Page 63 of Make Them Pay

Orchid sits with him, but when she sees me walk out she gets up to leave. She knows we need a moment to talk. I smile at her as she passes by.

I sit in the chair beside him. The porch faces east. The morning light is soft on the lawn that someone gets paid to keep neat for a house nobody officially lives in. Birds are doing ordinary bird things in the trees. The world is putting on a convincing performance of normal.

“So,” Poe says.

“So.”

“Render.”

The name sits between us. I don’t rush to fill the quiet. I let him decide what comes next, because this conversation belongs to both of us, but the specific pain of a brother realizing that the two people he loves most have crossed a line he never gave them permission to cross.

“How long?” he asks.

“Ten days if you’re counting from the beginning. Nine days of him keeping perfect distance. One night where he didn’t.”

“That so?”

“It is.”

“I saw Render’s face when he walked into my cell. I’ve known that man since we were seven. I’ve seen every expression he’s capable of. The one he was wearing when he cut my restraints wasn’t one I’d ever seen before. It took me about thirty seconds to figure out what was different.”

“What was different?”

“He looked like a person with something to lose. Render’s never looked like that. He’s always been the one with the least to lose because he kept everything at a distance. The team. The work. All of it held at arm’s length. Where it was safe. And then he walked into my cell looking like a man who’d just realized that arm’s length isn’t long enough to protect the things that matter.”

My chest does that warm, dangerous thing that makes my eyes sting and my throat tighten.

“Are you angry?” I ask.

Poe’s quiet for a long time. The rocking chair moves a little. The birds keep going about their business. The morning keeps being morning.

“I’m angry at myself,” he says finally. “For keeping you out. For building a wall between you and everything I cared about because I thought the wall was the same thing as safety. I kept you out of the crew. Out of the operations. Out of the room where the people I love most were doing the work that mattered most. And what happened? You taught yourself to do it alone. You ran your own operations against Goldenbell from your apartment. You became exactly the kind of person I was afraid you’d become, and you did it without any of the protection or training or support that being inside the crew would have given you.”

“Poe.”

“I kept you out and Serafina put you in a box. Those two things are connected. If I’d let you in, if I’d trained you properly, if I’d given you the tools and the knowledge and the team instead of the locked door and the silence, you would have been more prepared. You might not have been taken at all.”

The guilt in his voice is heavy enough that I can feel it in the air between us. I recognize it because I carry the same weight about Margaux, about the access pattern that almost ruined the rescue, about every choice I made alone that had consequences I didn’t see coming.

“You were trying to protect me,” I say.

“I was trying to control the thing I was most afraid of. Losing you. The same way I tried to control every other variable in my life—through walls, through distance, through keeping people far enough away that the work couldn’t touch them.” He pauses. “Render does the same thing. Did you know that? The distance he keeps. The walls. He learned it from watching me. I taught him, by example, that the way you love someone is by keeping them far enough away that your work can’t reach them.”

“He’s learning a different way,” I say quietly.

“I know. I saw it in his face.” Poe turns and looks at me with both eyes, the clear one and the damaged one, and the expression on his face is the most complicated mix of love and fear and pride and loss I’ve ever seen. “He’ll take care of you.”.

“I don’t need him to take care of me.”

“I know that too. That’s what makes him right for you. He knows you don’t need it, and he’ll do it anyway, and you’ll let him because you love him. And loving someone means letting them give you things you could survive without but don’t want to. It’s how I feel about Orchid.”

The tears come. Not the quiet ones I shed behind the concrete shed during the breach. These are the tears of a conversation that’s been waiting years to happen. They carry every locked door, every silent night, every stolen fry while a man across the table looked at me like I was the most dangerous thing in the room and my brother pretended not to notice.

Poe reaches over and takes my hand, and squeezes it.

“Don’t break him,” he says.

“Don’t break me,” I say back.