His Unusual Request

His Unusual Request
POV: Felix

Martin asked for a bible on the second day.

That was the first thing. A small request, delivered through Marco with the particular humility of a man who had undergone some internal reckoning and was reaching for something outside himself. Marco reported it with the flat neutrality he brought to everything, and I looked at him for a moment and said nothing and then said give it to him.

I was not naive enough to believe it. But I was also not going to refuse a bible to a man in custody on the grounds that his interest in it was probably performative, because refusing it would tell him something about my level of suspicion that I preferred he not know.

So Martin got his bible, and he read it with every appearance of sincerity, and he spoke to Marco and the other men with a quietness that was new, a quality of containment that had replaced the cold architecture of the man in the operations room doorway. He ate what was brought to him. He slept at reasonable hours. He made no requests beyond the bible and once, on the third day, a specific brand of tea that had been Camille's preference and which I could not determine was deliberate provocation or coincidence.

I decided it was deliberate and said nothing about it and gave him the tea.

On the fourth day he asked to speak to me directly. Not to Selina, that request had been made and addressed, Selina had spoken to him for forty minutes in a room with me present and Marco outside the door, and what had passed between them in those forty minutes was something I was still processing and would be for some time. This request was different. This was Martin asking for his brother.

I went.

He was in a room in the basement of a property I owned that had been repurposed for exactly this kind of temporary holding, not a cell exactly, but a room with one door and no windows and sufficient space that it didn't register as deliberately cruel. I had been specific about that. Whatever Martin had done, I was not going to manage him through cruelty because cruelty was imprecise and imprecision was something I couldn't afford.

He looked up when I came in.

He had always been good-looking in the way that some men are good-looking, not softly, but with a kind of structural authority to his face that projected competence before he said anything. It had served him well for years, that face. It was the same face now but it was carrying something different, or appeared to be carrying something different, and I sat down across from him and looked at it and tried to read it the way I read most things.

I couldn't.

That bothered me more than I showed.

"You look tired," he said.

"I am tired."

"How is she?"

I looked at him. "That's not something I'm going to discuss with you."

He nodded, accepting it, which was itself part of the performance if it was a performance, the accepting and the nodding, the studied reasonableness of a man who no longer pushed. "I've been thinking," he said.

"About?"

"About what I told you. In the corridor." He paused. "About what I said being true not excusing what I did with it. I've been sitting with that." He looked at the bible on the table beside him without touching it. "There's a significant difference between a legitimate grievance and what I made of it."

"Yes," I said. "There is."

"I'm not asking for anything," he said. "I wanted to say it to you directly. Without the architecture." He looked at me. "The women. I understand what that means. What it costs. I'm not going to minimise it."

I sat with that. With the specific cruelty of a man who could say true and meaningful things and have every one of them be real and also be a tool. Because that was the thing about Martin that had made him so effective for so long, he wasn't performing goodness over corruption. He was both things genuinely, the corruption and the truth of the grievance existing in the same person simultaneously, and that simultaneity was more dangerous than simple evil would have been because simple evil was readable.

"I'll make sure the families know," I said. "The women. Everything that can be told to them will be."

Something moved across his face. "Good," he said quietly. "That's good."

I stood.

"Felix." He said my name and I stopped. "I am sorry. About Camille specifically." He held my gaze without flinching. "Whatever you believe about the rest of it, I need you to know that one is true."

I looked at my brother for a long moment.

"I know," I said. Because I did, somehow, in the part of me that had always been able to read Martin beneath the layers, and it was the worst thing about it, that the apology was genuine and meant nothing at all in the face of what it was apologising for.

I left him with his bible and his tea and went upstairs.

The fire started at eleven forty-seven that night.

I know the time precisely because I had been awake, sitting in the study on the first floor of the eastern house where Selina and Amaya were staying, going through documentation my legal team had sent through. I had moved my base of operations here for the past several days, not permanently, not in a way I had announced or framed or attached any meaning to, simply practically, because the situation required proximity and proximity was what I provided.

Selina had not commented on this. Amaya had looked at me once with the expression of a woman filing information for later use and then returned to whatever she was doing.

I was reading a document when I smelled it.

Smoke. Faint, first, the kind you second-guess. Then not faint.

I was on my feet and into the corridor before the alarm activated, moving toward the smell, which was coming from the lower level of the property where Martin was being held. The holding room. I hit the staircase at the same moment my phone lit up with Marco's name and I answered it without breaking stride.

"Fire in the basement," Marco said. "Contained to the holding room and the adjacent corridor, we're working on..."

"Martin."

A pause that lasted one second too long.

"He's not in the room," Marco said.

I stopped on the staircase.

"The door was open when we got there," Marco said, and I could hear in his voice the specific quality of a man delivering news he would rather not be delivering. "We don't know when. The fire, we think it was set from inside, something from the bathroom, he must have..."

"Secure the perimeter. Every exit, every vehicle, every..."

"Already done, sir. We're not finding him."

Of course they weren't finding him.

I stood on the staircase with smoke beginning to thicken at the lower level and the alarm filling the house with its urgent, indifferent noise, and I thought about the bible and the tea and the forty minutes with Selina and the apology for Camille, and I understood that I had been right not to believe it and had allowed it to soften something anyway, not consciously, not in any way I could have pointed to, but somewhere in the past four days, in the face of Martin's studied reasonableness and his genuine-sounding remorse, something had relaxed by a degree that had been sufficient.

One degree.

That was all he had needed.

"Get everyone out of the house," I said. "Now.
Selina and Amaya first."

Then I took the stairs upward instead of downward and I moved fast.