Chapter 12
1042 Words
Riot
My real name is Ellis Vane.
Nobody has called me that in eleven years. I stopped answering to it around the same time I stopped being the person it belonged to. Ellis Vane was a twenty-year-old kid from South London who still thought the world had a bottom you could hit and push off from. Riot was what came after. After the bottom turned out to be a trapdoor.
I grew up in Peckham, youngest of three. My brother Deon was six years older and out of the house before I was old enough to understand what out of the house really meant. My sister Cara was two years above me, which meant she was the one I actually knew, the one who pulled me out of fights I started and made me eat when Mum was having one of her bad weeks and told me every single time I said something self-destructive that I was smarter than that.
She was right. I was smarter than that.
She was also smarter than the man she fell for at seventeen.
His name was Terrence. Twenty-four, good-looking in the sharp way that looks like confidence until you understand it's something colder. He had money in the way that certain men in certain neighborhoods had money, which meant it came from somewhere nobody discussed and disappeared if you looked at it directly. I didn't like him from the first time Cara brought him around. I told her that. She told me I was being overprotective.
She was right about that too.
I found out about his Voss connections six months into their relationship. Low level, but real. He ran a collection operation for one of Aldric's local distribution networks. The kind of work that kept its hands clean by staying one layer removed from the actual violence.
I told Cara. She said she'd handle it. Three weeks later she was dead.
The police said it was accidental. Said she fell. Said the bruising was consistent with a fall down the stairs in the flat she and Terrence shared. Said there was no evidence of foul play. Said it with the particular tiredness of people who had already decided what they were going to say before they arrived.
I was twenty years old and I sat in the corridor of a hospital that smelled like bleach and bad news and I made a decision that was really the only decision I was capable of making at that moment.
I found Terrence's car three days later. I walked away from it while it was still burning and I didn't feel anything. That was the part nobody tells you. People talk about revenge like it delivers something. It doesn't deliver anything. It just removes a variable. The grief is still exactly where you left it.
Three weeks after that I was in a holding cell on an unrelated charge, a fight outside a pub that got out of hand in the specific way things got out of hand when you were a man with nothing left to protect, and Kael Draven walked in and paid my bail.
I had never met him before. I asked him why. He said: "Because you burned the right car." He offered me something to belong to.
I never asked how he knew about Terrence. I never asked why he chose me. Some things you don't pull on because the thread connects to too many other things.
That was eleven years ago.
Now I sat on the floor of a hallway with my back against Isolde's door and the clubhouse quiet around me and Cara sitting somewhere in the back of my chest the way she always did when things got close to the bone.
Kael hadn't told me to guard her door. He'd assigned two outer members to the building perimeter and told me to get some sleep. I'd gone to my room and lain on my bed and stared at the ceiling for forty minutes and then got up and walked here and sat down.
The light was still on underneath the door. Thin and steady. She hadn't moved for hours.
I thought about the Nadia meeting. The way Isolde had walked into that room and sat down like she had every right to be there, like fear was something she had already factored in and set to one side. Nadia had watched her with that careful measuring look and Isolde had looked straight back. I had watched it from the doorway and felt something shift in my chest that I didn't have a clean word for.
I thought about the back steps. Her saying Petra's name in that specific way, like the name itself was something she was trying to keep safe. The way grief looked on her face when she wasn't performing anything. Small and real and nothing like weakness.
Cara used to sit on the steps outside our building when things were heavy. Same posture almost. Knees up, face turned away.
I pressed the back of my head against the door and looked at the ceiling. Fury and grief. Eleven years of running on both of them. They were the same muscle, Kael told me once. You can use it to burn things or build things but it only runs one direction at a time.
I had been burning for so long I wasn't sure I remembered the other direction.
The light under the door went off. Came back on two minutes later.Then the door opened. She almost stepped on me. She caught herself on the frame and looked down and we stared at each other in the low hallway light. Her hair was loose. She had a large shirt on, her feet bare, and her eyes were wide and alert in the way of someone who hadn't slept at all.
She looked at me on the floor. She looked down the empty hallway. She slid down the doorframe and sat on the floor beside me, her back against the wall, close enough that I could have reached out and touched her shoulder.
"Were you here all night?" she asked.
"Go back to sleep."
"I can't."
The hallway was quiet for a moment.
"Me neither," I said..
- Writer
