Chapter 40: The Interview
The quiet at Carrion House was not peaceful. It was a vacuum. Logan moved through its rooms like a ghost through a museum, the only sounds the scuff of his socks on ancient rugs and the relentless, ticking clock of his own healing. His strength returned in whispers—the ability to climb the stairs without seeing stars, a cough that no longer left him tasting copper—but it felt less like recovery and more like an adjustment to the atmosphere of the place.
Roman’s study remained his anchor. He’d migrate there in the late mornings, after the nurse’s visit, and plant himself in the leather chair or on the corner of the sofa. He was reading now, actual books pulled from the dark, looming shelves—dry histories of Gothic architecture, thick volumes on Byzantine finance. He understood about one word in three. It didn’t matter. The words were a fence to keep his own thoughts corralled, and Roman’s low, constant voice on calls was the patrol outside the fence.
Today was different.
Roman ended a call and swiveled his chair. “The Gotham Gazette is sending a journalist. This afternoon.”
Logan lowered his book. “To the fortress of solitude? You’re giving tours?”
“A profile piece. ‘Councilman Sionis’s Rural Retreat: Charity and Recovery.’” Roman’s smile was a thin, practiced line. “Humanizing. They want a glimpse of the private man, nurturing his… ward back to health.”
The word ward landed like a stone in Logan’s gut. He kept his face blank. “So, what? I’m supposed to be napping prettily in the sunroom?”
“You’re supposed to be sitting right here,” Roman said, his gaze unwavering. “Looking appropriately convalescent, but alert. Grateful. You will speak when spoken to. You will corroborate the narrative of charitable intervention and peaceful recuperation.”
“Corroborate.” Logan tested the word. “You mean lie.”
“I mean perform,” Roman corrected, standing up and walking to the window. He looked out at the pines. “Performance is the only truth that matters in politics. You, of all people, should understand that. It’s just a different stage from your diner.” He turned, his gray eyes catching the weak light. “This is important. Your presence sells the story. The defiant young man, humbled by tragedy, saved by a benefactor’s guiding hand. It’s a good story. People love a redemption arc they don’t have to fund.”
Logan felt a hot needle of anger pierce the gauzy fatigue that usually wrapped him. “And if I don’t feel like performing?”
Roman’s expression didn’t change, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop a degree. “Then you will be demonstrating a tragic relapse of poor judgment. Which would necessitate a more… structured convalescence. Perhaps your own room stops being so accessible. The books go away. The fires get lit less often.” He tilted his head. “We’re not in Gotham, Logan. The audience here is me. And I am a brutal critic.”
The choice wasn’t a choice. It was a set design, and Logan was a piece of furniture to be placed. The anger curdled into a sour resignation. He gave a short, sharp nod.
“Good,” Roman said, his voice returning to its silken normalcy. “Wear the gray sweater. It makes you look less skeletal.”
The journalist arrived at three. Her name was Anya, and she was all sharp angles and keen eyes that missed nothing, from the dust on a portrait frame to the slight tremor in Logan’s hands as he poured tea. She praised the “authentic, rustic character” of the house, her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged study.
Roman was masterful. He was charming, self-deprecating, weaving tales of civic duty and quiet philanthropy. He spoke of Logan’s accident with a grave, paternal concern.
“When I saw the potential in this young man, thrown away by the city’s neglect, I couldn’t just stand by,” Roman said, leaning forward earnestly. “It’s not just about rebuilding the infrastructure, it’s about rebuilding the people. He’s family now.”
The word family hung in the air, cloying and false. Logan kept his smile, a soft, grateful thing that felt like a grimace.
“And you, Logan?” Anya asked, turning her phone’s recorder closer. “How has this experience been? The transition from the city to… all this?”
Logan felt Roman’s gaze on him, a physical weight. He set his tea cup down carefully to hide the shake. He looked at the reporter, then at the fire, summoning the ghost of his old charm, sanding down its edges into something docile.
“Overwhelming,” he said, his voice purposely softer than usual. “In a good way. I was in a bad place. All noise, no future. Here… there’s quiet. You can actually hear yourself think.” He paused, letting his eyes drift to Roman with a look of staged reverence. “Roman saw something… salvageable, I guess. When no one else did. He didn’t have to do any of this. I was just another guy falling through the cracks.”
He delivered the lines with a convincing weariness, a hint of awe that wasn’t entirely fabricated—the awe was for the sheer, terrifying scale of Roman’s manipulation. He was a brilliant actor. Logan was just trying to keep up.
Anya’s eyes softened. “It’s a remarkable story. Second chances.”
“They’re the only ones that count,” Roman interjected smoothly, placing a hand on Logan’s shoulder. The grip was firm, possessive. Logan didn’t flinch. He leaned into it slightly, a bird settling onto a perch.
The interview wound down with photos—Roman standing by the fireplace, Logan sitting in the armchair with a blanket over his legs, looking pale and interesting. The click of the camera shutter sounded like teeth snapping shut.
When the heavy front door finally closed behind Anya, the silence rushed back in, thicker than before. Logan’s performative energy evaporated, leaving him hollow. He stayed in the chair, staring at the dying fire.
Roman locked the door. The click of the bolt was definitive. He walked back to the study, poured two fingers of amber whiskey, and came to stand before Logan. He didn’t speak for a long moment, just sipped his drink, studying him.
“You were perfect,” Roman finally said. His voice was low, stripped of its public charm. It was pure, undisguised satisfaction.
Logan said nothing.
Roman set his glass down. He stepped closer, into Logan’s space, and cupped his chin, forcing his head up. The touch wasn’t gentle. It was an appraisal. “The look you gave me. The gratitude. You almost had me believing it.”
“That was the point,” Logan mumbled, trying to turn his face away. Roman’s grip tightened, holding him fast.
“I know,” Roman murmured. His thumb stroked the line of Logan’s jaw, a cruel parody of affection. “That’s what made it so exquisite. You’re learning. You see the shape of the cage now. You’re choosing to sit quietly inside it because the alternative is a darker, smaller box.”
Logan’s breath hitched. The truth of it was a chill that went deeper than the house’s cold. He had performed, and performed well, to keep the privileges of his gilded captivity. The defiance that had defined him was being carefully, inexorably swapped out for compliance.
Roman saw the understanding in his eyes. The satisfaction in his own deepened. He released Logan’s chin, but didn’t step back. Instead, he combed his fingers through Logan’s hair, a gesture that was somehow more intimate and more dominating than the grip. “You did well. You’ve earned your comforts.”
The praise, so obviously a tool, shouldn’t have landed. But after weeks of silence and sickness, after the exhausting performance, it did. A pathetic, hungry part of him warmed at the words. He was seen, he was acknowledged, he was good.
He let his eyes close. He leaned his head, just slightly, into Roman’s touch. It was a surrender, smaller than the ones in the car or on the stairs, but somehow more complete. This was a surrender of spirit, not just body.
Roman’s hand stilled. He made a soft, approving sound in his throat. “There,” he whispered. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Down in Gotham, Maya bottled her third batch of tincture. The clinic’s new “Green Calm” program was a modest success. The chamomile and lemon balm blends were popular. She should have felt a spark of victory.
All she felt was the persistent, silent buzz of a message that would never deliver.
She scrubbed her hands raw at the sink, watching the green-tinged water swirl away. Ivy’s words echoed. A distraction. A fantasy. Was tending window boxes while Logan was in a cage really the work that mattered?
Her phone buzzed on the counter. A news alert. She wiped her hands, picked it up.
GAZETTE EXCLUSIVE: Councilman Sionis’s Sanctuary – Healing a Broken City, One Life at a Time.
Her heart stuttered. She clicked the link. There was a photo of a stern, beautiful house surrounded by pines. Another, interior: Roman Sionis in a cable-knit sweater, looking statesmanlike by a fire. And there, in a chair beside him, wrapped in a blanket, was Logan.
He was thinner. Paler. His eyes, those watchful green-hazel eyes, were looking at the camera, but they weren’t present. They were hollow. A beautifully wrapped void. The caption read: “Logan, recovering under Councilman Sionis’s care, speaks of ‘quiet and second chances.’”
Maya zoomed in on his face. She knew his smiles—the real, crooked one, the smirk, the defensive grin. This wasn’t any of them. This was a mask, so expertly worn it was more terrifying than any sign of physical abuse.
He was performing. And he was performing perfectly.
A cold fury, clean and sharp, washed through her. This wasn't a man healing in a peaceful retreat. This was a hostage posing for a ransom photo. The article was a love letter to a jailer.
She closed the article. The quiet of her apartment was suddenly suffocating. She looked at her plants, their leaves turned toward the weak sun. They fought for life in poisoned air, just like everyone in this city. They adapted. They found cracks.
Logan was in a cage of clean air and cold stone. And she was here, in the decaying, living, breathing city.
She picked up her phone again. Not to send another message into the void. This time, she opened a maps app. She typed in the coordinates she’d memorized weeks ago. The route to Carrion House glowed on the screen.
It was a five-hour drive.
Fantasy or not, she was done watching from a distance. She needed to see the soil with her own hands. She needed to look him in the eye and see if the man she knew, the one with the silver tongue and the defiant smirk, was still in there behind the perfect, grateful performance.
At Carrion House, the performance had left a residue. Logan sat in the study long after Roman had left him, the ghost of that grateful smile still aching on his face. The fire had burned low. He felt scraped out, a shell painted to look whole.
He wandered to the bookshelf, not to read, but to feel the solidity of the spines. His fingers trailed over leather and cloth until they bumped against something that wasn’t a book. A small, framed photograph, turned face-down. He flipped it over.
It was an older picture of Roman, maybe a decade younger, his arm around a severe-looking man with the same cold gray eyes. His father. They stood in front of a different house, not smiling. The composition was stiff, formal. Someone had taken a nail or a knife and scored deep, angry lines across the father’s face, gouging the glass.
Logan stared at the vandalized image. The violence of it was quiet, personal. It spoke of a hatred so deep it was done in private, then hidden away but kept close. This wasn't the calculated violence of Black Mask. This was raw, filial rage.
He heard a footstep in the hall and quickly placed the photo back, face-down. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped feeling. He had seen something he wasn’t meant to see, a crack in the pristine, controlled narrative.
Roman entered, shrugging off his jacket. “Still brooding by the fire? You should be in bed.”
“Just thinking,” Logan said, his voice thankfully steady. He didn’t turn from the shelves.
“About?”
“About how convincing a lie can be.” He finally looked at Roman. “That reporter bought it all. Every word.”
Roman came to stand beside him, too close. He followed Logan’s gaze to the shelves, his eyes lingering for a fraction of a second on the facedown frame. If he noticed it had been moved, he gave no sign. “It wasn’t a lie,” he said softly. “It was a future fact. You are recovering. This is a sanctuary. Those are the truths we are building.” He reached out and brushed a non-existent piece of lint from Logan’s shoulder. “The feeling will follow the action. You’ll see.”
The touch was proprietary. Logan wanted to flinch. He didn’t. He was so tired of flinching. “And what action comes next?”
“The action,” Roman said, his thumb now tracing the line of Logan’s collarbone through the gray sweater, “is continuing to heal. Properly. No more performances for a while.” His gaze was analytical, dissecting. “You’re standing differently. Favoring your left side. The pain in your chest is back.”
Logan shrugged, a practiced movement he’d perfected to dismiss concern. “It’s nothing. Just stiff from sitting.”
“It’s not nothing.” Roman’s hand dropped to Logan’s wrist, his fingers pressing against the radial pulse point. He held them there, counting silently, his eyes locked on Logan’s. The scrutiny was absolute. “Your heart is beating too slowly. It’s been doing that. And you get dizzy when you stand up too fast. You think I don’t see you brace yourself against the door frame every morning?”
A hot flush of shame crawled up Logan’s neck. He tried to pull his wrist back. Roman’s grip tightened, not painful, but inescapable. “It’s the medication. Or just… getting better. It’s fine.”
“It is a condition,” Roman stated flatly. “Orthostatic hypotension. Bradycardia. The poison damaged your autonomic nervous system. Your body can’t regulate its own basic functions anymore.” He released the wrist. “Your old asthma is worse now, too. The cold air here makes you wheeze when you think I’m not listening. And you forget to eat. The shakes you hide are hypoglycemia.”
Each word was a clinical, precise hammer blow, shattering the fragile illusion of normalcy Logan was trying to rebuild. He felt exposed, his body’s betrayals catalogued and displayed. “So what?” he muttered, looking away at the fire. “I’m a broken toy. You knew that.”
“I know the specifications of what I’m maintaining,” Roman corrected. His voice lost its edge, shifting into something colder and more practical. “You need a structured regimen. Regular meals, on a schedule, not when you remember. More saline IVs to stabilize your blood pressure. A beta blocker, perhaps, for the arrhythmia. Your inhaler before any exposure to cold.”
Logan stared at him. This wasn’t concern. It was a maintenance schedule. A list of procedures for keeping a piece of complex machinery operational. The clinical detachment of it should have been horrifying.
Instead, a perverse, desperate gratitude bloomed in his chest. Someone was seeing the cracks, all of them, and wasn’t looking away in pity or disgust. Someone was simply… formulating a repair plan. It was cold care. It was ownership. But it was care.
“You’ve been monitoring my heart rate?” Logan asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“Since you arrived,” Roman said, as if it were obvious. “The nurse’s charts are on my desk every evening. I review them.” He stepped back, finally breaking the intense proximity. “Starting tomorrow, we implement the new protocol. You will follow it.”
Logan’s pride, the last tattered flag of his independence, wanted to rebel. To refuse. But his body, the traitorous, failing thing, sang a chorus of relief. The thought of not having to pretend, of having the dizzy spells and the tremors acknowledged and managed, was a seductive release. He gave one short, sharp nod.
“Good,” Roman said. There was no warmth in the approval, only satisfaction at an agreement reached. He turned back to his desk, the moment of intense focus over. “Now go to bed. You’re pale.”
In her apartment, Maya stared at the photo of Logan until her eyes burned. The hollow look in his eyes was a hook in her gut. She paced, her fingers itching for soil, for something real to crush or nurture.
She found the sprig of wolfsbane, now dried and pressed in a book. Beneath it was a number, scribbled on a fragment of herbarium paper. She didn’t think. She just dialed.
It rang four times before the connection opened. There was no greeting, just the sound of humid, leafy stillness.
“It’s Maya.”
“The clinic gardener.” Ivy’s whisper was like bark scraping stone. “Has your seedling wilted?”
“I saw him,” Maya said, the words tumbling out. “In a news article. He’s at that house. Carrion House. He looks… empty. He’s saying all the right words and his eyes are dead. I have to do something.”
“Do what?” The question was a blade. “Drive your little car to the castle? Scale the walls? You’re a gardener, not a knight. Your weapons are seeds and patience, not recklessness.”
“He’s in a cage!”
“And you are in a city of cages!” Ivy’s voice sharpened, a vine snapping taut. “You have soil here that you can actually touch. You have patients in your clinic breathing toxic air, drinking poisoned water, whose pain you can actually soothe with your tinctures. That is your work. That is your resistance. Not a quixotic rescue of one man who has already been consumed by the rot.”
Maya sank onto her floor, the phone pressed to her ear. “It feels like giving up on him.”
“It’s choosing your battlefield,” Ivy countered, her tone softening to a corrosive sigh. “He is in Sionis’s ecosystem now. That is a dark, tangled wood where you will get lost and die. Your garden is here. Tend it. Make it grow. Spread your herbal protocols to other clinics, other practices. Undermine the system that creates patients for you by offering them a piece of the earth. That is how you fight. Plant by plant.”
The logic was irrefutable, and it felt like a sentence. Maya looked at her windowsill, at the thriving fern she had painstakingly cleaned. It was a small, breathing victory. “They’re just band-aids,” she said, but the fight had left her voice.
“Band-aids are what you have,” Ivy said. “Use them. Stop screaming at the forest fire and start watering the things that haven’t burned yet.” The line went dead.
Maya sat in the silence for a long time. Then she got up. She went to her kitchen, pulled out her notebooks, and began drafting an email. The subject line read: “Herbal Adjuvant Protocols – A Free Resource for Gotham Clinics.”
She attached the PDFs she’d created, the dosing schedules, the sourcing guides for clean herbs. She sent it to every independent practice contact she had. It felt small. It felt like planting a seed in concrete.
But it was action. It was her action.
The next morning at Carrion House, the new protocol began. Breakfast appeared at eight on the dot: steel-cut oats, a precise scoop of protein powder, a handful of berries. Logan ate under Roman’s watchful eye from the head of the table.
At ten, the nurse came not just to check vitals, but to hang a bag of saline. Logan sat in the study, the IV line in his arm, as Roman worked. The slow drip felt like a direct infusion of submission.
He stood up too fast after it was removed, a wave of lightheadedness turning the room into a tilting painting. He swayed, his hand flying out to grip the mantelpiece.
Roman was there in an instant, a steadying hand on his elbow, another pressed firmly between his shoulder blades. “Breathe. Slowly. In through the nose.” His voice was an order. Logan obeyed, the gray fog receding. Roman didn’t let go until his breathing evened out. “You see? It requires management.”
Logan didn’t thank him. He just nodded, leaning into the support for a second longer than necessary before straightening up. The gratitude was there, a silent, shameful pulse beneath his ribs.
Days folded into this new rhythm. His body became a readout that Roman monitored: the timing of his meals, the color in his cheeks, the slight wheeze after a walk on the porch. Roman would wordlessly push a glass of juice into his hand when the hypoglycemic tremors started, or block a draft from the window with his own body.
It was a cold, mechanical maintenance. But it was constant. It was reliable. In the face of his own body’s betrayal, Roman’s ruthless competence became a perverse shelter.
One afternoon, Logan found a new book on the side table by his chair. It was a heavy medical text. A note card sat on top, in Roman’s sharp script: Chapter 12. Understand your machinery.
Logan opened it. The pages were dense with diagrams of the heart, the nervous system. He read about dysautonomia. He saw his own failures laid out in Latin terms and chemical pathways. Instead of feeling despair, he felt a grim clarity. This was the blueprint. This was what Roman was fixing.
He looked across the room. Roman was watching him, waiting for a reaction.
“Feels like a owner’s manual for a lemon,” Logan said, his old smirk trying to make an appearance. It felt weak.
“It’s a schematic,” Roman replied. “All problems have solutions. You just have to be willing to apply them.” He returned to his work, a faint, approving tilt to his head.
Logan looked back at the book, his fingers tracing a diagram of a nerve synapse. The cage had become a clinic. The warden, a meticulous physician. And he, the patient, was learning to be nothing but appreciative of the cold, clear air it provided. It was the only air left that didn’t make him choke.