Lahat ng Kabanata ng INHERITED SIN : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 8

Grief has a schedule. That was the thing nobody told Kian. It doesn't care that you haven't slept. It shows up on time, in a room that smells too sweet from all the flowers, and makes you stand at the front of it shaking hands with people who tell you your father is "in a better place," as if that's a sentence with any content in it at four in the morning in a hospital parking garage.The funeral home smelled like lilies over carpet cleaner. Organ music drifted from speakers Kian never located — the kind of music engineered to offend no one's specific grief, which somehow made it worse, like his father's death had been filed under some general, interchangeable sadness.He lost track of how many hands he shook. Aunts he hadn't seen since he was twelve. A coworker of his father's who talked for ten minutes about a fishing trip Kian had never once heard about. His aunt Denise, who cried hard enough to need walking outside twice, which meant Kian spent the afternoon absorbing everyone els

Halloran & Voss occupied the ninth floor of a glass tower Kian had walked past a hundred times without once looking up. Lobby fountain that actually ran, unlike the one at the funeral home — unlike most things in Kian's life lately. He'd found the appointment card wedged between a cable bill and a coupon flyer in his father's mail, as if the single most consequential piece of paper in Marcus Reyes's affairs had been filed with exactly the same weight as a discount on rotisserie chicken.Estate & Trust. Tuesday, 2:00.He arrived fifteen minutes early, sat in a waiting room with chairs too stiff to be comfortable, and flipped through a magazine without reading a word of it. The small brass key from the floorboard sat in his jacket pocket like it had mass beyond its size. He hadn't told anyone about the key. Hadn't told anyone about the photograph, either — still creased down the middle now from all the times he'd folded and unfolded it, checking, as if a tenth look might show him someth

The sedan didn't move.Kian stood just inside the Blue Anchor's doorway for what felt like a full minute, watching through rain-streaked glass, waiting for a door to open, a window to roll down, anything that would turn the vague dread pooling in his gut into something he could actually react to. The car just sat there, engine low, headlights throwing twin cones through the drizzle. After a while he understood it wasn't going to do anything at all except be seen.Somehow that was worse than if it had.He glanced back once — Sal very deliberately not looking at him, drying a glass that had been dry for a minute now — and understood there was nothing left to get here tonight. He pulled his jacket tight and pushed out into the wet, half-expecting the sedan's doors to open the second his feet hit the sidewalk.They didn't. He walked right past it, close enough to touch the hood, and through the tinted glass caught only the vague suggestion of a driver, motionless, tracking him without a s

The footsteps stopped in the doorway.Kian turned, already braced, and there he was — the man from across the street, closer now, close enough that distance no longer smoothed anything over. Younger than Kian had expected up close, though young felt almost the wrong word for someone with this much stillness behind his eyes. Dark hair, precise without looking styled. A jaw that stayed relaxed even now, unbothered by the fact that a stranger he'd apparently had kidnapped was standing shaking in the middle of his living room."Mr. Reyes." Quiet. Controlled. No theater in it. "Thank you for coming.""I didn't come," Kian said. "Your men put me in a van."Something flickered at the corner of the man's mouth. Not quite a smile. Gone before it finished forming. "Semantics. Sit down. You look about to fall over, and I'd rather have this conversation with you conscious."Kian didn't move at first — some last stubborn thread of defiance keeping his knees locked — but the adrenaline that had car