"What are you talking about? Penny’s dead?"
The unrelenting smirk on Slater’s swollen face slowly vanished as he gazed up at Mark. For so reason, it felt like his ear was blocked, and he was starting to hear things.
"Huh?" was all Slater could manage to say.
What did Mark just say?
Penny was dead?
Slater opened and closed his bloody mouth, his eyes searching Mark’s face. In one sense, Mark seed just as confused as Slater.
"What do you an my sister’s dead?" Slater mumbled, his expression blank. "She can’t be dead. The execution date hasn’t—it’s still too early for that."
Were they trying to break him in a different way because the beating hadn’t worked?
Slater wanted to believe that was the case. But the genuine puzzlent on Mark’s face stopped him from fully convincing himself.
Mark shot Zoren a quick look, unsure what to say. He knew this was sothing Zoren had to explain himself. But seeing that Zoren wouldn’t budge from the autopsy table, Mark hesitated.
"Her execution date was moved up," Zoren said in the sa calm tone, his eyes still shut. "And she was transferred to a different prison that granted the request."
Slowly, Zoren opened his eyes. "This is the morgue where they kept her body," he said, casting Slater a nonchalant look. "And this sa table I’m lying on is the one she lay on when she was dead."
"..." Slater opened and closed his mouth, staring at Zoren. His vision was blurry from the beating, but he could see the lack of emotion in Zoren’s eyes.
It wasn’t like he expected a storm of emotion from Zoren. But how could Zoren talk about sothing so grave and lie on the sa table where the dead lay without the slightest reaction?
Most importantly, how could Penny die?
"Impossible..." Slater whispered, looking down. "How could they move up her execution date? And how co I didn’t hear anything about it?"
Penny’s case was significant enough to make it into the mainstream dia. If she had been executed, Slater would have heard about it. But alas, there was nothing.
As silence settled in the morgue, Zoren slowly peeled his eyes away and closed them again. "If you could save her by killing , I wouldn’t mind," he said with the sa indifference. "But there would be no one to save if I die. You should’ve asked nicely instead of going through all this trouble."
Slater slowly lifted his gaze to the man, who appeared to be trying to take a nap on the autopsy table. However, his eyes didn’t linger on Zoren but rather on the table where the latter lay.
’That’s where Penny’s body...?’ he trailed off, his heart conflicted over what to feel about this information.
This news was just too big for him to digest in under five minutes. The wave of emotions crashing inside him was a mix of everything, leaving his heart confused. Slater should be crying, in denial, or angry.
Yet, he didn’t feel like doing any of that.
It was just... dismay.
It was a strange feeling to have at that mont, but it was all he knew. Slater was filled with great dismay.
"Mark." After another minute of stifling silence, Zoren’s calm voice cut through the thick air again. "Let him go."
Mark snapped out of his trance. "But sir, what if—"
"He won’t kill anymore," Zoren said as he pushed himself to sit up. When his eyes landed on Slater again, he cocked his head slightly to the side. "Killing ... will not save the dead, Slater Bennet."
Zoren paused as he jumped to his feet, approaching Slater while pulling sothing from his coat. "That beating was also nothing personal," he said. "If you want to visit her, then this is the place where she is."
"However... make sure you make the best of it," he added. "After all, you... do not deserve anything from her. I don’t even think you deserve to live, Slater Bennet. I would’ve killed you myself, but... killing you is simply giving you an easy way out."
Tossing a card onto Slater’s lap, he exhaled. "This is the first and last ti I’ll let any of you get near her again."
With that, Zoren didn’t linger and turned his back on him, walking away without looking back. But just as he reached the autopsy table, he paused and gazed at it. Not long ago, Zoren had been in this place to retrieve the body of a stranger who had beco his wife.
"She got the chair," Zoren whispered, his eyes fixed on the empty autopsy table. "I heard she died in the first thirty seconds—perhaps the worst thirty seconds of her life."
He glanced over his shoulder and added, "Think about that, Slater Bennet."
With that, Zoren resud his steps, leaving Slater with information the latter might not want to know. But, if there was anything Slater needed to know, it was how Penny died. This way, he could understand that all the suffering he had caused to others, including his sister, was futile.
Even so, Zoren hoped that Slater would suffer to the point where he wouldn’t want to live, either.
After all, Zoren was letting him live not out of rcy, but because he wanted Slater to suffer before he ended his own life. At least then, Slater would understand just how miserable Penny felt before she died.
*****
[Present Ti]
"It’s not that I didn’t understand him back then," Slater remarked. "But I’m not really sure about his intentions. At first, I knew him because I had to kill him. But sohow, he’s involved in all of this, and even then, I can’t grasp his intentions."
A mont of silence fell between them as neither spoke after Slater’s remarks. Penny just stared at him with blank eyes, trying to digest everything.
"How did you... how did you know First Brother killed him?" she asked, trying to stay focused on the topic. Thankfully, Finn had already given her a glimpse of Zoren’s involvent and what had happened to her brothers in the past. Therefore, she was able to take this in better than expected.
"He told ."
"What?"
"Zoren told ," Slater repeated with a sigh. "He said if there’s one person who would kill him and he would give permission to, that would be First Brother. Although I wasn’t there to witness it myself, I believe that’s what happened. After all... the Zoren Pierson I rember is simply a walking corpse."
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