A small part of Julian knew where he was. He understood that he was in one of the guest rooms, that his mother came and went, that there was a doctor. But that knowledge was a flicker in the dark. He didn’t know why he was there or what was going on, didn’t know the day or the month or the year. Julian barely knew his own name.
He was scattered.
Afraid.
The bed was too small, a jumble of hot sheets that twisted around his legs and made him feel trapped. That was bad, claustrophobic. He kicked off the sheets, but kept his eyes closed so that he saw red through his lids, red and heat and smears of black. He waited for some kind of pattern, the coolness of reason.
But there was no reason.
The blackness moved, and in the red were flashes of bright, sharp metal. Julian rolled onto his side. His hands hurt and something smelled, so, he focused on the black. The black was safe, and the black was cool. Beyond it was heat, and beyond that was something bad.
Julian squeezed into a ball.
The black made an island, and if he stayed on the island nothing could touch him. That was another thing he knew, the island he’d made in his mind. He could go there when things got rough or frightening or hard. The island was safe, and the island was his. Beyond the island was…
He shied from the thought of it, looked for something else; but there were strange voices in the hall.
And that was scary, too.
Voices.
Strangers.
Julian thought he might fade, but the door creaked, and when he opened his eyes, he saw feet on the floor and legs that rose. He saw his mother and a woman he did not know. And there was a man, but the man made no sense. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing your own face twisted.
Julian blinked and darkness rose up. The man said something, but Julian didn’t want to see anyone. He wanted to be alone in the black, so he closed his eyes, and tried to break a bridge with his mind.
He knew how to do that, break bridges, float away.
Somebody touched his arm, and when he opened his eyes he saw the face that was his, but not. There was comfort there, and warmth, a reason to not feel so lonesome. But the bridge was already breaking. Julian heard his name, but it had no weight to settle. It touched him once and was gone.
Julian wanted it back, the touch of this voice. Some part of him understood what was happening, and that part wanted the man with the familiar face to understand why he was on the island, that something had happened. He had the wild, insane thought that the man with the face could make everything better.
So, Julian waited for the man to kneel, and when he was close, Julian said the horrible thing; he screamed as the bridge twisted and cracked and fell.
But the man was fading.
The island was an island. The red was gone, and there was only dark. But Julian, finally, understood.
Michael…
His voice echoed.
He was alone in the black.
Michael rocked back on his heels, then stood. His brother’s eyes were closed now, but what Michael had seen of them hinted at insanity. They’d been dilated, shot with red and the kind of wild, raw panic he’d not seen since the worst moments of childhood.
“What did he say to you?”
That was Jessup Falls. He stood in the door, an armed guard in the hall behind him. The guard was like the ones at the gate, competent but detached. Professional. Michael gave Falls a single glance, and then shook his head. There’d been a second of awareness when Michael took Julian’s shoulders, one instant of clarity and recognition as they leaned close. He’d whispered something so quietly only Michael could hear. The madness had stilled-understanding between brothers-then, somebody pulled the drain and Julian was gone.
“I’m going to have to ask again.” Falls started to cross the room, but Abigail stopped him with a hand.
“Please,” she said. “He’s not spoken for three days. Tell us what he said.”
“It was nothing,” Michael lied. “Something from childhood. Gibberish.” He squatted again and lifted one of his brother’s arms and then the other. Julian remained unresponsive, even as Michael pulled up his sleeves, checked the skin for needle tracks.
“There’s no sign of intravenous drug use.” The doctor pointed. “I checked between his toes, the backs of his legs. All the usual places.”
Michael rose. “May I see the other room?”
Dr. Cloverdale shot a glance at Abigail, who nodded. They’d moved Julian out of the bloodstained room, but the walls had yet to be cleaned. Together, they left Julian’s room and crossed the hall. The guard stepped back to make room.
“You can see why I hesitated.” Abigail stopped in the door, as if unwilling to commit.
Michael studied the room. “When did you move him?”
“Just this morning.”
“And this started three days ago?”
Abigail walked him through it again: Julian’s absence, how she found him in the garage and how he beat his hands bloody. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
Michael touched a dark crescent of dried blood, put a palm flat on one of the drawn doors. “Something smaller, maybe. A long time ago.” He pictured Julian in the boiler room at Iron House, the glazed eyes and bloody knuckles. He touched the second door. It, too, was scratched through to plaster. “If things got bad, Julian went deep. Basements, caves. If he couldn’t get deep enough in the world, he went deep in his mind. It happened a lot when we were young. If something bad happened, he checked out. Minutes. A few hours. Never this long.”
“What about the doors?” Abigail gestured at the drawings.
“An old man told him once that there were magic doors hidden in the walls. Doors to better places, a different life. Tap them right and they open up. All Julian had to do was find them.”
“His poor hands,” Elena said.
Michael stopped by the bed. The sheets had been stripped. “Something bad happened three days ago.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Falls said.
“I’m sure.”
“It’s been twenty-three years. He’s not the boy he was. You don’t know him anymore. You can’t.”
Michael cataloged the distrust in Jessup Falls’s face, the wrinkled skin, and folds of flesh at the corners of his eyes. The man was tense in his bones, and Michael bridled at the doubt. He looked at the blood-smeared walls, and he felt anger spark in the normally frozen place behind his eyes. Julian was his brother, and they’d allowed him to come to this.
Them.
Not Michael.
The old protectiveness rose as if it had never slept. Twenty-three years of suppressed worry, fear and doubt boiled into anger so immediate and hot that part of Michael knew he was off the rails. But he didn’t care. He pushed close to Falls and to Abigail Vane. He ignored the guard in the hall, the blunt, square-faced man who rose up on his toes and slipped one hand under his coat to touch the weapon there. “Do you have any idea what my brother endured as a child? The torment and abuse? The callousness and unconcern of people paid to care for his most basic needs?”
“No, I-”
“That’s right.” His gaze landed on Abigail Vane. “You don’t. None of you. Not how he hurt or how often he broke. You don’t know what it took to pick him up day after day, to put him back on his feet, to hold him together. You weren’t there and you can’t imagine. He was beaten, abused, ignored…”
Michael saw red as a day from childhood flashed into his mind with such clarity it was physical. Julian was eight and had been missing for an hour when Michael finally found him in the same bathroom where Hennessey would later die with a rusted blade in his neck. It was the screaming that led him there. They had Julian naked on the cold, tile floor, one boy on each arm and leg. Julian was still wet from the shower, thrashing, begging. Hennessey had a knife against Julian’s hairless prick, laughing as he threatened to cut it off.
I would like some beanie weenies…
No! Please!
Say it motherfucker.
“Julian doesn’t like to talk about his childhood.” Abigail put herself in front of Michael.
“That’s because nightmares are personal.”
“We can’t possibly understand what you boys went through at that terrible place, but we’ve tried.” Abigail looked down, sad. “This has been so hard.”
“Don’t talk to me about hard, and don’t question me on the past or on my brother. You may think you understand, but you can’t. No one can.”
Michael felt the stillness in the room, the way Elena stared at him. She’d never seen him raise his voice, never seen him angry.
“No one meant any disrespect,” Abigail said. “We understand your connection to Julian. We welcome it. Please, don’t be angry.”
Yet. Michael was. He was angry at the world, and he was angry with himself. Stepping into the hall, he pointed at the guard. “You. What’s your name?”
“Richard Gale.”
“Are you any good with that?” Michael nodded at the weapon on Gale’s belt.
“Michael, what are you doing?”
Abigail came out behind him, worried. She caught his arm, and Michael pulled it free. He studied Richard Gale and liked what he saw. Assurance that bordered on eagerness. An utter lack of fear or doubt as he sized Michael up. “Try me,” he said.
And that moment told Michael everything he needed to know. He took Elena’s hand, and turned. “We’re leaving.” He led her down the long hall and onto the sweeping staircase. Behind them, Abigail followed, Jessup Falls two steps behind the hem of her skirt.
“Michael, please…”
He was resolute, but she caught him at the front door. “Why are you leaving?”
“I came to make sure my brother was safe. He’s safe.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve counted six guards since I got here. There’s probably more, all of them well armed and professional. The property is gated and walled. Video surveillance. Electronic countermeasures.” Michael shook his head. “Julian doesn’t need me.”
“But he does. You can’t just show up and then leave. He needs you. I need you.”
Michael stared out beyond the far gate. Jimmy was out there, coming. Elena’s hand felt warm and small when he squeezed it. “Other people need me, too,” he said.
That thought burned in Michael’s mind, and in Elena’s, too. She squeezed his hand in return, and he felt her relief in the way she molded against him. He’d done what he needed to do. Julian was safe. Now, they could make a life, build a family. “We have to go,” he said.
But Abigail was not finished. “You said he’s safe.”
“He is.”
“From what?”
Their gazes locked, and she was so desperate to know that Michael almost told her the truth. Jimmy. Stevan. The target painted on his back. But what purpose would such disclosure serve? “I have enemies.” He kept it simple. “People I thought might choose to hurt me through Julian.”
“What kind of enemies?” Falls forced himself into the conversation.
“People that don’t want to hurt Julian badly enough to risk security like this.” Michael was confident. Julian was bait, nothing more. “The risk leaves when I do.”
“That’s not good enough,” Falls said. “What risks? What threats? If there’s a danger out there, I need to know what it is. I want specifics: names, timing, all of it.”
But Michael was confident. Stevan had used Julian to flush Michael into the open. “Julian’s in no danger. Not here. Not with this security.”
“How did you even find us?” Falls demanded. “Adoption records are sealed. Julian’s father is a United States senator.”
Michael gave him a second, then said, “I’ve known for a long time how to find my brother.”
“How?”
A shrug. “I have resources.”
“That give you access to private information on a senator and his family? What kind of resources?”
What could Michael say? How could he explain that he knew Julian’s GPA from high school, that he had copies of their tax returns, photographs of the senator with two different prostitutes. Michael remembered his seventeenth birthday. Early in the morning, the sky outside still black. The old man had come to Michael’s room with a thick folder in his hand.
A man should know his family. He’d put the file on Michael’s bed, offered a sad, knowing smile. Happy birthday, Michael.
It was a dark gift, but extensive. Michael later learned that the old man had spent almost five hundred thousand dollars on private investigators and corrupt officials. The old man did nothing in a small way.
So, yes.
Michael knew the senator and his family. He squeezed Elena’s hand. “We’re leaving now. It’s better for us, better for Julian.”
“But you saw him!” Abigail was desperate. “You can’t just leave.”
“I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why did you?”
She looked desperate, and Michael answered the question in his mind: Because I had to see the security for myself; because I had to know he was protected.
“He’s your brother, Michael. Please.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What kind of danger?” Falls demanded. “What kind of threat?”
“Nothing you can’t handle.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’ll have to do.”
Michael aimed for the far gate and started walking. Abigail took a dozen running steps and cut him off a final time. “Damn it, Michael.” She flattened her palm on his chest, and then hesitated. She threw a glance at Falls, the giant house. “Nothing is ever as it seems. Understand? Nothing. I need you to reconsider.”
“Why?”
Elena pulled on Michael’s hand, and even he was thinking of the places they could go. Europe. South America.
Large cities where they could disappear.
Long stretches of lonely beach.
“The guard in whom you found such comfort.” Her words were clipped. “Richard Gale. In the hall outside Julian’s room.”
“What about him?” Michael asked.
“He’s not just there to keep people out.”
“Are you saying Julian is a prisoner?”
Michael felt Elena stiffen beside him. Her fingers tightened in a quiet, insistent squeeze, and he thought of what his brother had said in his moment of clarity. Then he considered the clarity, itself-the cleanness of it, the sharp, bright edges surrounded by madness. He allowed his gaze to drift down and left as he studied the long, narrow lake, the things he saw on its shores. When he looked back, Abigail was imploring with her eyes.
“I’m saying it’s complicated, and you should stay.”
She stood taller, one hand on his arm.
“I’m begging you.”
There was a time, once, when Michael could walk away from people who slowed him down. It was the most basic rule of life on the street: survival first. It was the first thing he learned after stepping off the bus in New York: people will lie, and people will kill. That truth was wound so tightly in his core it was part of him; but that was changing. Looking at Elena, he felt the cable loosen in his chest.
“Are you okay?” They were back in the car, following Jessup Falls to the guesthouse.
“We shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s just a day. Just to make sure.”
She stared at a far, gray line in the sky. “Clouds are piling up.”
“He’s my brother.”
“And what am I?”
Michael took her hand. She was angry, and he understood. “Look at me, baby.”
“No.”
“Look at me.” She looked, and Michael said, “You’re everything else, you understand? You’re my life.”
At the guest house, Falls waited for them to climb from the car, then rolled down his window. Like Elena, he was unhappy. “It’s unlocked,” he said. “There’s everything you need. Call the house if something comes up.”
“All right.” Michael stayed near the car. Elena went onto the porch and sat.
“You won’t find the gun in your car,” Falls said.
“I noticed.”
“I’ll give it back to you when you leave.”
“Do I need to count the money?” Michael dropped his duffel bag on the gravel, and watched Falls stare for long seconds before looking up.
“There’re no thieves here, young man. And no fools, either.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Falls thought for a second, then said, “I may just be hired help, but Julian’s like a son to me. I watched him grow up. I helped raise him, and have a warm place in my heart for his mother. There’s not much I won’t do for him.”
“Your point?”
“My point is I’m not as forgiving as Mrs. Vane. It’s not in my nature and not in my job description. Point is you need to talk to me. There’re things I need to know and I plan to know them. You think on that. I’ll expect you to have a different attitude come morning.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“In the meantime.” Falls put the big Ford in gear. “Don’t come near the main house without permission. Dogs are out after dark, and the guards are for more than show. I can promise you that.”
“I think we understand each other.”
Falls waited a heartbeat, then took his foot off the brake. Michael watched taillights fade in the dark beneath the trees, and then joined Elena on the porch. She was in a rocking chair, knees drawn up. Michael sat beside her. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m scared.”
“Give me a second.” He returned to the car and triggered the release of the driver’s-side air bag. It was disengaged, hollowed out. Inside was the forty-five, wrapped in newspaper to keep it from rattling. “See, all better.”
Yet Elena did not feel better. She went into a back bedroom, pulled the curtains and climbed into bed. “I love you, Michael, and I can handle this. Your brother. This place. I can give you your day, and you can get some answers. Just tell me you know what you’re doing.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Swear it on your soul.”
He touched his heart. “I swear on my soul.”
She pulled his head down and kissed him. “Do you love me?”
“You know I do.”
“What if you had to choose? Julian or me? Julian or the baby?”
“That won’t happen.”
She cupped his face with both hands, stared deep into his eyes. She kissed him hard, then rolled onto her side.
“It just did.”