Chapter 388: A Weak Man.

Ingrid lifted her eyes off the floor and found mine, and everything I needed to know was in them.

Max stepped over the threshold into the cell. The blonde girl and the three infected stayed in the corridor — the tall one still bent under the frame, head scraping the lintel, the other two standing with the empty patience of bodies that only moved when told.

The blonde girl’s face stayed half in shadow. She didn’t look at me. She looked at Ingrid on the floor, and whatever sat behind her eyes was cold and personal.

Max walked past Ingrid while she worked her way up onto her knees with her hands still tied behind her. Stone bit her skin. Her balance failed once and she caught it without the use of her arms. He didn’t look down at her once. His boots passed within inches of her shoulder and kept going.

He came straight at me.

"Do you see what you’ve done?" His eyes locked on mine and held. Close enough that I could see the fatigue under the composure. "Do you see it?"

"I’m not the one throwing her in a cell."

Something hit me.

Not his hand. His hands hadn’t moved from his sides. The whole of my body turned, went backward at once and met the wall beside the door — flat, spine against the stone, shoulders pinned, the back of my skull knocking once against the paint.

Melissa’s dress slid off my arm and landed on the floor, the fabric settling with a soft sound that felt too loud in the sudden quiet.

The pressure sat on my chest like a weight somebody had set down and forgotten about. Not crushing. Holding. Air still moved, but only as much as he allowed.

I didn’t fight it.

I let it hold me instead and watched his face, because a man angry enough to pin you to a wall without lifting his hands is a man about to tell you something he didn’t plan to.

The weight eased off a fraction.

He came in close until his eyes were level with mine. Breath on my face.

"I’ve been asking myself something for days, Bram." Quiet. Almost conversational. "And I can’t make it work. Every time I look at you I see somebody weak. Somebody small." A pause. The pressure on my chest pulsed once, as if the thought had a body. "So why do people keep choosing you over me?"

My door opened.

Melissa walked out with nothing on and the whole corridor changed temperature.

Bare feet on stone. The long line of her — shoulders, the full weight of her breasts, the taper of her waist — held without shame under the hard light. Max’s eyes went to her. Stayed a second. Took the whole of what she was offering by existing. Came back to me with something uglier underneath the composure.

"Is everything all right?" She was looking at me flat against the wall, not at him.

"Yes."

No. Nothing’s all right. He wants me back inside. He’s handling it.

"Okay." She bent and picked her dress up off the floor at my feet. "I’ll be in the room."

She went back in. The door closed softly behind her.

Max’s jaw set hard. A muscle jumped once under the skin and locked.

"Answer me, bruh." He leaned closer. The word landed wrong in his mouth — the same casual sound he’d used on Sinn before the tall one hit him, stripped of warmth. "Sherry, I understood. I always thought Sherry was stupid. But my own sister? And now Ingrid?"

His voice cracked on her name.

He forced it back level. The crack sealed over. The pressure on my chest didn’t change.

"Why do they put their trust in something as weak as you?"

Say the word, Bram. Tell me to go at him.

Melissa’s thought, from behind my door. Furious.

Sinn was better than this. At least Sinn knew what he was. This boy thinks he’s something. We’ve buried greater men.

"You’re asking the wrong person," I said. My voice came out steady against the weight on my sternum. "I didn’t grow up with those girls. You did." I held his eyes. "So if you’re as strong as you think you are, ask yourself why none of them picked you."

A small smile came onto his mouth.

It didn’t reach anything. Not his eyes. Not the hand he still hadn’t lifted. Only the mouth, performing an expression that had nothing under it.

"Do you want to know where Sherry and Becky are?"

"No." He straightened up. The smile held a second longer and then was gone. "Not from you."

The weight came off my chest all at once.

Air flooded back. My shoulders left the wall by a fraction before I stopped them. I stood against the stone with nothing holding me there except the decision not to step forward.

He turned away.

What the fuck.

Melissa again, sharper, reading him as he went.

He’s executing us in public. Today. In front of the whole city.

Bram needs to know.

"Sherry’s pregnant," I said.

Max stopped.

One step short of Ingrid, with his back to me, and for a second nothing in him moved at all. Not his hands. Not his head. His shoulders came up half an inch — a single involuntary lift — and stayed there as if the words had physically landed on them.

Ingrid looked up at him from the floor. Her eyes tracked the line of his spine.

Then his shoulders came back down.

"Then she raises that child without a father."

He didn’t turn around.

I knew exactly what that looked like. I’d walked across the plain inside it — a boy with no one behind him and a sky that didn’t care whether he got up in the morning. The shape of a life with the father cut out of it. I had lived the sentence he had just handed a child who wasn’t born yet.

"Because the next time you see these doors open," Max said, walking again, each step deliberate toward the seal, "every one of you is going out through them to be executed for treason."

He stepped past Ingrid. Over the threshold. The three infected parted to let him through without being told. The blonde girl still hadn’t looked at me.

"Ingrid will tell you the rest."

And the door started closing behind him — heavy steel, the gap narrowing, morning light and corridor light separating again — until the latch found its seat with a sound that ran the full length of the cell and left five of us on the wrong side of it.