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“He called me Popi and introduced himself as Peacock.
“… Like I said, he’s very charming. He knew just what to say to a fifteen year old boy who didn’t know what it felt like to belonged. I know I couldn’t have known better but— they were pretty, empty words and I ate them all up. He played me right into his palm then he started to close his fingers. He told me that he wanted me to become his apprentice. That if I followed him, I would win at not just The Game but everything. At life. That I would be able to hold the world in the palm of my hand and hold it for ransom to the highest bidder.
“He stuck a business card in my pocket and told me if I was interested to go to the address, order a black coffee and wait.
“The next morning, I cut school and went to the address. Predictably it was a cafe. Anyone from the Three Rings would have known it for what it was: a shitty front that didn’t pretend to have good food or service. I did what I was told and I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Then, just when I was starting to worry I was going to have to leave to make sure I would beat my mom home to delete the message about missing school, a hand fell on my shoulder. He teased me about wasting the coffee and asked if I was hungry. He took me to a Chinese restaurant and the fucking prick made comments about it being the same thing when I corrected him that I was Korean and not Chinese. But I was used to that shit. It wasn’t a flag of any color to me.
“That first day, he just showed me around his operation, making me promises, making me make promises. He told me not to cut school and to tell my mom that I was working after school when I came to him. Money was always tight for us. She didn’t like that I was working but when I promised that I’d quit if my grades dropped even a little bit she relented. Learning how to hack my school’s mainframe and making sure everything appeared to be perfect was the first thing Peacock taught me. It was so perfect that it even gaslit my teachers into thinking I had earned all my As.” Seong sighed, rubbing at his face. That part was the easier bit of the story.
“For six months, I had his undivided attention, his praise, access to technology I never thought I’d get my hands on. He was careful. He made sure I craved his attention, that I would agree to everything he asked, showered me with little things. He kept everything he asked for seeming small and insignificant, so I stopped thinking about requests he made.
“Then… I turned sixteen and that was some kind of magic number. He coached me on what to say to my mom so she wouldn’t expect me home. I told her I was spending the night with another sixteen-year-old I had met at work. They took me to a bar. One of my gifts was an ID nearly as good as the one you have. Peacock… He made sure I didn’t drink too much. I thought it was sweet. I thought he was looking out for me—” He swallowed through the knot in his throat.
“Peacock lived in the cafe. We ended the night there and he sent everyone else home. Even though some of them were really fucked up and shouldn’t have gone anywhere. When we were alone… He poured us another glass, told me I was special. Told me I was a man.” He laughed softly. “The damn pedophile playbook. But he’d set it up so perfectly that I didn’t notice anything was wrong until he kissed me. Then he ignored me when I tried to stop him, layering on praise until I complied. And it didn’t end that night. His undivided attention became a risk of him putting his hands on me again. Even though I was infatuated with him and craved his approval, I hated how his hands made me feel.
“But I felt powerless to do anything. I couldn’t do anything and no one would help me. Because I knew, even back then, that the others knew what he was doing behind closed doors to me. But no one said a god damn thing. No one helped me. For two years, I simultaneously had all the attention I thought I had wanted and had never felt more alone. I tried twice to get away from him in that time. The first time was after he hit me for pushing him away. He was stronger than me but I was faster and I was able to get away for a few days before he managed to use all that fucking charm and empty words to convince me to come back. I figured out by then that he was far more interested in making money than physical pleasure so I started chasing harder and harder scores that would yield more money in the long run. It wasn’t perfect but it was enough to keep him at bay most of the time. I couldn’t have known that doing that would ultimately lead to my escape.” He paused for a moment, considering the back of his hand and his long fingers.
“I’m half Korean. My father was an Italian-American who abandoned my mom when I was a toddler. I’d learn eventually that he died two years after that but I’ve never looked into the hows or whys of it. His family ignored me and my mom. I think my grandparents might have sent her money occasionally but not very much and I never met them. He had a brother. An older one. I can’t be sure if my father was part of the Italian Mafia but his brother absolutely was. He was a Capo in the Three Rings. A fucking stupid, greedy man who filled a void created before the treaty was signed and the Rings were at each other’s throats. He somehow found out what I could do. Don’t know and don’t care how. All I knew was he was an out.
“By that point I was out of high school and Peacock wanted me in his cafe at all times. But something was changing in how he was acting around me. Our… dynamic was changing. He physically and financially held all the power over all of us. But people weren’t going to him when they hit a snag in their rabbit holes. They were coming to me. I was only eighteen and I was better than he was at twenty-eight. And he knew that. I’d like to think it still eats at his core that he was inferior to someone he thought he would always have power over. But at the time, it was becoming dangerous for me. When my uncle managed to get me alone to make his deal, I was sporting a black eye and more bruises in other places.” He swallowed at the memory.
“It couldn’t have been more perfect for him. I was desperate to get as far away from Peacock as I could and a couple of states worked just as well as an entire county. I agreed to work for him. To steal money from the Family and line his pockets in the process. In exchange, he’d keep me safe from Peacock.
“But the stupid fucking prick was too greedy. He knew about my big scores and didn’t seem to realize how much time and effort went into covering my ass to make sure it couldn’t be traced. Or he didn’t care. He just wanted it. I was able to hold him back at first by claiming I didn’t have the equipment. He said to do whatever I needed to to make it happen but he wanted a million dollars by the end of the year. If he didn’t get it… Well, Peacock was going to find it very easy to get his hands back on me according to him. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that if I did things his way, we were going to get caught. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be the FBI or another mobster but I wanted to be prepared when they came for me. Using money that wasn’t mine I bought a desktop to run all the money laundering off of, plus a laptop to store my evidence in. I covered that shitty apartment he hid me in with cameras and I made sure that every time he called me or came to talk to me, I had multiple recordings of it. I had everything I needed to show that I was just as much of a victim as the people I was stealing from in all of this.
“Sure enough… Sure enough, I came home one day and there was a man sitting at the card table I ate dinner at. But no one could have guessed how it was going to turn out. Because no one could have predicted the Cat making his splash as someone to look out for. He had been a soldier back then. But he was a soldier with the Don’s blessing to prove a Capo was stealing from them all. The Cat’s uncle had been hit hard by the scheming and the Cat wanted blood. He had been careful. Patient. And that eventually led him to me.
“I wasn’t… I wasn’t in a good place when I walked into my apartment that day. I hadn’t been for a long time but by that point I had simply gone into autopilot. I simply existed. So when I saw the stranger in my apartment… I barely even registered how dangerous it all was. He told me later that my only response to seeing him was to sigh and ask to put my ice cream away before he did anything because it was a rare treat I had been looking forward to. He’s never said if he let me put it away or not and I cannot recall much of that conversation for the life of me. All I remember is him telling me to sit down and asking me a question and the next thing I knew I was spilling my guts to him, not completely unlike how you unloaded onto Andy. Except he didn’t try to stop me. He let me say everything I had ever thought or felt or had held pent up inside of me until I choked on my own sobs, begging to just be left alone. For someone to just want me for me and not what I could do for them.
“He hugged me. I’m not sure when he put his gun away or when either of us got up. All I know is I was ranting about how unfair my life had been up to that point and then I was being given the first platonic hug I’d ever received from another man. When I asked him what he was doing, he just said I looked like I needed a hug. He wasn’t wrong. Then he gave me a choice. I could run with whatever money I had skimmed from working for my uncle and he would let me go with the understanding that if he ever saw me again, I was a dead man. Or I could stay and work for him. He told me he had big plans for the city. Plans that would make it so no one would be used like I was. He told me that if I agreed, I would have to give the money back but he would protect me. That he would make sure no one would ever make me do anything I was uncomfortable with again. That no one would ever touch me again. He said there were too many people like Peacock and my uncle who used their power and influence to hurt others in desperate need of help and he was going to exterminate them so they couldn’t hurt anyone again. But he needed help to do that.
“Obviously, I took him up on that. I won’t tell you what happened but my uncle was handled the only way he could have. I became Snake, named by the Cat for the silly screensaver I had on the desktop. And… you really liked that didn’t you?”
* * *
Thomas blinked and looked down at the dishes in front of him. He hadn’t even noticed how much he had eaten but the soup Seong had made for him and most of the side dishes were gone with Seong’s coffee mostly untouched. He flushed though that might have been in part the lingering heat on his tongue. “Yeah,” he muttered. “It was really good.”
“Good,” Seong told him, smiling at him. “How are you feeling now? How’s the head and stomach?”
“Um,” Thomas said slowly, his brow wrinkling as he considered how he felt, “…full.”
The laugh was soft and filled Thomas with a warmth that he was sure wasn’t the Korean spices. “That’s as good an answer as any. I’m just glad all the prep didn’t go to waste. I try to have haejang-guk ready whenever I go out drinking. A little gift to my hungover self. Glad it works just as well for a drug hangover as well as it does for alcohol.”
“I liked the cucumbers,” he said, gesturing to one of the empty plates.
“That’s called oi muchim. I have more of it in the fridge if you want it?”
Thomas shook his head quickly, feeling the shirt he had wrapped around his hair shift. He hadn’t wrapped it as tightly as he would have with his own shirt. Seong had told him it wasn’t a good shirt when Thomas made the awkward request for one but he didn’t want to stretch Seong’s clothes out too bad. “No, I really am full. …Can I ask you a question?”
“If you didn’t have questions I’d be concerned,” Seong said taking a drink of his coffee. “Ask as many as you need.”
Thomas chewed on his lip for a moment, trying to think of how to ask what he wanted to know. “What happened with your mom?”
“Hm, she lives about an hour out of town,” Seong said. “I go see her about once a month or so and she fusses at me for not seeing her enough and not bringing anyone home.”
“Does… Does she know?”
Seong looked away, his lips twisting. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Probably not everything. Probably more than I want her to know. We both pretend I work as a computer programmer and she doesn’t ask me any questions. We don’t bring up the rough patch we had in my teens or moving away from her without a word. That’s… That’s partly cultural. I wouldn’t dream of speaking for all Asians but… talking about these sorts of things just isn’t done in her generation. She pretends it never happened and shows me how much she loves me by fussing over me and making me food and I return it by buying her anything she needs and making sure that her house is in good repair.” He shrugged. “That’s just how it is.”
