That’s when Titan finally turns.
His gaze settles on Delaney—not rushed, not angry, just absolute. It pins him in place the way gravity pins a falling body to the earth.
“Too late,” Titan whispers.
45
TITAN
If there’s one thing I despise, it’s men who refuse to stand still long enough to face what they’ve done.
I see it constantly. Grown men who spend their lives wielding power—over women, over systems, over silence—only to fold the moment that power is reversed. The moment the pain is theirs, instead of someone else’s. Torture doesn’t make them brave or honest. It simply reveals what was never there to begin with.
Scott-Evans and Delaney are no different.
They collapse quickly. Too quickly. There isn’t even a shared backbone between them—just two men scrambling for air, for distance, for a version of events where responsibility belongs elsewhere.
From where I stand, their friendship is already a corpse.
Scott-Evans doesn’t defend Delaney. He doesn’t protect him. He watches him instead—waiting. Measuring. Almost hopeful that Marcus will speak first so he doesn’t have to be the one who gives voice to what they did.
Because something inside Scott-Evans still resists saying their names out loud.
Missy Hale.
Rowan Hale.
There’s a line even monsters hesitate to cross—the moment where cruelty stops being abstract and becomes personal. Where victims stop being faceless and start being remembered as girls with voices and choices and futures.
Scott-Evans can’t bring himself to narrate how they were noticed. How they were selected. How attention turned into entitlement and entitlement into violence.
But Marcus can’t hold it in forever.
He shakes. He sweats. He cracks.
And in the end, it isn’t the pain that breaks him.
It’s the silence.
And Marcus Delaney snaps first.
“It wasn’t my idea to take the girls,” Delaney blurts. “None of it was. We didn’t touch the younger sister—Jesus Christ, we didn’t hurt her.”
“What happened to Daniel Stockton?” I ask.
The name cuts through the room.
Delaney looks between us, genuinely confused now, like the question doesn’t belong in this place—or maybe like he hoped it never would. His brow furrows, irritation flickering beneath the fear, as if he’s trying to decide whether this is a trick or a mistake.
Before he can answer, Justin’s phone vibrates in his pocket.
The sound is small. Ordinary. But equally devastating.
He doesn’t break eye contact as he pulls it free, his gaze still locked on the men in front of us.
“Silas,” he announces into the phone.
I watch him closely.
