Chapter 39: Leave me in Stitches
The taste of blood had become a familiar ghost, a copper-penny phantom that lingered at the back of Logan’s tongue no matter how much water he drank. Standing in the penthouse foyer two hours later, a duffel bag at his feet felt like an admission of defeat. The city lights winked through the windows, a promise of chaos and life he was being taken from.
“This is a bad idea,” Logan said, his voice still carrying the rasp from the coughing fit. He leaned against the wall, feigning a casualness his trembling knees undermined. “You just got elected. You can’t ghost the city for… how long? A week?”
“Three,” Roman said without looking up from his phone, tapping out a message. He was dressed down in dark jeans and a sweater, the politician shed for something more casually ruthless.
“Three weeks? Roman, come on. You’ve got committees forming. People to strong-arm. You need to be here.”
“What I need,” Roman said, sliding the phone into his pocket and finally meeting Logan’s eyes, “is not to be photographed next to you while you’re busy painting my handkerchiefs with lung tissue. The narrative is ‘recovery in a peaceful setting.’ It’s good PR. It makes me look… human.” He said the last word with a faint, ironic twist, as if it were a costume he was trying on.
“I’m fine right here,” Logan insisted, pushing off the wall. A wave of lightheadedness made the action less convincing than he’d hoped. “The air’s fine. I’ll use the stupid breathing thing. You go do your councilman thing.”
Roman closed the distance between them in three silent strides. He didn’t touch Logan, but his presence was a physical pressure. “I don’t have a mandatory meeting for twenty-one days. Everything else is remote. This isn’t a negotiation.” His gaze dropped to Logan’s hands, which were subtly seeking the wall’s support again. “You can walk to the car, or Emil can carry you. Which option lets you keep pretending you have a choice?”
The threat was delivered calmly, almost kindly. It hollowed Logan out. The bravado, the snark—it was armor for a body that had turned to glass. He saw the scene: his own limp form hauled over a bodyguard’s shoulder like a sack of grain, the final shred of his dignity gone. He bent, his back twinging in protest, and grabbed the duffel bag. “I hate you,” he muttered, the words lacking any heat.
“I know,” Roman said, a hint of satisfaction in his voice. He placed a guiding hand not on Logan’s arm, but firmly between his shoulder blades, and propelled him toward the private elevator.
The garage was a tomb of cool, damp air and expensive engine smells. The black SUV waited, idling softly. Emil stood by the open rear door, a silent monument. As Logan approached, another cough gathered in his chest, a dry, warning hitch. He stifled it, swallowing against the itch. The effort made his eyes water.
Roman saw it. His hand on Logan’s back pressed harder, steering him directly to the door. “In.”
Logan slumped into the leather seat, the duffel bag landing beside him with a thud. He was breathing too fast, the suppressed cough making his ribs ache. Roman slid in after him, filling the space. He pulled the door shut, and the sound sealed them in a silent, pressurized cabin. Emil got behind the wheel. The partition between the front and back stayed down.
“Seatbelt,” Roman said.
Logan fumbled with the clasp, his fingers clumsy. Roman watched for a three-count, then leaned over, his cologne—something crisp and expensive—cutting through the car’s sterile smell. He took the metal tongue from Logan’s hand and clicked it neatly into place. The gesture was efficient, impersonal, and utterly infantilizing. Logan looked straight ahead, his jaw clenched so tight it ached.
The car purred out of the garage and into the Gotham night. The city slid past the tinted windows—a blur of neon and shadow, of grime and fleeting life. Logan watched his reflection ghost over the spectacle, a pale man trapped in a dark box. The distance from the penthouse grew, and with it, a strange panic began to unspool in his gut. He was being extracted, removed from the ecosystem he understood, however poorly he thrived in it.
“You’re holding your breath,” Roman observed. He wasn’t looking at Logan; he was scrolling through emails on his phone, the blue light etching his sharp profile.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not. Breathe out. Slowly.”
Logan exhaled, and it triggered what he’d been holding back. A cough, sharp and sudden, punched out of him. He turned his face to the window, muffling the sound in the crook of his elbow. It was a single, harsh bark. He waited, tense, for the chain reaction. It didn’t come. The cough was clean, if painful. A small, pathetic victory.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Roman’s thumb pause over his screen. A minute adjustment. A silent note taken.
They crossed the bridge, the river a black expanse dotted with phantom lights. The iconic, oppressive skyline began to shrink in the rear window, replaced by the low, tangled sprawl of the outer boroughs, then by the dark lumps of industrialized countryside.
The silence in the car was dense, loaded with everything unsaid. Logan’s independence, always a fraying rope, now felt severed. He was cargo. He was a project.
“It’s not a prison,” Roman said, as if reading the thoughts plastered across Logan’s reflection. “It’s a clinic. With better walls.”
“What’s it called?” Logan asked, his voice quiet against the hum of the tires.
“The house?”
“Yeah. Does it have a name? All rich people houses have stupid names. ‘Windcrest.’ ‘Fucking… Hawk’s Perch.’”
A faint, almost invisible smile touched Roman’s mouth. “It’s just an address. But the previous owner was morbid. He called it Carrion House.”
Logan barked a laugh, which instantly dissolved into another dry, rattling cough. He pressed his forehead against the cool window. “Of course he did. Of course.” Carrion House. A place for broken things to go and be picked apart. Fitting.
The urban grit gave way to true darkness, broken only by the car’s headlights carving a tunnel through towering pines. The air coming through the vents changed, losing the city’s chemical tang, gaining the cold, clean scent of damp earth and rotting leaves. It was too clean. It felt like breathing in nothing.
An hour in, the weight of his own weakness pressed Logan down into the leather. The adrenaline of the argument was gone. The exhaustion was total, a leaden fatigue that seeped into his bones. His head listed sideways. He fought it, blinking hard.
He lost the fight.
His temple came to rest against the cool window. The vibration of the car traveled through his skull. He was floating in a dim, weary haze when he felt a shift in pressure beside him. Roman was moving.
Logan forced his eyes open, expecting a command, a critique.
Roman was simply rearranging himself. He shifted closer, his shoulder aligning with Logan’s. Then, with a deliberate, unembarrassed motion, he lifted his arm and draped it along the back of the seat behind Logan’s neck. It wasn’t quite an embrace. It was a claim of space, an architectural support. His fingers brushed the tense cord of Logan’s trapezius muscle.
“Sleep,” Roman commanded, his voice a low vibration in the dark cabin. “You’re exhausting to look at.”
The touch was a paradox. It was confinement and support, dominance and shelter. Logan wanted to shrink away. His body, traitorous and spent, sank into it. The solidity of Roman’s frame became a wall against the swaying motion of the car. The warmth was undeniable. He was being held in place, and the awful, shameful truth was that part of him felt too broken to stand on its own.
He closed his eyes, the lights of passing cars painting red streaks against his lids. The last thing he was aware of was the faint, rhythmic press of Roman’s thumb against the base of his skull, a steady, metronomic pulse that felt less like comfort and more like a reminder: I am here. You are here. This is the reality now.
And the car, a sealed bullet of black glass, sped on, carrying them deeper into the hungry, pine-scented dark.
In her apartment, the world was reduced to the glow of a laptop screen. Maya had traded her potted soil for digital dirt. Property records, satellite maps, archived society pages from upstate towns.
The name ‘Sionis’ yielded little. He was careful. But ‘Carrion House’ was a gift. The previous owner’s morbid vanity was a crack in the facade. She found it in a digitized local paper from fifteen years ago—a brief feature on the ‘quirky’ estate of a reedgecollector. The photo was grainy, but it showed a severe stone structure hunched against a hill, all gables and dark windows, surrounded by overgrown gardens.
She cross-referenced the location with the postal box zone from the clinic request. A match. This was the place.
She leaned back, chewing her thumbnail. A private clinic, a gothic house, a man who caught falling bodies not to cushion the impact, but to control the trajectory. Logan was there. In the belly of it.
Her phone buzzed. Clarissa. Any news?
Maya typed slowly, her message a carefully planted seed. He’s been taken out of the city. To a private estate for ‘recovery.’ It’s very secluded. I just hope he has people who really see him there.
She sent it, then stared at the satellite image of Carrion House, a stark geometric shadow against the textured green of the wilderness. Seclusion could be peaceful. It could also be a perfect place for something to be forgotten, or reshaped, away from prying eyes.
She needed to get closer. She needed to see the soil firsthand. A plan, thin and dangerous as a spider’s thread, began to form in the quiet of her room, under the watchful, silent leaves of her plants.
The plan was simple, audacious, and probably stupid. She would take a personal day, drive upstate, and just see the place. Reconnaissance. A gardener assessed the land before planting. Her phone buzzed again, breaking her concentration. An unknown number with a Gotham area code.
She answered. "Maya speaking."
"The clinic girl." The voice was a dry, rustling whisper, like leaves scraped across pavement. It was unmistakable. A cold thread of adrenaline pulled tight down Maya’s spine. She hadn't heard that voice since the fundraiser, where Poison Ivy had pressed a sprig of wolfsbane into her palm with a knowing look.
"Pamela," Maya said, using the name few dared to. "How did you get this number?"
"A tree’s roots find the cracks in the concrete. Your interest in a certain decaying property has vibrations. You’re digging in soil that doesn’t concern you." There was no greeting, no preamble. It was a straight slash to the point.
"It concerns me if someone’s being buried in it," Maya shot back, her voice lower.
A soft, disdainful sound whispered through the receiver. "The wounded stray? The one who played hero? He’s been taken to the country air. He’s healing, or he’s dying. It’s a natural process. Why are your roots tangling in his business?"
"He didn’t choose to be part of Sionis’s ecosystem."
"And you think you can transplant him?" Ivy’s laugh was brittle. "You’re nurturing a single, half-dead seedling in a window box while the whole forest is on fire. This is projection. A distraction. Your mission was the city. The concrete. The poisoned ground here. But that’s hard. It’s vast. It doesn’t offer the satisfying fantasy of saving one pretty, damaged thing from one bad man."
The words landed, each one a sharp stone. Maya’s hand tightened on her phone. "It’s not a fantasy."
"Isn’t it?" The whisper was merciless. "You see a captive audience. A validation for your kindness. He’s out of the city, Maya. The toxic air here isn’t his problem anymore. But you’re still breathing it. And you’re ignoring it to follow a fairy tale." There was a pause, filled with the sound of a distant, humid breeze. "Or is it that you see yourself in his cage? And breaking him out feels like breaking yourself free?"
Maya had no answer. The silence stretched, accusation filling it.
"Feed your city or feed your savior complex," Ivy hissed, and the line went dead.
The SUV crunched to a halt on a vast gravel turnaround. The engine cut, and the silence that rushed in was absolute and heavy. No distant sirens, no hum of infrastructure. Just the wind moving through endless pines, a sound like a slow, cold exhalation.
Carrion House loomed. The photo hadn’t captured its sheer, damp severity. It was dark fieldstone, three stories of jutting gables and narrow windows that reflected nothing. A covered porch held shadows too deep to penetrate. One single, feeble bulb above an enormous oak door did little but draw attention to the darkness around it.
Logan stared through the window. His body felt like it had been packed in wet sand during the drive. The deep, reluctant rest he’d taken leaning against Roman had left him groggy and uncoordinated.
“Out,” Roman said, already opening his door. The cold sliced in, sharp and clean, carrying the scent of pine resin and wet stone. It was a shock after the sealed, recycled cabin.
Logan fumbled for his door handle. His fingers, stiff and clumsy, slipped. He cursed under his breath, a cloud of vapor forming in the frigid air. He tried again, leveraging his weight. The door swung open and he half-fell out, his boots skidding on the loose gravel. He caught himself on the door frame, a jarring impact that sent a fresh ache through his shoulder.
Roman was already at the trunk, retrieving bags. He didn’t look over. “Emil will bring the rest. Don’t just stand there in the cold.”
Logan pushed off the car, his legs uncertain. The gravel was treacherous, shifting underfoot. Each step was a calculated effort. The twenty feet to the porch steps looked like a mile. The wind cut through his jacket, finding every gap. He could feel the weakness in his core, a deep hollow tremor that threatened to unravel his balance.
He reached the bottom of the stone steps. There were five of them. They might as well have been a cliff. He placed a hand on the icy iron railing, its cold biting through his skin. He lifted one foot. The simple motion demanded a humiliating amount of focus. He ascended one step, then two.
On the third, a familiar, deep itch bloomed behind his sternum. He paused, gripping the railing, willing it away. His breath hitched. He tried to swallow the cough, to press it down. It was a mistake.
The convulsion ripped through him, bending him double on the step. It was a wet, ragged tear of sound in the pristine quiet. He clung to the railing, the world narrowing to the struggle for air, the hot, metallic flood in his mouth. He spat onto the dark gravel, a vivid red against the grey.
He didn’t hear Roman approach. He just felt the solid presence materialize beside him. A strong arm slid around his waist, hoisting him upright, taking his weight entirely. Roman’s other hand grabbed Logan’s wrist, peeling his white-knuckled grip from the railing.
“Enough,” Roman said, his voice flat with impatience. He pulled Logan’s arm across his own shoulders, anchoring him. “Walk.”
It was not a request. It was a physical command. Logan’s body, exhausted and defeated, obeyed. He leaned into the support, his head dropping close to Roman’s shoulder. The smell of Roman’s wool coat and that crisp cologne filled his senses, blocking out the pine. Each step up was guided, controlled, Roman’s body moving his like a master with a faltering puppet.
The humiliation was a live wire, but beneath it, a terrifying relief was flooding in. The fight was gone. The pretense of independence was too heavy a weight. He let his head rest more fully against Roman, his eyes closing. He was carried, for all practical purposes, over the threshold.
The oak door swung open into a vast, dark hall. The air inside was still, cold, and smelled of wood polish and something faintly dusty, like old books. A single crystal chandelier hung unlit above. Roman didn’t pause. He walked them forward, their footsteps echoing on marble, then muffling on a deep Persian runner.
He steered them to a wide, curving staircase. “Your room is upstairs. No elevator. Consider it motivation.”
Logan, his face buried in the rough wool of Roman’s coat, just nodded. He had nothing left. He leaned in completely, letting Roman bear the full burden of his weight, his steps, his direction. The last shield of his defiance cracked and fell away, leaving only the raw, grateful surrender to this cold, pragmatic care. He was too tired to stand, and Roman simply would not let him fall.
In her room, Maya stared at the dead phone in her hand. Ivy’s words coiled in her gut, thorny and true. The satellite image of Carrion House still glowed on her screen. A single, isolated point of darkness.
Her gaze shifted to her windowsill, to a delicate maidenhair fern whose fronds were browning at the tips from the city’s air. She’d been nursing it for months, a tiny, losing battle against a vast, toxic atmosphere.
Poison Ivy was right. It was a fantasy. A satisfying, contained story with a visible villain and a tangible victim. The city’s decay was a diffuse, systemic poison, a thousand dying ferns. It offered no clear enemy, no dramatic rescue.
Logan was out of the poison. He was in a clean, controlled environment, however gilded the cage. Her mission had always been the poisoned ground right here.
She closed the laptop, the image of the house vanishing. The plan, that spider-silk thread, snapped. She looked at her brown-tipped fern, her jaw tightening. The anger she kept banked, the simmering fury at the world’s injustices, found a clearer focus. It wasn’t about saving one man from one garden. It was about burning the whole toxic system to the ground and seeing what could grow from the ashes.
She picked up the fern, her touch gentle on its failing leaves. Then she carried it to the sink, ran the water until it was cold, and began to wash the city’s grime from each delicate frond, one by one.
Then she carried it to the sink, ran the water until it was cold, and began to wash the city’s grime from each delicate frond, one by one. The dirt swirled down the drain, a tiny, temporary victory. She made a decision, there at the sink. She would tend her own garden, the one right in front of her.
The clinic the next morning smelled of antiseptic and the new, earthy scent of dried lavender. Maya’s proposal, a modest pilot program for plant-based anxiety tinctures, had been approved by the city’s new wellness initiative—one of Roman Sionis’s first, photogenic acts. The irony was a bitter pill she swallowed with her coffee. His machinery had inadvertently cleared a path for her small rebellion.
“So we just… give them tea?” asked Dr. Chen, peering at the neatly labeled jars of chamomile and lemon balm Maya had arranged on a side counter.
“It’s a complementary option,” Maya said, smoothing the city’s approval letter. “For the low-level anxiety cases. The ones where we usually just say ‘try deep breathing.’ It’s something tangible. Something from the ground.”
Dr. Chen shrugged, a practical man won over by paperwork. “Fine by me. Just don’t let it interfere with the real meds.”
Her first patient was Clarissa. Maya offered the chamomile blend in a small muslin bag. “A trial,” she said, her voice gentle. “See if it takes the edge off the city noise in your head.”
Clarissa held the bag to her nose, inhaling. “Smells like my grandma’s kitchen.” A faint, real smile touched her lips. “Better than those pills that made me feel like a ghost.”
Watching her go, Maya felt a fragile sense of purpose. This was a root, however small, pushing through cracked concrete. On her lunch break, sitting on the clinic’s back step in a rare slice of sun, she pulled out her phone. The impulse was sudden, a spark of optimism she wanted to share. She typed a message to Logan’s number: Small win today. City approved my plant program. First patient just left with chamomile instead of a prescription. Feels like something.
She hit send. The message showed a single checkmark, then a spinning wheel. It never changed to ‘Delivered.’ She stared at it, the sun feeling suddenly cold on her skin. She typed another: You’d probably call it hippie nonsense. Hope the country air is less stupid than the city air. Send. Same spinning wheel. Same failure.
The screen glared back at her, a silent, digital wall. He was truly gone, sealed away in that house of stone and pine. She put the phone away, the small win turning to ash in her mouth.
At Carrion House, the air was so clean it felt thin in Logan’s lungs. The silence was a physical presence, broken only by the groan of old pipes and the whisper of the pines outside his window. Roman’s skeleton staff were ghosts: a cook who left meals in the warming oven, a taciturn groundskeeper who never made eye contact, a nurse who took his vitals with cold, efficient hands and left without speaking.
They managed the property, and by extension, him. His world shrank to the rhythms of their invisible service. He was a specimen in a very well-appointed jar.
The weakness was a constant companion. It lived in the tremor that appeared in his hands when he tried to lift a full water glass. It was the dizzying fatigue that slammed into him after a shower, forcing him to sit on the tiled floor until the black spots receded. The bloody coughs still came, violent and humiliating, but they were quieter here, muffled by thick rugs and vast, empty rooms. No one but Roman ever saw them.
His own room was a gilded cage. A four-poster bed, heavy drapes, a view of endless, indifferent trees. It was there, in the profound quiet, that his thoughts grew teeth. They replayed the fall at the community center, the feel of Roman’s grip on his shirt, the coppery taste of his own failing body. The silence amplified every fearful whisper: You are broken. You are a burden. This is your life now.
He couldn’t stand it.
He began to wander. The house was a maze of dark wood and faded tapestries. He traced its corridors like a restless spirit, his socked feet silent on the runners. His wandering always led him to the same place: the heavy oak door of Roman’s study.
It was the only room that ever held a human sound.
The first time, he just lingered in the hallway, leaning against the wall, listening to the low, steady drone of Roman’s voice on a video call. It was about zoning permits, sewer lines, municipal bonds. Dull, dry stuff. To Logan, it was a lifeline. It was proof that a world existed beyond his own rattling breath.
The next day, he pushed the door open. Roman glanced up from his desk, a massive slab of obsidian, but didn’t pause his monologue to a city planner on the screen. Logan shuffled to a large, worn leather armchair in the corner, its cushions molded by decades of use. He sank into it, pulling a blanket from its back over himself. He didn’t ask permission. He just… existed there.
Roman’s voice washed over him. “The drainage issue on 5th is a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. I want the engineering report that says otherwise, not the political summary.” It was sharp, authoritative, filling the cavernous room.
Logan closed his eyes. The chaotic, self-loathing spiral of his own mind quieted, soothed by the mundane certainty of Roman’s control. He wasn’t being asked to participate, or perform, or be anything. He was just allowed to be present while Roman dominated the universe from his desk.
He began to spend hours there. He’d doze in the chair, the blanket pulled to his chin, while Roman debated budgetary allocations. He’d stare at the fire in the granite hearth, his mind blissfully empty, as Roman eviscerated a rival council member over speakerphone. Sometimes, Roman would talk to him directly.
“The problem with Gotham,” Roman said one afternoon, not looking up from a blueprint, “is that everyone mistakes decay for character. They think the grime is authentic. It’s not. It’s just neglect.”
Logan, curled in the chair with a book he wasn’t reading, made a noncommittal sound.
“You see it in the architecture. The beautiful bones are there, under the soot and the graffiti. But you don’t heal it by letting vines crawl over it. You heal it by cleaning the stone. By replacing the rotten beams.” He finally looked at Logan, his green-hazel eyes catching the firelight. “Strength isn’t about enduring decay. It’s about having the will to cut it out.”
Logan held his gaze for a moment, then looked back at the fire. The words settled into him, finding their own meaning. Was he a rotten beam? Was this what being cut out felt like?
Another day, after a coughing fit left him shaky and pale, he found himself on the study’s deep, velvet sofa. Roman was pacing, rehearsing points for a virtual town hall.
“They want safety, but they protest new patrol routes. They want clean streets, but they fight the sanitation fees. It’s a child’s logic.” He stopped, noticing Logan watching him from the sofa. “What?”
“Nothing,” Logan murmured, his voice still rough. “Just think it’s funny you’re calling anyone a child.”
A flicker of something—amusement, maybe—crossed Roman’s face. He resumed pacing. “The child wants the cookie but doesn’t want to open the jar. The adult opens the jar. Or breaks it.” He spoke to the room, to the portraits on the wall, to Logan. “I’m not here to be liked. I’m here to open the jar.”
Logan drifted off to the sound of his footsteps and the crackle of the fire, the words weaving into a strange, cold lullaby. His sleep here was deep, dreamless. In this room, under the blanket of Roman’s absolute, unshakable certainty, the terrifying thought-whispers couldn’t reach him. His weakness was just a fact here, not a failure. It was a condition of the environment, like the cold outside, and Roman was the furnace that kept it at bay.
One evening, the nurse had been particularly brisk, her fingers cold as she took his pulse. After she left, a deep chill had settled in his bones, one the fire in his bedroom couldn’t touch. He found himself standing outside the study door in just his t-shirt and sweatpants, shivering.
He didn’t knock. He pushed inside.
Roman was on the couch this time, reviewing papers, glasses perched low on his nose. He looked up, a question in his eyes.
“My room’s cold,” Logan said, the simple statement sounding like a plea in the quiet room.
Roman watched him for a long moment, then nodded once toward the other end of the sofa. Logan crossed the room, the thick rug soft under his feet, and sank into the cushions. He pulled a throw blanket over himself, tucking his feet underneath. The shivering slowly subsided.
Roman went back to his papers. The only sounds were the turning of pages and the settling of the fire.
Logan’s eyes grew heavy. The tension he carried always unspooled here, in this specific atmosphere of focused, impersonal power. His head tipped back against the sofa. Just as he was about to slip under, he felt a shift in weight.
Roman had moved closer. Not touching, but near. The heat from his body was a solid wave in the cool room. Then, Roman’s hand came to rest, not on Logan, but on the back of the sofa just behind his head. A claim. A boundary. A watchful, possessive guard.
Logan didn’t open his eyes. He let out a slow, deep breath, the last of the shivers melting away. In the dark behind his eyelids, with the scent of old paper and Roman’s cologne in the air, and the solid, silent presence beside him, his mind finally went still. It wasn’t peace. It was surrender, and it was the closest thing to quiet he had known in weeks. He slept, deeply, while Roman worked, the city’s problems spread across his lap, his free hand resting on the furniture just inches from Logan’s sleeping form.