The Martyr

When Elias re-entered the interrogation room, he didn't sit down. He walked over to the camera in the corner and reached up.

*Click.* The red recording light died.

Silas looked up, startled. "What are you doing?"

Elias threw a photograph onto the table. It was a picture he had taken on his phone of the tracks in the library dust.

"I know about Clara," Elias said.

The color drained from Silas’s face, leaving him gray and ghostly. He stopped trembling for a second, frozen by absolute terror.

"No," Silas whispered.

"I found the log," Elias continued, his voice steady but low. "I know Vane was stalking her. I know she was in the room. I know she swung the weapon."

Silas slumped in his chair. The façade of the arrogant aristocrat crumbled, leaving only a weeping, broken grandfather.

"She is nineteen years old," Silas choked out, tears spilling onto his expensive suit. "She hasn't spoken a word since the crash that took her parents. She is fragile, Detective. Like glass."

"It was self-defense, Silas," Elias said. "The law allows for that. If she testifies—"

"Testifies?" Silas laughed, a wet, jagged sound. "She cannot speak! Do you know what a trial would do to her? The press? The photos? They would tear her apart. They would make her relive the assault every day for months. They would put her on a stand and stare at her legs and ask her how it felt to kill a man."

Silas leaned forward, rattling his handcuffs against the table. "It would kill her, Detective. Not physically. But it would destroy whatever spark of life she has left. She finally started smiling again last month. If you drag her into this light... she will break."

"The law is the law," Elias said, though the words tasted like ash. "I cannot falsify a report. I cannot send an innocent man to prison."

"I am not innocent!" Silas hissed. "I failed to protect her. I wasn't there when he broke in. That is my crime. Let me pay for it."

He looked at his shaking hands. "Look at me. I have Parkinson’s. I have maybe two years left. Two years of drooling in a cup and forgetting my own name. What is prison to me? It’s a bed and a meal."

Silas locked eyes with Elias. The gaze was intense, burning with a fierce, terrifying nobility.

"I am offering you a trade, Detective. You get a closed case. You get a confession. The city gets rid of a monster like Vane. And a girl who has lost everything gets to keep her silence."

"It’s a lie," Elias said.

"It is a mercy," Silas countered. "Is your righteousness worth her life? Because if you write her name in that file, you are sentencing her to a death slower than the one Vane deserved."