He folded inward, whispering to the dark as if someone might answer him. "Dave… my child. I love you. I never wanted this." The sentence tasted like ash. He had meant each word, yet the truth of them did not absolve him. "She said she will kill us all if I don't act. She threatened everyone. She promised me a place in the new order if I kept my side of the bargain." The confession was both accusation and plea.
When he finally lifted his head, the shape of his resolve had changed. It was not born of genuine conviction — it was the last, ugly economy of fear. The man who had once come into their lives to ruin them now measured the cost of keeping them. Every tender memory with Dave became a coin he could no longer spend.
"But to save myself from all this," he said aloud to the empty room, voice thin and brittle, "that child in you must die, Dave. I can't let it be born and ruin all my years of hard work. Both Kelvin and that child must die."
The words landed like a blade. For a moment, the house cracked open and the old James — the man who had smiled at family dinners, who had wiped a fevered brow and read bedtime stories — recoiled as if assaulted by his own declaration. He hated himself in a way that was almost clearer than the fear: hated the bargain, hated the way promises had hardened him, hated the image of the boy he had come to love and the thought of becoming the instrument of that boy's destruction.
Yet hatred alone was not enough to unmake what he'd done. He rose from the floor with slack shoulders and a face gone older overnight. The choice had been made, not by a monstrous hero but by a terrified man who had traded a moral compass for a seat at a table of predators. There would be no midnight confession, no dramatic renunciation. There would be actions. Plans. Quiet steps to set the world right — or to tear it down.
He pressed his palms into his eyes as if to scrub the resolve away, but the ache only steadied it. Outside, the night kept its secrets, and inside, James began to move, already sketching with hurried, hollow certainty the first lines of what he believed would save him: the removal of the child, the end of the threat.
He did not hear the mortifying honesty in his own proclamation, only the need to act. The man who had loved them was still there — a small, ashamed ember — but it would not carry him now. Fear had eclipsed love, and fear had a very particular, very cruel finality.