Page 97 of Make Them Bleed

We do, and it’s awful. There’s no triumph. There’s no slow clap. Juno moves in a way I don’t like—too fast, too contained. Knight ghosts down the hall and out the door. Render evaporates. Ozzy stumbles and then corrects, and I take Juno’s elbow because I don’t know how else to hold the world together.

Outside, the air is shout-cold. The masks come off like we’re shedding skin we didn’t want to grow. We slide into the car and the siren is already a whisper three blocks away.

Juno rips the Ghostface off and drops it into her lap like it’s burned her. She stares at her hands as if they’re new. “I didn’t?—”

“You didn’t,” I say again, and I hate the way my words don’t fix it. They never do. They’re only words.

Knight drives because I shouldn’t. Ozzy has gone silent, which means his head is full of the wrong kind of noise. Render stares out the window. Gage is a breath in our ears that sayshome. Now.

In the rearview mirror, red lights bounce and turn and disappear. My stomach does a slow roll that feels like grief and adrenaline and a moral injury I can’t put back.

No one talks until we hit the bridge. The river below is black, pretending to be calm.

“Tell me this means something,” she says, voice scraped.

“It does,” I say, and I force my own voice to be the kind that doesn’t lie just to make pain shut up.

Her jaw clenches. She nods once, too sharp to be agreement and too soft to be refusal. “Coleman,” she says, like a vow. “Rook. Beau. Devin. We will not accidentally anything with them.”

“We won’t,” I say. “We will make suretheytrip.”

Render speaks without looking at us. “Merritt’s absence is a bell tolling. They’ll hear it. They’ll close ranks. Or they’ll preen. Either way, we see who flinches and why.”

“I want an ending,” Juno whispers.

“Then we’ll write one,” I say, knowing exactly how arrogant that sounds and saying it anyway because we are past polite.

She presses her palm to the glass, fingers spread, city lights slipping under like fish. “I hated him,” she says.

“I know you did.” I release a breath. “I hated him too.”

“The four left will know we did this,” she says, and the worst part is how right she is.

“It was an accident.”

“They won’t care.”

“Then we make sure the world knows the truth,” I say. “Huxley will find the call. Render will find the cameras that don’t show us. Paul will have already dropped the packet by morning.”

We drop Render and Ozzy at their building with a look that substitutes for a hug. Knight drives us the last stretch and doesn’t say a word because that would make this about him. I love him a little for that.

At Juno’s door, I walk her up. The hallway is the same as last week and somehow nothing is. She stands with the key in her hand and doesn’t use it.

“Arrow,” she says, and my name in her mouth is a question I want to answer with a miracle.

“I’ve got you,” I say, because it’s true. “I’m here.”

She opens the door, goes in, turns, looks like she wants to slam it and invite me in at the same time. She chooses neither. “Tomorrow,” she says. “We start again. And we don’t fall. And we start telling the world the truth.”

“Tomorrow,” I echo.

She closes the door softly. I stand in the empty hall and feel every decision I’ve ever made stack up behind my ribs like books I should have shelved by subject.

Knight drives me home and we’re both quiet the entire ride. We have names. We had a plan. Now we have a body that wasn’t on the whiteboard. Oops is a word for spilled coffee and tripping on curbs. Tonight deserves something with edges.

Coleman. Rook. Beau. Devin. Gray’s shadow. Nico’s ring.

We are done being men in masks. We’re going to take off theirs. And when we do, I want to be looking straight at them in the kind of light that doesn’t forgive.