The Marvelous Ethan Cole

Chapter 9

The impact was not like anything a regular kick produces. There was a force behind it that did not match the motion, something that came from a place deeper than muscle and bone, and the sound it made when it connected was heavy and absolute.

Daniel left the ground.

His body traveled backward through the air, arms flailing, and everything in his path went with him. Two chairs flipped sideways. A small side table skidded across the floor. People scattered out of the way, stumbling over each other, and Daniel's body covered the full length of the room before his back slammed into the far wall.

The impact shook the wall. A framed picture dropped and hit the floor.

Daniel crumpled at the base of it.

For a moment he didn't move at all.

Then a cough tore through him, violent and wet, and blood came with it, spraying across the back of his hand as he pressed it to his mouth. He tried to breathe and it came out ragged, hitching, like something in his chest wasn't sitting right anymore.

Ethan walked toward him.

He walked slowly. Not hurrying. His footsteps were even and quiet across the floor, and the crowd parted in front of him without anyone making a decision to move. They just moved, stepping back, opening a path, watching him cross the room.

He reached Daniel.

He put his foot on Daniel's chest.

Daniel's hands came up immediately, grabbing at Ethan's ankle, pulling, trying to shift the weight. He couldn't. His fingers gripped and pulled and his whole upper body strained with the effort and Ethan's foot didn't move even slightly.

“You thought I wasn't going to come,” Ethan said, looking down at him. “You answered that phone and you heard my voice and you thought, what? That I was bluffing? That I was too scared?” He pressed down slightly and Daniel made a short, choked sound. 

“You sent those men to kill me. You tried to burn my family's restaurant down with me inside it. And you stood there tonight calling me worthless, calling me a rat, calling me a failure.” He paused. 

“And you thought I wasn't going to come.”

Daniel's face was covered in sweat and blood. His hands were still wrapped around Ethan's ankle, shaking.

“That's a lie,” Victoria said.

Her voice came from behind Ethan, a few feet away. He didn't turn.

“Ethan, stop.” She stepped forward. “I understand you're angry. I understand something happened tonight and I understand you're—”

“Something happened,” Ethan said.

“Yes but—”

“Six men,” he said. 

“They poured gasoline over everything my family ever built and set it on fire and left me inside it.”

The room went so quiet it hurt.

Victoria's mouth was open slightly. She closed it.

“That's what happened,” Ethan said. “And he paid for it.”

“You're making an accusation,” she said, and her voice had gone smaller but she kept it steady. “You're accusing him of something enormous and the only evidence you have is—”

“Him  saying so,” Daniel said from the floor.

Everyone looked at him.

His voice was barely there, scraped raw, but the words were clear. 

“He's lying,” Daniel said. "He hit me. Whatever he did to me, my body said whatever it needed to say to make it stop. That's not a confession. That's a man in pain saying words.” He coughed again, wet and thick. 

“And he knows it. That's why he's doing this. He's using this as a way out. Hit me, make me say whatever, and then claim it as truth.” He looked up at the ceiling, breathing hard. 

“I'm going to sue him. For everything. Defamation, assault. Whatever I have left when this is done, I'm putting all of it into making sure he pays for the rest of his life.” A pause followed. “And if he doesn't have enough, his children will pay. And their children.”

Victoria's brother Marcus stepped forward from the side of the room. “He's right,“ he said, pointing at Ethan. 

“Whatever just happened here, he made it happen. You saw what he did to Daniel. You all saw it. He tortured him into saying that.”

Victoria's father, sitting near the center table, stood slowly. He hadn't spoken yet, but the look on his face had been building since the moment Ethan walked in. “He's a liar,” he said, his voice thick and controlled. 

“He's always been a liar. A worthless, freeloading liar who has been living off this family's name for years, and now he comes in here with a story to make himself look like a victim.” He looked around the room. 

“You all know him. You all know what he is. He has never in his life been worth a single thing, and now suddenly he's making accusations against my nephew?” He shook his head. 

“Whatever he did to make Daniel say those words, that's all it was. Pain makes people say anything.”

“That's right,”someone called out. “Pain makes you say anything.”

“It was the pain.”

“What would Daniel even gain from something like that? What would he gain from going after him?”

“Exactly. What does he gain? Ethan has nothing. He's worth nothing. Why would anyone bother?”

“It's just an excuse. He hit Daniel and now he's trying to cover himself.”

Ethan took his foot off Daniel's chest.

He stood still for a moment, looking at Daniel on the floor, and something moved across his face that was not quite patience and not quite contempt but lived somewhere between the two.

Then he crouched down.

He put one finger against Daniel's temple.

“What are you—” Victoria started.

A light pulsed from Ethan's fingertip, barely visible, a blue so faint it could have been a trick of the chandelier overhead. It lasted less than a second.

Daniel's whole body went rigid.

His back arched. His hands slammed flat against the floor at his sides, fingers spread wide, and his mouth opened but no sound came out for a long moment. Then a sound came out that had no business coming from a grown man in a banquet hall, something between a scream and a sob, high and formless and completely uncontrolled.

“Stop,” someone said sharply.

“What is he doing to him?”

Inside the space that only Daniel could see, something had opened up. It wasn't dark exactly, more the way a room feels when all the lights are off and you can sense the walls without seeing them. And the fear was already there, waiting, the particular fear that belongs only to him, the one that has his father's voice attached to it and the word useless that has been following him for longer than he can remember.

But there was something else in this space now.

Needles.

He felt the first one and screamed with no sound. Then the second. Then ten at once, then fifty, each one precise and cold and finding something specific, a nerve, a memory, a place where the guilt had been living quietly for weeks.

Five hundred.

A thousand.

More.

“Please,”  Daniel said out loud, his voice cracked completely open, no performance left in it. “Please, please, please—”