Elsa's Gold Bracelet

Elsa's Gold Bracelet


POV: Felix

"Oh wait, before we leave, I would love to give this back to you. I've been holding it for so long, keeping it safe for you," he chuckled softly.

He threw the gold bracelet to me, and I almost lost my mind as I flew into a fiery rage and punched him so hard that he tumbled backwards.

When Elsa died, I could not find the gold bracelet I'd gifted her while we were still courting.

She had loved it so much that she never took it off. But after she died, it went missing, and I simply let it go because I'd thought that it must have gotten lost in the hospital or during her transit to the morgue. How would I have known that my brother used to visit her in the hospital and had even slipped off her bracelet while she fought to stay alive.

"You fucking bastard! You will pay, Martin, you will pay for everything you have done!" I told him fiercely.

"The only reason why you are still alive is because killing you would be merciful. I will make you beg for death, I will make you wish you were dead, Martin. That's a fucking promise!" I told him, ordering my men to get him locked up.

She had been gone for six years. I had spent six years believing I understood what had happened, a world of violence producing its inevitable result, the woman I loved caught in the crossfire of a life I had built with insufficient care for who it would eventually destroy. I had carried that understanding like a specific weight, heavy and familiar, the kind of weight you adjust to over time until you can't quite imagine what you'd do without it.

The weight was the same. The understanding was different now.

Martin had been there for the funeral. Had stood beside me, the half-brother who had kept his distance for years but showed up in the moments that counted, or appeared to show up, appeared to be the person who counted. I had let him stand beside me. Had been, if I was honest about it, briefly grateful for his presence.

I pressed my hand flat on the kitchen table and breathed through that and kept moving forward because there was nothing useful in the alternative.

What Martin had said in the corridor came back to me.

You had everything. Every single thing. And you treated it like furniture.

The tragedy of it, and I was capable of recognising it as a tragedy even now, even with Camille's name on the second line of his notebook, was that he wasn't wrong. I had taken the inheritance of my position with the casual confidence of someone who had never been required to imagine its absence. I had not built what I had, not in the beginning. I had received it. And Martin, who had been born at a different angle to the same family, to the same table with less room at it, had watched that ease with something that had curdled over decades into the thing that had produced that notebook.

It didn't excuse a single line of what was written in it.

But I was done pretending that understanding and excusing were the same thing, because I had used that pretence for years to avoid understanding anything at all.

My phone lit up with Marco's name.

I answered it.

"Martin's talking," Marco said. Not preamble, not softening. Marco never softened anything, which was one of the reasons I had kept him for twelve years. "He asked for a specific condition before he'd say anything substantive."

"What condition."

A pause. "He wants to speak to Selina."

I looked at the wall. "No."

"I told him you'd say that. He said to tell you that what he has to say is specifically relevant to her. That she has a right to hear it from him directly." Another pause. "He was..." Marco stopped, which was unusual enough to register. "He was calm about it. He wasn't negotiating. He said it like it was a request he expected to be refused and was making anyway."

I sat with that for a moment. Martin calm was always more dangerous than Martin agitated, had always been the version of him that cost me more. But Martin in custody with his network dismantled and his bunker breached and his notebook in the hands of my legal team was a different calculation from Martin at large.

And there was the other thing.

Selina, in the warehouse district, with her hand on my arm before I moved toward the operations room. He has a weapon under the console panel. I saw it when I went in. Twice. The quiet, complete, entirely self-possessed way she had said it, as if gathering intelligence in the home of a man who was planning to kill her was simply a thing you did when the situation required it.

She had not done this because I asked her to. She had not done it because she was mine or because she owed me anything or because she was performing the role of someone who needed rescuing. She had done it because she was the person she was and the situation was what it was and she had responded to it with everything she had.

She deserved to decide this herself.

I didn't like it.

I picked up the phone. "I'll ask her," I said. "The decision is hers."

POV: Selina

I had not been sleeping.

I had been lying in the dark in the good room at the end of the hall with my eyes on the ceiling, doing the thing my mind always did when I gave it darkness and quiet and nothing urgent to manage, it sorted. Went through everything in the order it had actually happened rather than the order I had experienced it, which were different things, and laid it out and examined the seams and the gaps and the places where one thing didn't quite connect smoothly to the next.

The knock on the door was soft enough to be considerate and firm enough not to be mistaken for the house settling.

I sat up. "Yes."

Felix opened the door and stood in the frame. He had not changed. He was still in the same clothes, still carrying the same night on him, and he looked like a man who had not slept and was not going to and had made some form of peace with that. He looked at me sitting up in the bed and said, without any construction around it, "Martin wants to speak to you. Marco called. He made the request and said it was specifically for you." A pause. "I told Marco the decision was yours."

I looked at him.

"You don't have to," he said. "I want to be clear about that. There is no version of this where you have to do anything."

"What does he want to say?"

"I don't know. He wouldn't tell Marco."

I thought about Martin in the operations room doorway. The last thing he had said to me, you were considerably harder to read, delivered not as flattery but as a plain observation from a man who had defaulted to honesty in the moment his architecture came down. There had been something in that. Not redemption, not anything that changed the shape of what he had done, but something human and direct that the performance had not contained.

"He knows things," I said. Not to Felix, exactly. More aloud. "About the women, about what happened to them, about things that are in that note
book and things that aren't. Things families might need."

Felix said nothing.