It is truly unfortunate they are using her to bait him. Dangling a vision of Mercy, gruesomely dead, is not exactly going to break him down to weeping; he is still too freshly angry for that. But to parade out every person he has loved and set them under the ravens, to rub salt in the wound of his newfound powerlessness by putting his Annabel Lee on the illusionary rack—

He does not look too closely, for fear her eyes will be open. He does not know what color they will be.

John's fingers have tightened on the side of the boat, but he does not take the bait.

Willow provides a helpful distraction by confessing to murder. He turns his eerily dark gaze upon her, somber and thoughtful, wholly attentive in the face of this sin. She looks away, expression gone distant, to the horizon; he turns his gaze down to his hands with a gentle exhale through his nose.

"You will hear no condemnation from me," he murmurs. With a wry edge of humor: "I have always had an overdeveloped sense of vengeance."

A man killed her lover, and so she killed him in return. It is an ancient logic, a tit-for-tat with an inherent simplicity he cannot deny. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, et cetera.

With the woman's corpse at his back, it comes out soft but intent, terribly genuine: "I am sorry you lost her."