The Custodian had the killer in a grip that could fold steel, and the killer — bleeding, beaten, entirely his — was laughing.
"You won't," the man said, through a split lip. "You never do. That's your whole brand, isn't it? The hero who's never taken a life. You'll cuff me, and the cell will hold me for a year, and then I'll be out, and I'll do it again — the school, or the next one, or the one after — and every child I take after tonight, you took with me. Because you had me. Right here. And you chose your clean hands over their open eyes."
The Custodian had heard taunts before. This was not a taunt; it had the awful symmetry of a proof. He had counted, once, in a sleepless grey hour, the names of the people his spared enemies had gone on to kill. The list was long. He had stopped counting not because it ended but because he could not carry it. His rule had always felt like the highest thing about him — the one line he would not cross, the thing that made him better than the things he fought. Tonight, with the man's pulse under his thumb and the next victims somewhere out there already breathing, it felt, for the first time, like the most expensive vanity in the world.
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