Chapter 263: My Dead Brother.
The elevator doors closed, sealing me inside the small metal box with my half-brother. And I was almost certain of one thing: he didn’t know that I knew who he was.
"Abram." He didn’t look at me. Just leaned back against the wall like a man who had all the time in the world and knew it. "I hope you were expecting me."
"Yeah." I kept my eyes on the numbers climbing down above the doors. "You said you’d visit. So I got ready." I didn’t look at him either. Two men sharing a box, both refusing to be the first to turn.
I didn’t know whether I was safe or in real trouble standing this close to him. The system had handed me the name in the corridor and I’d been carrying it ever since. Brahim Nadez. My father’s son, born inside the Vale family, dead once already and back now in a body that wasn’t his. Everything I knew about him fit in three sentences, and every one of those sentences told me to be afraid.
"You don’t look settled," he said, and pushed off the wall to face me. His weight shifted smoothly, shoulders rolling loose.
I turned and squared up the same way, feet planting wider on the metal floor. "I’m settled."
"No." A small smile curved his mouth. "Your heart’s pounding."
Wait. No ordinary person picks a heartbeat out of the air from across an elevator. He’d said it plainly, without lowering his voice, without any care for what it revealed. He wasn’t hiding what he was. And a man who doesn’t bother to hide it from you is usually a man who already knows you can see it.
He knows I know.
"It isn’t," I said out loud, and underneath it I told the system to reach into my chest and settle everything it could reach. My pulse slowed on command, but the tension in my shoulders stayed.
"Is that how you work?" he asked. "Hurt people, then ask them to forgive you?"
The question had teeth. Too personal. Too specific. Aimed from somewhere with real history behind it. Mute had never spoken to me like that. Nothing about the boy I’d stood beside on missions could have produced that sentence.
And something in me—stubborn, unreasonable—insisted we had met before. Which was impossible. This was Brahim. A man I had never seen, never spoken to, a dead thing returned in a way I still didn’t understand. There was no version of my life that contained him. We hadn’t met. I told myself that twice.
"Not really," I said. "But an apology saves a lot of trouble."
He looked at me and let the smile widen, eyes narrowing slightly. "Only the weak apologize."
"Mhm."
Switch everything on. Enhanced hearing. Attack protocols. Defense. All of it, now. My eyes never left his face. My fingers flexed once at my sides.
[Done.]
[Entity unreadable. But there is a deep, controlled rage running underneath him.]
Controlled. That was the word that stayed with me. Not rage boiling over. Rage held down, kept, aged—the kind that had years in it.
"I didn’t expect us to talk this long," he said, voice almost conversational.
"Why?" I didn’t give him room to answer it himself. "Were you planning to kill me instead?"
He made a small gesture with one hand—casual, almost lazy. You’ve got it. No shame in it. No attempt to soften it.
"Why?" I turned the blade sideways, keeping up the act, keeping him certain I saw only Mute standing in front of me. "This about Mable?"
He looked at me and said nothing. His expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes went still.
I poured everything I had into listening. The system opened my hearing all the way up and I took the elevator apart with it. The faint drag of his sleeve against the wall. The cables working somewhere above us. My own pulse. And in the space where his heartbeat should have been—where a living man’s chest fills and empties without being asked—there was nothing. No beat. No breath doing breath’s quiet work. Just a body standing upright and occupied, running on something that wasn’t a heart.
What are you.
"Your heart’s steady now," he said, letting the Mable question fall away untouched. "You’re standing your ground. Good."
I held his eyes. The car was moving—I could feel the faint pull of it under my feet—but the whole thing felt frozen, suspended between floors. Whatever my half-brother had come into this box to say or do, none of it was going to make my life easier. He owned this conversation. He’d owned it since the doors closed. I needed to take a piece of it back before we reached the bottom.
"What do you want from me?"
"I want everything you took." His voice stayed level, almost gentle. "Everything you took from me."
"Okay." I kept it easy, unhurried, like he’d asked me for the time. My shoulders stayed square. "As long as you’re not talking about Mable."
"I want you to feel what I felt." He didn’t rise to the deflection. "I want you carrying the exact pain you put in me. Every ounce of it."
"Who are you?" It broke out of me before I could stop it, right as the doors slid open onto the floor with a soft chime.
He didn’t answer.
Neither of us moved. The open doors waited, hallway light spilling in.
"Do you want me dead?" I made it simple. Laid it flat between us and let him pick it up.
He crossed the car toward me, unhurried. Up close he was slightly taller, and I registered that the way you register the reach of something that might hit you. He set his hand on my shoulder—fingers firm, cool—and leaned in until his mouth was at my ear.
"Dead?" The word came as a whisper, warm and wrong coming from a body with no heartbeat. "You did something far worse than kill me."
Then he straightened, stepped past me, and walked out. His boots made soft sounds on the corridor floor.
"I know who you are," I said to his back.
He stopped. Turned his head just enough that I caught the edge of his profile.
"Good."
And he walked away down the corridor, unhurried, like a man leaving a conversation he’d already won.
I stepped out after him on legs that held, but my heart was going hard now—fast and loud—and no order to the system was going to talk it down this time. Whatever composure I’d borrowed for that box, it stayed in the box. My hands flexed once at my sides, then stilled.
Venna Belmonte.
The name arrived on its own, unasked for, and I knew why the second it landed. Whatever answers existed for the conversation I’d just survived, they weren’t in my head. They were in a history I couldn’t reach on my own.
But she could. She read the past of every person alive except herself.
The answers weren’t in the future anymore. They were buried somewhere in my past.