The Price of Blood

Prologue

Rick was the kind of government agent who left behind no headlines, just sealed folders and sleepless nights. He had worked years beside his brother Roger, but where Rick learned to put duty first, Roger learned to pour whiskey second. Rick retired to a modest home, a wife who loved him, two children who thought he could fix anything. Roger retired to debts, excuses, and a shelf of unpaid promises.

One autumn evening, warmth lived in every corner of the house. A board game on the table. A pot on the stove. The kids, Landon, eight, and his sister, made forts beneath a blanket. The knock came gently, one, two, three, and the door opened to a man in a mask who spoke in a voice that had never learned doubt. They were forced to kneel. The intruder shot the mother first. Then the children. Then Rick. He left by closing the door as if leaving a library. Silence pressed on the walls.

The camera of fate drifted. It found a closet door left slightly open. Inside, Landon pressed a hand over his mouth, eyes flooded, learning in one terrible minute that childhood has an exit.

After

Foster homes, new last names, caseworkers who used the word “resilience” like a bandage. Landon woke at 3:07 AM for years, exactly when he had heard the last shot. Well-meaning therapists told him anger was a stage. He learned that stages can last a decade.

At fourteen, he made a vow he never said aloud: he would find the man who killed his family. He lifted weights in rusted gyms. He learned footwork in boxing gyms where old men smelled like liniment and stories. He read about memory, lies, and microexpressions. He learned to shoot, slow and steady, not for sport, never for sport, but because his hands shook and he refused to live as a tremor.

Building the Mask

Landon worked nights in a print shop and days in the stacks of a public library. He learned that the world keeps everything if you know how to ask. He requested public records, read court filings, scraped data, wrote small scripts. He mapped names and dates like constellations on a hidden wall in his apartment. At the center glowed a photograph he returned to again and again: Michael Harper. Husband to Donna. Father to Emily. A face that matched a blurry reflection from that night, a name in a buried police note, a witness who had since “moved away.”

He watched Michael’s routines: coffee at 7:30, a jog on Saturdays, a church he left early when the sermon ran long. Landon learned the routes, the cameras, the blind corners. He built a plan measured in patience. And then life betrayed him with something he had never accounted for.

Emily

He saw her at the park. She wore a red scarf that caught the wind like a small flag. Her dog, an overexcited mutt named Rascal, kept dropping the ball at strangers’ feet. She laughed with her whole face. Landon found a reason to return the next day, and the next, and the next. The conversation was easy: favorite books, first concerts, the worst food each had ever tried and politely pretended to like. She was kind in the way people claim to be and only a few actually are.

Dates followed, cheap places with honest food, late-night drives where the city looked like a toy. On a rooftop, her hands tucked into his coat, Emily told him she believed people are basically good. Landon said nothing and wanted to believe her so badly it scared him.

Weeks became months. They discussed futures. She met no parents of his. “They’re abroad,” he lied. “You’ll meet them soon.” He learned how heavy a lie can feel without making a sound.

Dissonance

Landon perfected his mask. With Emily, he was present, kind, thoroughly there. In the quiet after he walked her home, he returned to the wall, the web of names, the pinned photograph of Michael, and felt the heat of the life he had promised to his grief. He would stare at the photo until the edges blurred. Once, he set the photo face down and could not pick it up for an hour. Another time, he nearly confessed everything. Instead, he asked Emily about her first memory. She said, “My dad lifting me to see the fireworks at Lakeview. I thought he made them.” Landon pictured Rick teaching him to skip stones and tasted iron in his mouth.

The Night Arranged

Storm warnings came in the afternoon. Emily texted that she would stop by her parents’ place to drop off soup. Landon’s plan, years old, had a date now. He prepared the room the way the intruder had prepared his childhood home: tape, rope, the chairs turned to face each other as if the furniture itself had learned cruelty. He told himself this symmetry mattered; that it would give the past the balance it demanded.

Emily arrived and found Michael and Donna tied, panic scraped into their faces. Landon stepped from the hallway’s shadow. “I’m sorry,” he told Emily, and meant it. He bound her wrists. Her words came in fragments. “No… why… what is this?”

They were on their knees. Landon aimed the gun, and the room felt so small it could fit inside a wound.

Accounting

“How does it feel,” he asked Michael, “to know you’ll watch your family die and you’ll be last?” The phrasing matched his memory almost perfectly. The past loves repetition.

Emily shook, voice breaking. “Landon, look at me. This isn’t you.”

“This is exactly me,” he said, tears burning. “This is what’s left.”

The Attempt at Truth

Michael said, “Please. Let me speak before you do this.”

“You had your chance fifteen years ago,” Landon said.

“No,” Michael said, words tumbling out. “I didn’t take money. I refused the money. Your uncle Roger, he offered it. When I refused, he threatened my family. He said if I didn’t do it, he would make me watch him do it to mine. I don’t ask forgiveness. There isn’t any. But you should know why.”

Emily turned to her father, a lifetime of trust colliding with a minute of horror. “Dad?”

Michael nodded once, a motion so small it hardly counted as movement. “I wanted to call the police. He said the police belonged to his friends in ways I couldn’t afford to test.”

The name Roger opened a locked drawer in Landon’s memory: arguments in the garage, his father’s voice tight with finality, No more money, and a bottle shattering like a period.

Entrance Wound

The door blew open. Roger staggered in, older, edges frayed by drink and bad sleep, but the same cocky tilt of the head. He raised a pistol and smiled the way men do when they think a room owes them attention. “You built a life on a lie, kid,” he said. “You are my favorite project.”

He glanced at Michael. “You were supposed to keep quiet forever.”

He raised the gun toward Landon. Habit beat shock: Landon turned and fired. Roger dropped, not dead, swearing without oxygen. The room exploded with noise, Donna’s scream, Emily’s plea, the storm shouldering the windows.

Corrections

Landon moved to cut the ropes. He reached Emily first. His hands shook so badly he could not untie the knot. Emily took a breath and put her forehead to his. “Come back,” she said quietly. “If you can’t do it for me, do it for the boy in the closet.” He closed his eyes and the room tilted. He cut the rope.

Roger rolled, reaching for the gun like a man reaching for one last drink. Michael lunged. He grabbed Landon’s pistol from the floor and fired a single, steady shot. Roger fell and stayed.

Epilogue

Some aftermaths are simple: police reports, sirens, statements given in rooms painted the color of cheap neutrality. Others are not. Landon told the truth and waited. Prosecutors weighed words like “premeditation” and “mitigating trauma.” A detective studied the old case file and swore, quietly, at a corner of the room.

Emily visited Landon in the county jail where conversations were timed by a clock that ticked too loudly. “You should hate me,” he said through the phone.

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know what I feel that has a single word. But I know this: if you had pulled that trigger the way you planned, the closet would have closed for good.”

Months later, a court accepted a plea. Roger’s crimes went into the record in language that felt too clean. Michael carried a sentence of his own that would never end but had no cell. Donna attended every hearing and aged ten years by the last one. Emily moved apartments and kept Rascal’s ball near the door in case visitors needed to smile.

Landon stood, finally, beside a gravestone he could look at without shaking. He said aloud the words he had not dared: “Dad, I almost lost you twice.” He placed a stone on the grave the way his father had taught him, something to hold the memory down so the wind couldn’t take it.

That night he dreamed of the closet. In the dream the door opened both ways.