. Would you like to pay your respects?"
Ravi was quiet for a moment. "Yes. Definitely."
Osmina sat before the shirt and the bracelet arranged on the table, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on them with the particular stillness of a woman who has run out of tears and is simply present now inside the grief. Everyone around her was dressed in black. The air in the mansion was heavy and ceremonial and subdued.
The moment Ravi stepped through the entrance the entire gathering felt it. A tension moved through the room like a current, passing from person to person without a word being exchanged. Heads turned. Bodies shifted. Eyes followed him as he walked through the assembled mourners with the same unhurried certainty with which he did everything.
He reached the casket and placed his flowers down. He stood there for a moment with his head bowed, saying nothing, giving his brother what he had come to give.
he knew what his presence was doing to the room.
He straightened and turned to leave.
"Ravi."
Osmina's voice reached him before he cleared the gathering. He stopped.
Osmina rose from where she was sitting and moved toward him slowly, deliberately, the gathered mourners parting around her and following behind as though drawn by the current of what was coming.
She stopped in front of him.
"Why are you here?"
"To pay my respects to my brother," Ravi said.
Something hardened in her face. "Since when did you start calling Jokull your brother. You are glad he is gone. You came here because you wanted to see the result of what you did to him."
"I came here to pay my last respects," Ravi said, his voice level and without apology. "And I did not do anything to him. Jokull is no longer here because he chose to end his own life. That is the truth of it."
"How dare you stand in front of me and say that." Her voice rose, cracking at its edges. "Everyone in this room knows how furious you were when he shot Aine. Everyone knows what you are capable of. And you are standing here telling me whatever suits you."
"You killed him," she said. "You killed my son."
Ravi looked at her for a long moment. When he spoke his voice remained even but carried something beneath its surface that was neither cold nor cruel, simply final.
"His death was not caused by my hands. But if you want to speak about causes then look closer to home." He held her gaze. "You have a considerable share in what happened to him. Have you already forgotten your own confession?"
The gathering went very still.
Osmina's legs gave way beneath her. She dropped to the floor without a sound, the grief and the weight of his words and everything she had set in motion years ago arriving all at once in her body, and she could not hold it.
Ravi looked at her on the ground for one still moment.
Then he turned and walked away.