Mal returned to stand between Nico’s legs, taking the other boy’s hands and putting them on his head. Nico began to comb through his curls absently.
Mal shrugged. “I was going to be smart about it. Potassium chloride injected between his toes. It’s undetectable in autopsy. It would just look like a heart attack.”
Atticus frowned. “A heart attack in a healthy twenty-something-year-old man would catch a coroner’s eye.”
Mal gave another terrifying smile. “Not if the victim had been abusing Adderall.”
“Your brother is abusing amphetamines?” Thomas asked.
Mal gave a slow shrug. “Not to his knowledge, but, yes.”
“What does that mean?” Avi asked, leaning in, clearly intrigued.
“It means the vitamin capsules he insists on taking every morning have been filled with Adderall. I’d been titrating his dose higher and higher for months.”
“Impressive,” Thomas said.
Atticus scoffed. “Still, where were you going to get your hands on potassium chloride without leaving a paper trail?”
Mal shrugged. “I was initially going to make it myself, but it was too tedious. I would have needed a working lab and that would have been too big a risk. So, I stole some from a vet clinic.”
“Weren’t you afraid someone might put two and two together?” Asa asked.
“There was no way anyone would connect the sudden death of a drug addict with a vial of potassium chloride that went missing from a vet’s office one year prior,” Mal said. “Especially since I didn’t get caught.”
“You’ve been planning this for a year?” Shiloh asked, voice wobbling.
Mal shook his head. “I’ve been planning this for a decade, doodlebug. Did you think I was going to let him torture you forever? I just had to be smart about it.”
Shiloh crossed the room and threw himself into Mal’s arms. His brother returned the hug haltingly, eyes dull, back straight,like hugging Shiloh was expected but not necessarily welcome. Nico dropped one hand to scratch at Shiloh’s scalp as well, like he was petting two cats.
When Shiloh pulled back, Mal sighed and used his sleeve to wipe his brother’s tears, then turned him around and pushed him back towards Levi. He opened his arms so Shiloh could hug him, closing them around him, squeezing him the way Mal wouldn’t, his heart tripping in his chest when Shiloh buried his face in his neck.
“I have no problems with you being the point person once we’re done questioning him,” Aiden said. “But I’d prefer you stay back with Shiloh until we have him secured. If he manages to get his hands on either of you, this goes from interrogation to hostage negotiation and we lose the advantage.”
Mal looked like he was going to protest when Thomas stepped in. “Once we have the information we need, we’ll have someone bring you out and you can do what you want with him. As long as he doesn’t have a pulse when we leave.”
Mal looked at Shiloh for a long moment, then sighed. “I guess that’s fine.”
“We won’t kill him without you,” Asa promised. “But I can’t guarantee what kind of shape he’ll be in when we get done with him.”
Mal’s face was expressionless. “As long as I get to kill him.”
“What if he doesn’t believe me?” Shiloh said. “What if he knows Mal is out of prison?”
They sat on Levi’s and Nico’s saggy couch, Levi on Shiloh’s left, Mal on his right, Nico at his feet. They were all touching him in some way. Levi squeezed his thigh, Mal was rubbing soothing circles on his back, and even Nico was holding Shiloh’s leg like he was just trying to transfer his energy. Shiloh needed it. He needed all that and more.
Everything had sounded so simple last night when surrounded by a bunch of people who killed for fun. But now, in Levi’s and Nico’s living room, it sounded absurd. If the entire plan hinged on Shiloh, they were doomed. He never did anything right. Ever. Just ask anyone. Hell, even Mal would probably say Shiloh had limited skills with anything.
Mal was dialed in today, or maybe he was simply echoing Nico’s behavior. It was hard to say where Mal’s head was at from moment to moment. Sometimes, he seemed hyper aware of everything, while other times, he appeared to have checked outof participating in life for the day. Often, he would latch onto a person and simply mimic them, mirror everything about them, like he was just trying on their personality.
Mal already did it with Nico, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t his usual stimming or echolalia where he needed to repeat everything he saw. With others, it was ‘monkey see, monkey do,’ but with Nico, Mal watched him like a cat watched a fish tank. Every single thing Nico did delighted Mal and he was already freakishly territorial over him, not even wanting Shiloh to touch him. Even now, his gaze repeatedly dipped to where Nico gently held Shiloh’s leg. That Mal hadn’t brushed Nico’s hands away spoke more to the gravity of the current situation than anything else.
“Relax, doodlebug. It’s gonna be okay,” he said, like someone had pulled a string on his back and that was what he’d been programmed to say.
Mal loved him. Shiloh knew that. Mal loved him in the only ways he knew how. That he tried to comfort him at all showed how much he cared, how much he tried, because Mal didn’t feel things like others, even though he tried. Often the world seemed to confuse him. He found others’ behavior illogical, their worries silly. He floated through even the worst times by simply shutting off when things were too much and powering back on when they returned to a level he found tolerable. Shiloh hoped Nico didn’t grow bored of how odd Mal was because Mal had locked in on him, and unlike many other neurodivergent people, once Mal found a new obsession, he wouldn’t let it go, no matter how much it squirmed or begged to be released.
Shiloh shook his head, dragging himself from the rabbit hole of his thoughts. Shiloh wanted to believe them when they said it was all going to work out. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust that the Mulvaneys knew what they were doing. But historically speaking, statistically speaking even, things never worked outfor him. They just didn’t. And even as they all sat there assuring him that this was all finally coming to an end, the voice in the back of his head—Micah’s voice—was laughing at him, at them and their stupid optimism.
