His voice sounded flat. “It was almost as if the dagger had taken me over and driven itself into his body. I could’ve disarmed him. I knew how. But I didn’t.”

Being trained as an efficient killer wasn’t enough. You also had to learn to control your stress and your fear, becoming so used to violence that you could detach yourself from the trauma of it and assess the level of violence necessary to respond. When the fight-or-flight response kicked in, Mother Nature shut off our brains. It was a biological survival mechanism. By the time our minds processed the full impact of a predator’s presence, we would already be running for the nearest tree.

Bahir wasn’t a natural predator. Given a moment to think, he probably wouldn’t have killed the man, but in the pressure cooker of the moment, his body simply reacted and his training took over.

“I had committed a great sin,” Bahir said.

“Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption in the land—it is as if he had slain mankind entirely,” Luther said quietly.

“Yes.” Bahir nodded.

The Qur’an had many different verses, some pointing to war, some pointing to peace, but the fifth chapter of it was clear on the subject of murder. Human life was precious.

“I went to the man who taught me and asked him why this had happened. He said I was too old. I started too late. I realized that my son had to be a better fighter than me. Eduardo was six at the time, so I took him to be trained. When Rima found out, she was furious with me. She wanted an explanation, so I told her everything. I had planned out how to tell her, and it sounded reasonable in my head, but when it came to the actual explanation, everything went wrong. It was a jumbled mess. I must’ve sounded like a man deep in the throes of a psychotic break, raving about murder, holy men, and vengeful ifrits. I had begun to build the box by then, so I brought it out. It was plain steel then.”

Nitish had said the inside of it was bone. “What is under the steel?” I asked.

“My father’s skull.”

Okay, then.

“The lid is made of my mother’s bones.” Shame twisted his face. “I desecrated their graves to make it. They both carried ifrit blood. I tested their bones for it and the magic in them will help contain him.”

Yeah, if I were his wife and he had unloaded all of this on me at once, I would be less than thrilled.

“Rima was horrified. She asked me to check myself into a hospital. I refused. She asked me to stop exposing our son to violence. I told her that violence would find him one way or another. At least we could prepare him. She thought I was mentally ill.”