Bruised Alliance

"Brothers know each other's tells. That's precisely why lying to them costs more than lying to anyone else."

A minute or two passed in a blur of motion and turbulent thoughts before I realised I wasn't alone in my frantic pursuit. My feet pounded against the riverbank in a rhythm that matched my heartbeat—too fast, too desperate, fuelled by the particular urgency of someone racing toward consequences they'd been trying to outrun. My wet clothes clung to my skin like a layer of accusation, the river's chill still biting into flesh that had no time to warm.

"Luke! Stop!" The urgency in Paul's voice pierced my concentrated bubble of determination, cutting through the white noise of exertion and fear that had become my entire world. I didn't stop—couldn't stop, not with Joel's body floating somewhere downstream toward the one person who must never find it—but I did slow, the heavy breaths tearing through my lungs with the ragged quality of someone who'd been running on reserves that were rapidly depleting. Paul's longer stride ate the distance between us, his determined footfalls growing louder until he was beside me, matching my pace with the particular stubbornness that had characterised our relationship since childhood.

"Why is the body suddenly so important to you?" Paul's question came between laboured breaths, laden with confusion and something sharper—the beginning of suspicion that I could feel probing at the edges of my hastily constructed explanations. His gaze fixed on me as we ran side-by-side, searching my face for the truth I was trying to keep caged behind my teeth.

"He's Jamie's son," the words tumbled out of me, raw and unfiltered, before I could corral them back into the secrecy they deserved.

The moment they escaped, I felt something shift—the particular sensation of a door closing behind you that you'd been meaning to keep open. The revelation hung between us, suspended in the heavy air like something physical, something that had weight and shape and the power to alter the landscape we'd been navigating together.

Paul slowed, his steps faltering as though his body had received a command his mind hadn't authorised. The shock of my admission was evident in every line of his posture—the sudden rigidity of his shoulders, the way his jaw went slack before clenching tight, the abrupt deceleration that nearly sent me stumbling into him.

"Since when did Jamie have a son?" His voice carried a mixture of disbelief and dawning realisation, the kind of tone people use when they're watching foundations crumble beneath something they'd assumed was solid.

"Long story," I managed to say, my voice a strained whisper against the backdrop of the river's constant murmur. "And Jamie doesn't know he's dead." The admission sat heavy on my tongue, bitter with the weight of everything it implied. I'd known. I'd mourned. I'd raised a glass of whiskey to Joel's memory in candlelight while Jamie lay in a tent, oblivious to the son he'd lost before ever knowing he existed.

Paul's hand shot out and grabbed my arm, his grip firm enough to bruise, yanking us both to a sudden, jarring stop. The momentum nearly toppled me, my wet shoes sliding on the dune’s uncertain surface before I found footing. His glare was intense when I met it—a storm of betrayal, understanding, and anger brewing in eyes that had known me for thirty-four years and were now seeing something they hadn't recognised before.

I braced myself, the anticipation of Paul's reaction coiling through my gut like rope being pulled taut. My older brother had always been my ally, my confidant, the one person in our fractured family who understood the particular weight of being Noah Smith's son without requiring explanation. But the eyes boring into me now seemed to belong to a stranger—someone cataloguing evidence, assembling a picture of the person I'd become that differed sharply from the brother he thought he knew.

"But you already knew," Paul accused, his voice carrying a sharp edge that cut through whatever remnants of pretence I'd been clinging to. His words weren't a question. They were an indictment, a stark unveiling of the secret I had harboured while pretending to share in everyone else's ignorance.

I swallowed hard, the action scraping painfully against the dryness that had claimed my throat. The taste of river water lingered, mingling with something more acrid—the flavour of truths I'd been trying to keep swallowed.

"Yes," I slowly replied, the admission escaping on a heavy exhale. The word carried more weight than its single syllable should have been able to bear, releasing something I'd held so closely that I'd almost convinced myself it wasn't a burden at all.

"Shit," Paul muttered, the word saturated with a toxic blend of anger and disbelief. His grip on my arm loosened gradually, fingers unclenching one by one as though the physical act of releasing me was its own kind of verdict. I pulled away the moment I could, a surge of urgency propelling me forward even as the weight of what I'd revealed hung between us like smoke that wouldn't dissipate.

"I had nothing to do with it. I swear." My voice was earnest, desperate with the need to make him understand at least this much—that whatever else I'd done, whatever lies I'd constructed and maintained, I hadn't killed the boy. My hands hadn't held the knife that opened Joel's throat. My choices hadn't ended his life. Someone else had done that. Someone whose identity I suspected but couldn't prove, whose methods I'd benefited from without authorising.

The distinction felt important, even as I recognised how thin it sounded.

"I highly doubt that," Paul retorted, his tone sharp enough to draw blood if words could wound. The callous disbelief in his voice stung more than I wanted to admit—this was my brother, the person who'd always assumed the best of me even when evidence suggested otherwise, now looking at me as though I were capable of murder.

Was I?

The question flickered through my consciousness before I could suppress it. I'd pushed Kain through a Portal without consent. I'd manipulated Jamie, deceived his family, orchestrated the movements of people like pieces on a board game only I could see. The distance between those actions and violence wasn't as vast as I'd once believed. The slope I'd been sliding down kept revealing new depths.

I huffed, frustration and desperation tangling together into something that emerged more aggressive than I'd intended.

"We don't have time for this, Paul," I insisted, gesturing downstream with urgent emphasis. Every second we spent arguing was a second the current was using to carry Joel closer to Jamie. Every moment of confrontation was a moment of delay I couldn't afford. I urged him to return to a jog alongside me, my body already angling toward forward motion.

But Paul remained anchored, rooted to the spot by shock and suspicion and the weight of revelations he was still processing. His feet didn't move. His eyes didn't leave my face.

"I'll tell you about it later," I promised, the words tumbling out with the particular tone of someone bargaining for time they know they haven't earned. "There's a lot you don't know." The admission was meant to buy cooperation, but even as I spoke, I heard how it sounded—not reassurance but confirmation that the lies extended further than this single secret, that the truth I'd been hiding had layers Paul hadn't begun to imagine.

The depth of betrayal in his eyes didn't diminish at my words. If anything, it deepened, the foundations of our bond visibly fracturing under the weight of what I'd revealed and what I'd implied. We'd been through so much together—Dad's remarriage, Mum's distance and eventual death, the complicated navigation of a blended family that never quite blended. Paul had been my constant through all of it. And now I was watching that constancy waver, watching him recategorise me from ally to unknown quantity.

"Obviously," Paul's scornful reply landed with the sting of deserved rebuke.

"I don't know how he got here, but if Jamie finds him, this place will become even more hellish than it already is," I explained, the words rushing out in a torrent of exasperation and fear. I needed Paul to see past his anger, past the legitimate grievance of being kept in the dark, to the immediate crisis that required our combined attention. Jamie's fragile psychological state. His infected wound. The guilt that already consumed him over a son he'd never met. Adding the discovery of Joel's murdered body to that equation would be catastrophic in ways I couldn't fully predict but could vividly imagine.

Something shifted in Paul's expression—a crack in the wall of accusation, a glimmer of understanding breaking through the initial shock. Perhaps he was imagining it too: Jamie's face when he recognised his own features in the corpse, the sound he would make when he understood what had been taken from him.

Seizing the moment before it could slip away, I reached out and tugged on his arm—not forcefully, but with urgent invitation. A silent plea to set aside our differences, to table the reckoning that was clearly coming, and focus on the pressing crisis that wouldn't wait for us to resolve our personal conflict.

Paul's resistance held for a heartbeat. Then two. His jaw remained tight, his eyes still holding questions I couldn't answer right now, accusations I deserved but couldn't address. But something in him made the calculation I'd been hoping for—the recognition that whatever I'd done, whatever I was hiding, the immediate priority was preventing Jamie from finding his dead son floating in a river.

We resumed our jog, falling into a rhythm that felt nothing like the easy coordination we'd shared in childhood, racing each other down streets, competing in the particular way of brothers who loved and resented each other in equal measure. The tension between us remained, a third presence keeping pace as we ran, silent and heavy and utterly unresolved.