The Seven Sins: Cross Reckoning

Chapter 2: The Return

"You're not on the list." The guard at the gate had a rifle slung across his chest and the kind of face that had learned not to ask questions twice. "Nobody gets past this gate tonight. Family only. Turn the car around."

"I am family," Silas said.

The guard's eyes flicked to Reyes in the driver's seat, then back to Silas in the passenger seat, and something in his expression shifted, uncertain now, like he was trying to place a face he'd never actually seen but had maybe heard described once, years ago, in whispers that weren't meant for him.

"Name," the guard said, slower this time.

"Cross."

The word hit the man like a slap. His hand actually moved toward the radio at his shoulder before he caught himself, before some older instinct told him that whatever he was about to report up the chain might be the kind of thing that got a man killed for saying wrong.

"Wait here," the guard said, and disappeared into the gatehouse.

Reyes glanced sideways. "You want to tell me how you're planning to walk into that house."

"Like I own it." Silas didn't look at him. "Because in about an hour, I will."

The gate rolled open six minutes later, slow and groaning on old hinges, and the car crawled up a long gravel drive lined with trees that had probably been planted before Silas was born, black shapes against a sky gone the color of a fresh bruise. The house at the end of it was lit up floor to ceiling, every window blazing, cars packed three deep along the circular drive, the kind of gathering that only happened when someone important had died and everyone wanted to be seen mourning them.

Silas stepped out before the car had fully stopped.

He walked through the front doors like he'd done it every day of his life, past a woman in black who tried to hand him a program with his own father's photograph printed on the front of it, past whispers that started the second his face registered in someone's memory and spread through the room faster than he could cross it. By the time he reached the main hall, the noise had dropped by half, dozens of conversations dying mid sentence, glasses of wine frozen halfway to mouths.

He didn't stop walking. He scanned the room once, methodical, cataloguing faces, and found the one he was looking for standing near the fireplace with a drink in his hand and an expression arranged into something that was supposed to pass for grief.

Dominic Kade looked good for a man who'd just orchestrated his own brother's murder. Silver haired, tailored black suit, the kind of composed sorrow that photographed well. He saw Silas coming and his face did something complicated, surprise first, quickly smoothed over into something warmer, something that wanted to look like relief.

"Silas." Dominic set his glass down and moved to close the distance between them, arms already lifting like he meant to pull him into an embrace. "My God. Look at you. It's been, it's been years, I didn't think, I didn't know if Reyes would even find you in."

"Don't." Silas didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. The single word landed hard enough that Dominic's arms dropped back to his sides on their own.

"I know this is hard," Dominic said, softer now, adjusting. "I know. He was my brother. I loved him too. We are all, all of us here, we're grieving the same man, and I understand if you need someone to be angry at, but I am not your enemy, Silas, whatever you might have heard out there in the world."

"I haven't heard anything." Silas held his gaze, flat and unblinking. "Yet."

Something flickered behind Dominic's eyes, there and gone so fast that a lesser man wouldn't have caught it, but Silas had spent his whole life reading the half second before people decided how to lie to him, and he caught it clean.

"Where is he," Silas said.

"Silas, it's not, it's not a good idea to see him like this, they, they had to, the funeral home said it was better if we remembered him the way he."

"Where. Is. He."

The room around them had gone almost completely silent now, every guest pretending very hard to study their drinks, their shoes, anything that wasn't the two men standing three feet apart in the center of the hall with twenty years of history sitting between them like a loaded weapon nobody had drawn yet.

Dominic's jaw tightened. "Study. Second door on the left."

Silas walked away without another word, and Dominic didn't follow, which told Silas something too, that his uncle was more afraid of what might happen in a closed room with a coffin than he was of what people might whisper about him staying behind.

The study was dim, lit by a single lamp in the corner, and Jonathan Cross lay in an open casket at the center of it, dressed in a dark suit, hands folded over his chest in a way that looked nothing like the man Reyes had described to him on the drive over, a man who talked with his hands, who gripped a shoulder hard when he wanted someone to listen. Silas had no memory of his own to measure this stillness against. That absence sat in his chest like its own separate wound.

He stood over him for a long moment and said nothing at all.

Then he reached out, slow, and pulled back the collar of his father's shirt just enough to see the base of his throat.

There.

A mark, faint, nearly hidden beneath the mortician's careful work, a bruise in the shape of something that wasn't an accident, wasn't a fall, wasn't anything close to the story Reyes had said the Assembly was telling the world.

"They didn't even hide it well," Silas said quietly, to no one, to the empty room, to his father's still face. "They didn't think anyone who mattered would look close enough to check."

Behind him, the study door creaked open.

"I told you not to come in here alone." Dominic's voice, low, careful, standing in the doorway like he'd been waiting just outside the whole time. "There's things about that night that are complicated, Silas. Things I need you to hear from me before you hear them from someone with a reason to lie to you."

Silas turned around slowly, his father's collar still open beneath his fingers, the bruise catching the lamplight now for anyone with eyes to see.

"Someone already told me everything," Silas said. "Six votes for. One against. And you're the one who called the vote and gave the order."

Dominic went perfectly, completely still.

"I don't know what you think you."

"Don't lie to me again, Dominic." Silas's voice dropped lower than it had been all night, and something in it made even the shadows in the room feel like they were holding their breath. "That's the one rule I never break for anyone. Not even for the man who taught it to me."

For one long second, Dominic's carefully arranged grief cracked straight down the middle, and underneath it Silas saw something raw and unguarded flash across his uncle's face, something that looked less like sorrow and far more like fear.

Then, from somewhere deep in the house, a scream tore through the quiet, sharp and sudden and very, very close.