night adroxis | 9

It's not like he meant to become this.

This person who stares right through people and holds a cigarette between two fingers as if it's not a ticket to a slow death.

Night knows that he's gone off, spoiled somehow without even realizing it. He can feel it in the heavy silence that sits in the room with him when he's alone, talons dug tight into his shoulderblade. "Eve," he says after a long moment of struggling to breathe past the weight of it, "Sit with me for a bit?"

But she's in the other room.

He gets these headaches sometimes, long affairs that make it hard to deal with light that split his skull in two. He squints as the room spins and braces himself on the desk, fingers white and bloodless against dark mahogany. He can't remember if they started happening before or after the ritual.

But the bullet went through his chest, not his head.

He dreams about that sometimes, how the force of the shots pulled Eve's hand out of his grip and the way he turned his head to look at her underneath the light of the storeroom skylight. The pain finally hit him after he saw the shuddering rise and fall of her chest. The blood that pooled beneath them soaked into his hair and he was still washing rust-red flakes out days later.

They gave him his first gun when he was eight. His first bullet hit the wall behind the target, his second the dirt in front. He cried that night and used Eve's nightgown to wipe his tears, the sound of the gun was too loud, the rebound painful.

Now he keeps a gun in a holster on his chest beneath his jacket at all times, funny how things change in less than a decade.

The street is quiet. It smells good, one in the morning after it's been raining all day on hot summer pavement paints a pretty picture and Night's got nowhere to be for once. It's just him, the cigarette and the overwhelming feeling of being watched. That never truly goes away because he can always feel it, all eyes on him, watching and waiting for the heir of the Adroxis clan to fuck up.

He's not his father but he tries to be, blank stares safely forming a wall between himself and his emotions to keep him safe. He's gotten so good at it in the past couple years he's begun to worry that maybe he actually doesn't feel anything at all.

Maybe it's more than just a safety tactic.

His feet take him down the street to the square that changed things four years back. He watched Tess Seraphim die there, body full of bullets before she hit the ground. They'd been Adroxis bullets, shot from guns sold to the Peacekeepers. His father had stood beside him, hands clenched into fists at his side as they both watched her fall.

Maybe they could have done something about it. Either way, he hasn't spoken to the triplets since.

Or to anyone really.

He wants to make excuses, say that The Ritual changed him and maybe it's partly true but not really. He'd been expecting the bullet, expecting the pain of it. He'd been gearing up to it for weeks beforehand. It was more than he expected but somehow also less.

His father's hand shook beneath the skylight, only slightly but Night had seen it. He'd stood with Eve silently as they'd been instructed to but a part of him had wanted to reach out, tell his dad that it was ok. He didn't need to pull the trigger, the sins of the father should not weigh down the children.

But he hadn't, he'd let him shoot them.

So there's a bullet hole above his heart.

It made a great excuse to just fall off the face of the earth too, to just be that perfect older brother, ice-cold and quiet. He knows there's a disconnect, that when he stands quietly in the dark, it's Eve they run to. He knows that he's broken things with his siblings but he doesn't know how to explain it.

How to tell them that the first time you use your gun to kill a person it's different, everything is. The world shifts, tilts, moves you out of place until you've lost time.

But he has no time to rest, the duties of the heir to the factory already having been on his and Eve's shoulders for two years. He's got a gang to run, a factory to learn how to lead and very little time to sleep, Night hardly even sees his bed. So he misses things, like evenings in the garden catching fireflies with Trace or the way he used to sit on the west balcony with Ty and talk until three in the morning.

The more he drifts away from them, the harder he finds it to come back.

The easier he finds it to point a gun at someone's head.

He gets why his dad built a wall.