"If there’s anything to be said about this, it’s that I did nothing." Apollo held his stance, opposite the door, with Dion staring back and Aenea approaching from behind, sweating at the forehead. The rest of the family was gone, nowhere to be seen for the deathbed of Junior.

A toy train quietly whizzed in the background, snagging upon a plastic, topped over tree and falling with the wheels spinning and slowing and whining into the air.

Junior’s blood pooled underneath Apollo like rising tide.

"Oh my god," Aenea said. Her eyes were focused on the rising tide of red.

"I found him like this," Apollo said, his blade interred into the floor, covering half his face.

“You found him like this?” Dion asked.

“Yeah, I did. You believe me, right?”

Apollo should have known what crazed and intense face he made, he should have known to relax, to ease his eyes to their dull blackness from the red crimson they held. He should have been calm, composed. He should have been many things, he would regret later, but calm was not one of them. His crooked body stepped forward, most of his weight was on his blade.

“There are witnesses. The people in the front, they saw me come in.” Apollo said.

Dion stepped back.

“I was chasing after Floyd. He went somewhere but I swear that if you found him, he'd tell you as much.” But why would Floyd help Apollo? Why wouldn’t he blame him too?

He wanted to slap himself at the claim. Apollo knew he wasn't...thinking. He took two looks at Dion and Aenea and knew what they felt, then looked at his shoes and the footprints of blood he left.

“I don’t even have a reason to kill them. What’s in it for me?”

“I don’t know.” Dion said. “I don’t know what’s been going on with you lately. You’re talking to yourself. Arguing. Slapping. Punching yourself. You sleepwalk. I don't know what's going on with you Apollo, or what you're capable of. You’ve been acting…a little eccentric.”

“And what about you?” Apollo lashed back. “You’re spineless. You can’t move an inch without regretting it.”

Dion maintained his quiet indignation. Apollo could feel the laser beam of his stare burn into him. He felt warm at the face.

“We don’t have cameras to prove whether he’s full of shit or not,” Aenea whispered to Dion.

“I can hear you…” Apollo said. “And I know you don’t have cameras. You’ve invested a lot into making sure this casino is a hellhole of debauchery and chaos. Of course, you don’t want videotapes of that. Everything and anything to protect the elites, right?”

“This isn’t helping your case,” Aenea said.

“I don’t need help for a case, I’m innocent.”

“You’re the only one who wasn’t in the ball at some point.”

“I just finished telling you I was following Floyd!” He said. It didn’t matter who he spoke to now, him or her, for their unified suspicion felt the same. A giant brick, gray wall.

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They were both quiet.

“I wouldn’t have made a mess as much as I did anyway,” He said. “Fractured skull. Displaced spine plates, a broken neck, bone shrapnel in his brain matter. His windpipe, crushed, his jaw, fractured. I would have cut him clean in two if I wanted to kill him.”

Then he just shut up. Like they wanted him to because it was not out of pleasure that they blamed Apollo, nor convenience. So they just wanted him to shut up, to stop incriminating himself, to make himself look at least presentable. But Apollo knew how hard that was, with the sweat and his heartbeat and the fucking walls melting before his eyes, and the ceiling lights like fireworks. Hallucination after hallucination, growing out of his rising anxiety. He was being transported to a schizophrenic nightmare and his vehicle was the dread-steed of judgment these two had made for him.

“His gut is cut open,” Dion looked away. Aenea held her mouth.

“They’re just everywhere, aren’t they?”

Apollo put a blanket over the scene and the blood soaked into the baby-blue, flower patterned blanket. There was still spit and bite marks where Junior had last nibbled on it. Then, those too were soaked in blood.

There was a period of silence that felt like in itself, a kind of hell. A period of waiting, as they looked around at all the ruined toys; the stepped over green-plastic army men, the stuffed animals, the hot wheel cars and broken train sets. They looked too, to the corpses of the workers laying about in the corners of the room.

Apollo put his hand in his hair (it felt like dead, blackened straw, brittle, but looked like tar) and rubbed his scalp. Oily, sweaty and wet.

And Salome walked in.

She collapsed immediately, someone held her. After a while, she dragged herself onto the floor and underneath the blanket, such that all they could see was her shadow clutching Junior’s shadow. And the globs of black clotted-flesh wrapped-skull that fell from her squeezing hands as she cried and held him. Maybe she didn’t even care at that point, about the body or what was left of it. Maybe holding it was good enough.

She didn’t pass Apollo even a moments attention, not his sword or his nervous disposition. Her guards came in, following her, and they closed the door for her to give her privacy to weep underneath the bloody, baby blanket.

“Who did this?” She screamed, her mouth a wide, fanged outline underneath the blanket. “Who?”

Dion passed Apollo a look. Aenea put her hand over his mouth. And all Apollo could mouth, not even speak, was the sentence: You’d sell me out?

Of course, he couldn’t. He couldn’t lie to the crying mother either. So he was stuck, in perpetual silence as the blaming, wrinkled, vascular finger of Salome went person to person. Aenea took a deep breath.

“We don’t know who did it,” She said to the relief of Apollo. “It was someone who knew what room he was staying in and who had a reason to kill him.”

“Who?!” She wasn’t even talking anymore, just repeating herself like a broken machine.

“We. Don’t. Know.” She said. “I can’t imagine it was Dion…or Apollo.” Her breathing was unsteady, her eyes kind of dragged to the floor and to the blood following the cracked lines of tile. “They don’t have a reason to kill them. As far as I can tell.”

The words were forced. All of them could tell, though would not raise opposition to.

“Who did it?!” She came out of the blanket like a monster out of hibernation, dragging herself with chipped nails, onto the bloody floor and up, tall and overbearing. She walked over to Aenea, her pupils small and lost in the large pools of white. Her face, half-bloodied and clung to by pink brain. “Who?” She whispered, in a voice that made even Apollo go numb.

Apollo hid his blade at last. It disappeared into his coat. His clothes too, were bloody.

“If I find out you had something to do with it…” She muttered, angry, crying. “You fucking church dog…if I-!”

“Whoever killed your son,” He said. “Has a propensity for skull bashing and a right mind to get rid of your position as head of the pack.”

His vision cleared. His thoughts cleared, perhaps it was only just occurring to Apollo, as the blood dried on his skin and clothes.

“Who else had a problem with your sons' ascension to the throne?”

And he knew the name in his head, but could not say it. Maybe all of them knew it.

He closed his eyes. His breathing eased, his head begun to ache and the letters came to his mind by some manner of precognition, or soothsaying, or perhaps out of a retrieval of a thought his frightened delirium had kept hidden to him. What had he thought before they all came into the room? What did he think of that cracked skull, of the beaten body?

A mallet had done him in. Or a bat.

Or a cane.

“I think Richter killed your son, ma’am,” Apollo said. “I think he caved Junior's head, right the fuck in.”

And they all went quiet.