I try to say something, but I can’t remember what we were talking about. All my thoughts melt away as her lips part and her bare hand slides through my hair, pulling me down to her.
She makes a soft sound as my mouth presses against hers, hungry, desperate. Only a monster would do this, but I already know I’m a monster.
I roll toward her, not breaking the kiss, crushing her body against mine. My eyes close, so I don’t have to see what I’m doing, but my hands find her easily enough. She moans into my mouth.
Her fingers are still knotted in my hair, gripping it hard, like she’s afraid I am going to pull away.
“Please,” I say breathlessly, but then we’re kissing again and it’s hard to concentrate on anything but the feel of her body arching under mine, and I never get the rest of the words out.
Please stop me.
I drag my mouth away from hers, moving to kiss the hollow of her throat, my teeth gliding over her skin, my tongue tasting sweat and dirt.
“Cassel,” she whispers. She’s said my name a hundred times before, a thousand times, but never like this.
I pull back, abruptly, panting. Never like this.
She rises with me, but now at least we’re both sitting up. That helps. She’s breathing hard, her eyes black with pupil.
“I don’t—,” I start. “It’s not—not real.”
The words make no sense. I shake my head to clear it.
She looks at me with an expression I cannot name. Her lips are slightly apart and swollen.
“We have to go back,” I say finally.
“Okay.” I can barely hear the word. Her voice is all breath.
I nod, pushing myself to my feet. I reach out my hand, and she lets me pull her up. For a moment her hand is in mine, warm and bare.
At the window to my room, I catch my reflection in the glass. Shaggy black hair. Sneer. I look like a hungry ghost, glowering in at a world I am no longer fit to be part of.
The dream takes me by surprise. I’m standing at the edge of a lawn. Barron’s beside me. I know, without any reason to know, that we’re waiting for someone to come out of the big pillared white house in front of us.
“Join me in a cup of tea?” he asks, holding out a paper cup with a smirk. The amber liquid inside is boiling, bubbles rising along with steam. It’s going to scald us both.
“Oh,” I say. “Do you think we’ll fit?”
CHAPTER SIX
I’M USELESS IN CLASSES the next day. I fail a quiz in physics and conjugate my verbs completely weirdly in French. Luckily, I probably won’t need French in my future assassination career, unless I’m one of those fancy movie assassins who travel the world and also steal jewels. Physics I might need—got to calculate the trajectory of bullets somehow.
I call Barron on my lunch break to avoid the cafeteria. I don’t know how to say anything to Sam and Daneca that isn’t all lies. And I don’t know how to say anything to Lila that isn’t the truth.
“Hey,” he says. “We still on for Tuesday pizza?” His voice is casual. Normal. It makes me almost believe that I can relax.
“I need to ask you something. In person. Where are you?” A teacher walks by and gives me a look. We’re not supposed to be calling people during the school day, even between classes. I’m a senior, though, so she doesn’t give me a hard time.
“Mom and I are having fun. We’re staying at the Nassau Inn. It’s pretty swank.”
“That’s in Princeton,” I say. It’s right downtown, minutes away from Daneca’s house. I experience a frisson of horror at the thought of my mother and hers in the same pharmacy line.
Barron laughs. “Yeah. And? Mom says you two basically tore up Atlantic City, so we’re looking for a fresh start.”
I have no idea why I thought that Barron would do anything but amplify all of Mom’s problems. A memory of him saying something about a painting nags at me; I should have seen this coming.
“Look, whatever,” I say. “Can you meet me somewhere at six? I can skip dinner and some of study hall.”
“We’ll come over now. Mom can sign you out, remember? We’ll get sushi.”
“Sure, okay,” I say.
It takes them an hour and a half to make the twenty-minute trip from Princeton to Wallingford. By the time they get there, I am in the “extra help” period, where I have to suffer through realizing that almost all my physics mistakes were dumb and obvious.
It’s a relief to be called to the office.
Barron is lounging against the secretary desk in a sharkskin suit. Mom is next to him, her hair pulled back into a Hermes scarf with a massive black-and-white hat over it, black gloves, and a low-cut black dress. They’re both wearing sunglasses. She’s bent over, signing a sheet.
I think she’s supposed to look like she’s in mourning.
“Mom,” I say.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “The doctor wants to see you to make sure you don’t have the same thing that killed your brother.” She turns to Ms. Logan, who looks scandalized by the whole encounter. “These things can run in families,” she confides.
“You’re afraid I’m going to come down with a bad case of getting two in the chest?” I say. “’Cause you might be right about that running in families.”
Mom purses her lips in disapproval.
Barron claps me on the back hard. “Come on, funnyman.”
We walk toward the parking lot. I shove my gloved hands deep into the pockets of my uniform. Barron is keeping pace with me. He has left the top couple buttons of his crisp white shirt undone, enough so that I can see a new gold chain slide against his tan skin. I wonder if he’s wearing charms against being worked.
“I thought you wanted us to come get you,” Mom says as she lights a cigarette with a gilt lighter and takes a deep drag. “What’s the matter?”
“All I want is for Barron to tell me where the bodies are,” I say, keeping my voice down as I walk across the lawn. Having them here is surreal. They don’t belong at Walling-ford, with its manicured lawns and low voices. They’re both larger than life.
They exchange a look brimming with discomfort.
“The people I transformed. Where are they? What did I turn them into?”
I don’t know exactly what Barron remembers about the disappearances of Greco and Kalvis and all the rest. I have no idea how many of Barron’s memories are missing, how extensively he’s damaged himself with blowback, but if there’s a record in his journals, then maybe he knows something. Yeah, sure, I changed his journals so that he forgot that he wanted to use me to kill Zacharov, forgot that he wasn’t on my side against Philip and Philip’s buddy, Anton. But I didn’t change anything else.
“There’s no reason why you need to know that,” Barron says slowly. Which sounds promising.
“Let’s just say that I do.” I stop walking, forcing them to either stop too or go on without me. They stop.
“Don’t argue, boys,” Mom says, blowing out a cloud of smoke that hangs in the air. “Cassel, come on, baby. Let it go.”
“One,” I say. “Give me one body.”
“Fine.” Barron shrugs nonchalantly. “Remember that chair you hated?”
I open my mouth and then close it, like a fish. “What?” I say, but I know which chair he means. The one I almost threw out when Grandad and I cleaned the house, because the thing always creeped me out. It was a too-exact replica of one I’d seen on television.
He laughs and tilts up his sunglasses, so I can see him raise his eyebrows at me. “Yep.”
I root my keys out of my bag. “Thanks for signing me out, Mom,” I say, kissing her on her powdered cheek.
“I thought we were going to have lunch,” she says. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing—”
“I’ve got to go,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry nothing,” Mom says in a syrupy voice, grabbing hold of my upper arm. “You can come to lunch with us or I can call that nice lady at the desk and tell her that your appointment got canceled, I brought you back to school, and won’t she be a dear and make sure you’re where you’re supposed to be?”
“Don’t threaten me,” I say, which makes Barron look at me like I’ve gone crazy. Telling Mom what to do is never a great idea.
Her hand clenches tighter around my arm, nails biting into my skin through the white dress shirt. I look down; somehow she got her glove off without my noticing. If she slides her fingers lower, she could touch my bare wrist. Or she could go higher and grab for my neck. “A mother shouldn’t have to threaten her son into wanting to spend time together.”
She’s got me there.
Mom slides into the booth at Toriyama’s and plunks down her purse next to her, leaving Barron and me to use the chairs. Her gloves are back in place. When I study them to figure out how she rigged things to remove one so fast, she gives me a pointed look. I study the framed kimonos hanging above us and the pale bamboo table instead.
The waitress comes, dressed all in black, and pours us tea. She’s pretty, with supershort bangs and a nose ring that glitters like a single drop of absinthe. Her name tag says Jin-Sook.
Barron orders one of the big platters of sushi. “It comes on one of the boats, right?” he asks, pointing toward a shelf of lacquered wooden ships, some of them with two masts, that rests above where the chef carves fish. “Because one time I ordered it and it just came on a plate. But on the menu it says boat, so I just want to be sure.”
“It comes on a boat,” Jin-Sook says.
I take a sip of the tea. It’s a jasmine, so hot it nearly scalds my throat.
“So,” Barron says. “We’ve got a new mark we’re looking at. Someone big. We could use a hand. And you could use the money. Besides, we’re family.”
“Family looks out for family,” says Mom, a line I’ve heard her recite more times than I can count.
It’s tempting to say yes, even after everything. I used to long to be asked to grift alongside my brother. To prove that even though I wasn’t a worker, I could con along with the best of them. And my brother and mother are up there with the best of them.
But now I know I’m a worker and a con artist and maybe a murderer, too. And if there is one thing I want to prove to myself, it’s that I can be different.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I say.
Barron shrugs philosophically.
Mom reaches for her teacup, and I see the flash of a fat blue topaz circled in diamonds sitting on her first finger, over her leather glove. The ring’s new. I shudder to think where it came from. Then I spot the ring on the other hand. The stone is reddish, like a single droplet of blood spilled into water.
“Mom,” I say hesitantly.
Something in my expression makes her look down at her hands.
“Oh,” she gushes, clearly pleased. “I met the most fantastic man! He’s absolutely perfect.” She waggles the finger wearing the topaz. “And such good taste.”
“He’s the one I was telling you about,” Barron says. At my blank look he lowers his voice and raises his eyebrows. “The mark.”
“Oh,” I say. “But what about that other ring?”
“This old thing?” Mom says, holding out her other hand. The pale red diamond flashes in the fluorescent restaurant lights. “Also a gift. One I haven’t worn in years.”
I think of the pictures I found when I was cleaning out the house. Photos of Mom in vintage lingerie, posing for a person I couldn’t see. Someone with an expensive wedding ring. Someone who wasn’t my dad. I wonder if the man from the photograph had something to do with the diamond.
“Who gave that to you?” I ask.
She gives me a look across the table like she’s daring me to contradict her. “Your father, sweetheart. He had the best taste of any man.”
“Well, I don’t think you should wear it in public. That’s all.” I smile to let her know I’m not fooled. It feels like we’re alone in the restaurant. “Someone might steal it.”
That makes her laugh. Barron looks at us both like we’re speaking a language he doesn’t understand. For a change, I am the person with the insider information.
The food comes. I mix plenty of wasabi into my soy sauce and drag a piece of sashimi through it. The fish is salty on my tongue, and the green horseradish flares all the way up my nose.
“I’m glad you came to lunch,” Barron says, leaning in to me. “You seemed a little freaked-out back at school.”
I don’t mention that by the time they picked me up it was way past time for lunch. We’re surrounded by an early dinner crowd.
“What you’re feeling is part of the grieving process,” he goes on, with the total sincerity that makes him so convincing. “There’s no making sense out of what happened to Philip, so you’re trying to make sense out of something else instead.”
“Maybe that’s it,” I say.
He ruffles my hair with a gloved hand. “Sure it is. You’ll see.”
Jin-Sook brings our check in a narrow black folder. Mom pays for it with one of a dozen stolen credit cards.
Unfortunately for her, the credit card is declined. The waitress brings it back with apologies.
“Your machine must be broken,” my mother says, her voice rising.
“It’s fine,” I say, reaching for my wallet. “I’ve got it.”
Barron turns to our waitress. “Thanks for such great service.” His bare hand is on her wrist.