The crisis, when it finally came, didn't arrive through hollow_choir, or Yankovic, or anyone from Ashford's world at all. It arrived through Santiago, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the most mundane way imaginable — my brother, home early from a canceled practice, walking into my room without knocking to borrow a charger, exactly as he'd done a thousand times before, except this time I wasn't home to hear the door.
I found out about it from my mother's face when I walked in that evening, tight and pale in a way I recognized instantly as trouble, and from Santiago's silence at the dinner table, which was somehow louder than anything he could have said. My dad seemed oblivious to it, chatting easily about his shift, and I understood, watching my mother's careful, forced smile at his jokes, that whatever had happened, she'd caught some piece of Santiago's unease without knowing the shape of it and had decided not to press until she had more to go on. I ate through the entire meal running silent calculations, watching my brother push food around his plate without eating much of it, and felt the specific, sick anticipation of a man watching a slow-motion accident he couldn't yet identify the source of.
I ran through the inventory of my own carelessness while my dad talked, cataloguing every object in my room that could have caused this particular look on Santiago's face — the lockbox, obviously, but also the burner phones, the second set of clothes I kept for Jester and Somnus both, the cash I hadn't yet bothered moving somewhere less obviously suspicious than under a mattress a curious younger brother clearly had more access to than I'd ever accounted for. I'd built careful walls around Emma, around Annabelle, around my parents. I realized, watching Santiago avoid my eyes across the table, that I had never once built a wall specifically sized for a little brother who wandered in and out of my room the way he always had, because some part of me had never quite let go of a version of him who was still too young to notice anything at all.
"Can I talk to you?" he asked, once dinner was cleared and our parents had drifted into the living room, and I followed him to my room with a cold, specific dread already settling into my stomach.
He closed the door behind us and reached under my bed — my bed, not his, meaning he'd looked somewhere he had no ordinary reason to be looking — and pulled out the small lockbox I kept the Glock and a spare stack of cash in, the one I'd genuinely believed was well enough hidden that even a curious sibling would never think to search that specific spot.
He stood there holding the box like it might go off in his hands, shoulders hunched in a way that made him look years younger than fifteen, and I felt the specific, sick lurch of watching a careful architecture I'd spent months maintaining threaten to come apart over something as small and ordinary as a dropped phone charger.
"I wasn't trying to snoop," he said, before I could say anything at all. "The charger fell behind your bed and I was reaching for it and I felt this under there and I thought — I don't know what I thought. I opened it before I really thought about whether I should."
I looked at the box in his hands, at his face, pale and scared in a way I hadn't seen since we were kids and he'd broken something of Dad's, and felt, for the first time in months, a fear that had nothing to do with Ashford's wall or hollow_choir's black car — the specific, older fear of watching a carefully built wall crack in front of someone I actually loved instead of someone I was merely managing.
"Santi." I kept my voice even, carefully, the way I'd learned to keep it even in far more dangerous rooms than this one. "I need you to give me that," I said, holding out a hand that I willed, with real effort, to stay steady, "and I need you to tell me you haven't told Mom or Dad."
"I haven't. I swear. I didn't know what to do, so I just — I put it back and I didn't say anything, and then you weren't home, and I've just been sitting with it for two days not knowing what the hell is going on with you." His voice cracked on the last few words, fifteen years old and genuinely frightened in a way that cut through every careful calculation I'd built over months in about four seconds flat. "Is that real? The gun? Why do you have that much cash just sitting under your bed? Damian, what is going on with you?"
I stood there a long moment, looking at my little brother — not a target, not an asset, not a variable in an equation, just Santiago, who still slept with a nightlight some nights and who'd asked me, months ago now, in a completely different context, whether I'd ever been in a situation dangerous enough to need help getting out of — and understood, with a clarity that hurt more than anything Ashford or hollow_choir had managed to make me feel, that this was the exact moment I'd been quietly dreading since the very first week of this second life, arriving not through some grand betrayal but through a charger that had simply fallen behind a bed.
I thought about hypnosis. The command was right there, easy, familiar — a purple flicker, a forgotten afternoon, a lockbox that had simply never existed in his memory at all. I'd used it on my parents twice already, and each time some part of me had told myself it was the smaller cruelty, the kinder lie, better than the alternative of them knowing the truth and having to live with the weight of it.
I looked at Santiago's face, at the specific, raw fear sitting there without any of the adult composure my parents had at least managed to wrap around their own worry, and found that I could not make myself do it. Not to him. Not this time.
"I need you to trust me," I said instead, voice quieter than I meant it to come out. "I'm involved in something dangerous. More dangerous than I ever wanted to bring anywhere near this family, and I've spent months trying to keep it as far away from you and Mom and Dad as I possibly could. The gun is protection. The money is real, and it's legitimate as far as anyone outside this room ever needs to know, and I promise you — I promise you, Santi — that I am doing everything humanly possible to make sure none of it ever touches you."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I can give you right now that's actually true." I took the lockbox from his hands, gently, and set it back under the bed, further back this time, somewhere a fallen charger would never reach again. "I need you to hold onto this for me. Not tell Mom and Dad, not because I'm asking you to lie for me forever, but because telling them right now would put all of us in more danger, not less. I know that's a lot to ask. I know it's not fair. But I'm asking anyway, because I don't have a better option, and because I trust you more than almost anyone else in my life."
He was quiet a long time, searching my face for something — a lie, maybe, or the absence of one — and whatever he found there seemed to be enough, at least for tonight, because he nodded, slow and reluctant, the nod of someone agreeing to carry a weight he didn't fully understand the shape of yet. I watched something shift behind his eyes as he made the decision, some small, irreversible step from the little brother who still trusted the world to explain itself to him toward something closer to the wary, careful person I'd apparently just started turning him into.
"Can I ask you one more thing?" he said, quieter now, some of the fear ebbing into something more careful. "Are you in trouble? Like, actual trouble. Not the kind you can talk your way out of."
I thought about how to answer that honestly without handing him more weight than a fifteen-year-old should have to carry. "I don't know yet," I said finally. "I think I'm managing it. I think I'm good at managing it. But I'd be lying if I told you there was zero chance I'm wrong about that."
He nodded slowly, absorbing that with more maturity than I'd given him credit for having. "Okay. I still don't love it. But okay."
"You'll tell me eventually," he said. "For real. Not just enough to make me stop asking."
He lingered a moment at the door, hand on the frame, looking back at me with an expression that was trying, visibly, to land somewhere between trust and doubt and not quite managing to settle on either one. "I mean it, Damian. Not, like, next year. Not when I'm thirty. Eventually that actually happens."
"Eventually," I agreed, and meant it in a way that scared me more than anything hollow_choir had said in that black car, because I understood, watching my little brother leave my room with a promise I fully intended to keep, that I had just made a commitment to a version of honesty I had no idea, yet, how I was ever going to survive keeping.
I checked on him once more before I finally tried to sleep myself, cracking his door open just enough to see him curled on his side, phone still glowing faintly in one loose hand, breathing the slow, even breath of someone who'd cried himself into exhaustion rather than any real peace. I stood there a long moment, watching him, feeling the specific ache of loving someone you'd just handed a burden they never should have had to carry, and understood, closing his door as quietly as I'd opened it, that whatever else this second life cost me, it had just cost my little brother something too, and there wasn't a single ledger anywhere that could make that trade look fair.
I lay awake a long while after he'd gone back to his own room, running the whole evening over, and found myself circling back, again and again, to the moment I hadn't hypnotized him — the moment where every instinct built over months of exactly this kind of crisis had offered me the easy way out, and I'd chosen the harder one instead. I didn't fully understand why. Some part of it was Santiago himself, the specific shape of my history with him, older and messier and more load-bearing than my history with Emma or Annabelle or anyone else I'd met since waking up in this body. But some other part of it, I suspected, lying there in the dark, was simpler and considerably more unsettling: I had started, somewhere in the last few months, to worry about what I was becoming every time I reached for that particular shortcut, and Santiago's fear, small and specific and entirely mine to have caused, had been the first thing in a long while that made the worry loud enough to actually listen to.
I didn't know what that meant, long-term, for the throne, or the mask, or the mountain of bodies my sleeping mind kept building out of the choices my waking mind kept making. I only knew that some doors, once you decided not to walk through them, stayed a little harder to open the next time you needed to — and that some part of me, quiet and stubborn and increasingly rare, was glad of that.