Swedish Medical Center rose against the gray sky like a promise of healing, or a threat. Arora had avoided this place for years, since her mother's death, since the long corridors had become associated with loss rather than hope.
Now she walked them with Asher beside her, both of them wearing stolen credentials, playing roles they hadn't rehearsed.
"The psychiatric ward is on seven," Asher murmured, his hand at the small of her back, guiding her through the maze. "Caleb will have chosen a room with symbolic value. Your mother's room, if it's available. Or one with the same number, the same view."
"How do you know?"
"Because it's what I would do. Because the design requires meaning. Random violence is for amateurs."
They took the stairs, avoiding cameras, emerging on seven into a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and despair. Room 714 was at the end, the room where Elena Vance had spent her final days. The door was closed, but Arora could see light beneath it, and shadow—movement.
Asher pressed a knife into her hand. "Stay here. If I'm not out in five minutes, run. Find Voss. Tell him everything."
"I'm not leaving you."
"Then we're both dead. Please, Arora. Let me do this one thing right. Let me be the man who protects instead of destroys."
He kissed her forehead, chaste and desperate, and pushed through the door before she could respond.
The room beyond was frozen in time. Same bed, same window, same view of the parking lot where Arora had sat crying at seventeen, unable to enter, unable to leave. And in the bed, a figure covered by sheets, still, silent.
Asher approached, knife ready, every line of his body coiled for violence.
The figure sat up.
Not a patient. A dummy, straw and cloth, with a recording device where the head should be. And from the device, Caleb's voice, electronic and gleeful:
"Hello, brother. If you're hearing this, you've brought her. The doctor. The daughter. The final piece. Look behind you."
Asher spun.
Arora stood in the doorway, but she wasn't alone. Caleb held her, one arm around her throat, the other pressing a syringe to her jugular. He wore no mask now, and his face—Asher's face, wrong and right—was smiling.
"Drop the knife," Caleb said. "Or I give her a dose of our father's favorite cocktail. Slow paralysis. Conscious awareness. Death in four hours, no antidote."
Asher let the knife fall. "Let her go. This is between us."
"Oh, but it's not. It's between all three of us. Father's legacy. Mother's mistake. The family business." Caleb tightened his grip, and Arora gasped, her eyes finding Asher's, holding them. "She's strong, this one. Stronger than Isla. Stronger than the others. I think she might actually survive loving you. What do you think, brother? Shall we test her?"
"Name your price. Anything. Everything. Just let her go."
Caleb's smile widened. "I want your designs. All of them. The ones you've hidden, the ones you've never shown anyone. I want your secret work, your true art. And then I want you to help me use them. Together, as family. As father wanted."
"My father wanted nothing. He was a monster."
"Yes. And we're his sons. The question is which of us will embrace it, and which will die denying it." He pressed the syringe harder, and Arora cried out, a small sound that tore at Asher's composure. "Choose, Asher. The designs, or the doctor. You can't save both."
Asher looked at Arora. Really looked at her, as he had in her office that first day, as he had in the loft when she offered understanding instead of judgment. He saw her fear, and her courage, and her faith in him—misplaced, probably, definitely dangerous, but real.
"I choose," he said slowly, "neither."
And he moved.
Not toward Caleb. Toward the window. He threw himself at it, shoulder first, glass shattering, and for a moment he was suspended in air, falling, and then he caught the ledge of the floor below, swinging, pulling himself up with desperate strength.
Caleb was distracted for only a second, but it was enough. Arora drove her elbow into his stomach, twisted free, and ran—not away, but toward the broken window, toward Asher, toward the impossible leap.
"Arora, no!"
She jumped.
The fall was only one story, but it felt like flying, like dying, like being reborn. She hit the ledge beside Asher, her hands finding his, their fingers interlocking as they clung to the building's face, the ground seven stories below.
"You're insane," he gasped.
"You're contagious."
Behind them, Caleb's face appeared at the broken window, rage twisting his features into something inhuman. "This isn't over!"
"It is," Asher called back. "I'm done designing deaths. I'm done being your brother. Find another family."
He pulled Arora through the window of the sixth-floor room, into the shocked faces of patients and nurses, into the chaos of alarms and shouting. They ran, hand in hand, through the hospital that had taken her mother, and this time Arora didn't look back.