I move between them before it escalates further, planting both hands against Jon’s chest. He’s solid and hot and tense beneath my palms, his breathing hard enough that I can feel it.
“Stop,” I snap.
He barely registers me at first. His gaze is still locked on King, still burning, still halfway down a path he won’t be able to come back from clean if I let him take another step.
“Jon!” I shout louder.
His eyes finally drop to mine.
They’re burning. Not with rage alone. With hurt. With loss. With the raw, ugly kind of helplessness he hates more than anything.
“He was mine,” he says, but it doesn’t sound possessive. It sounds broken.
The words hit me right in the sternum. Because I know exactly what he means. Not ownership. Responsibility. Reckoning. The ending he had earned and lost in the same breath.
“And he was mine too,” I say, quieter now. “And I didn’t get a say either.”
That lands.
Just barely.
Something in his face shifts. Not enough to calm him. Enough to remind him I’m standing here too. That his grief isn’t the only one in the room. That I’m not some bystander to the aftermath.
King pushes off the wall then, straightening slowly, rolling his shoulder once like Jon’s shove was an inconvenience and not a near-fight between brothers.
“You’re both thinking with emotion,” he mutters. “I’m thinking about the fact that he’d have escaped in a week. Or someone would’ve tried to get him out. You know that.”
Maybe he’s right.
Maybe he’s not.
Maybe Mikhail would’ve talked. Maybe he would’ve died under interrogation laughing in our faces. Maybe someone would’ve tried to trade bodies for him. Maybe this was always how men like him ended—ugly and off-book and in a room no one wanted to document.
But it doesn’t matter now.
The choice is gone. The body is gone. The answers are gone. All we have left is the shape of what was done and what it says about the people who did it.
Before either of them can speak again, Larkin’s voice cuts down the hall.
“That’s enough.”
She strides toward us, heels sharp against concrete, eyes taking in the scene in one sweep. Jon’s clenched hands. King’s wrinkled collar. Me standing between them. The frozen soldiers trying not to look like witnesses. She doesn’t slow. Doesn’t blink. She looks tired and furious and entirely unsurprised all at once.
“What happened?” she demands.
Jon steps back from King, but his breathing is still heavy, shoulders tight enough to snap.
“Ask him,” Jon says coldly.
Larkin looks at King.
King doesn’t hesitate.
“I killed him.”
Silence.
No one moves. The whole corridor goes so still it feels staged. Somewhere behind us, a vent kicks on with a low mechanical groan.
