"Yeah." The word comes out rough. "I want that too."
"Good." He releases my hand, settles back in his seat. The tension in his shoulders has eased, replaced by something like calm. "Then let's go finish this. Let's release the cleansing fire and rebuild the world as it should have always been.”
We're quiet for a while after that. Not uncomfortable silence, but the kind that comes when there's nothing left to say. The kind that means understanding without words.
I watch him watch the clouds. The hard lines of his profile, the sharp jaw, the dark eyes that have seen too much. He looks tired. The weariness of a man who's been fighting his whole life and is finally allowed to consider what comes after.
"What are you thinking?" I ask.
"About the Custodian Board." He doesn't look away from the window. "Ten families. Ten seats. They've controlled the Silent for three centuries, making decisions about who lives and dies from behind closed doors. And we're about to walk in there and tell them it's over."
"Scared?"
"No." A pause. "Maybe. I've spent my whole life being their weapon. Following their orders. Killing who they told me to kill. Even when I rebelled, when I ran, I was still reacting to them. Still defined by what they made me."
"And now?"
"Now I'm going to define myself." He finally looks at me, and there's fire in his eyes. The kind of fire that burns away everything it touches. "They took my childhood. They took my brothers' childhoods. They took Lily's childhood. And they've been doing it to thousands of children for generations, because no one ever stopped them. No one ever could."
"Until now."
"Until now." He reaches across the space between us, takes my hand again. His grip is strong, steady. "I don't know what I am without them. Without the Foundry, without the conditioning, without the rage that's been driving me since I was old enough to understand what they'd done. But I want to find out."
"You're Jinx Harrison." I lace my fingers through his. "You're the most stubborn, violent, infuriating man I've ever met. You're loyal to the point of stupidity and tender when you think no one's watching. You're broken in ways that might never heal, but you're still here. Still fighting. Still capable of love, even though they tried to beat it out of you."
His breath catches. His hand tightens on mine.
"And in seventy-two hours," I continue, "you're going to walk into a room full of the most powerful people in the shadow world and tell them their reign is over. You're going to claim your seat at their table and use it to tear down everything they've built. You're going to be the thing they created, turned against them." I hold his gaze. "That's who you are without them. That's who you've always been. They made a weapon, but you chose what to aim it at."
Silent tears tracking down his cheeks, catching the light from the window. He doesn't wipe them away. Doesn't try to hide them.
"Fuck," he whispers. "How do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Make me cry. I’ve never cried, not even when they flogged me, but you..." He laughs, wet and broken. "Thirty years of conditioning, and you undo it with a few sentences."
"I didn't undo anything. I reminded you what was already there."
He leans across the space between our seats, cups my face in his hands, kisses me. Soft and desperate and full of things neither of us has the words for. I taste salt on his lips, feel the tremor in his fingers.
When he pulls back, his eyes are red but clear.
"Geneva," he says.
"Geneva."
"Let's go save some kids. Let's go take down an empire."
"Let's go home."
The word hangs between us.Home. Neither of us has had one in a long time. Maybe ever. But we’re going to build one.
That's as good a place to start as any.
The plane flies on. Geneva waits ahead. And somewhere below us, the last two living men who built an empire on children's suffering are on their last days.
They just don't know it…
