“Hold still and take your beating like a man,” Gregory threatens, while Leonard gets out his blade. “Or we’ll tell everyone that you’re a fraud. Kira will be humiliated, Sokolov will probably kill you. You’ll be dead in a ditch before sunrise.”
I scrub my face, tired of all of this. “Y’all are really gonna do this, huh?”
“Don’t act like you didn’t jump out of a two-story window to escape us once, Claremont, or whatever your real name is,” Leonard sneers, waving his knife around like a guy who doesn’t know how to use it. “You wanna jump? Go for it. It’ll be funny.”
With a sigh, I shove his shoulder, knocking him off balance. Not enough to hurt, but enough to get him out of my way. With the door clear, I grab the knob–but let it go again to duck under Gregory’s wild swing. His brass knuckles clang against the door, denting the old wood.
“Fuck!” Gregory cusses, pulling back and shaking his hand out with a wince.
“Yeah, those things hurt,” I chuckle without much humor.
Before I can unlock the door, Leonard slashes at me, and I have to jump back to avoid a cut. A knife is no toy, and he’s going to make this fight a lot more serious if he waves it around like that.
“Don’t,” I warn him, a real edge in my voice. Thunder clashes overhead, and lightning strobes on our dramatic scene. Wind whips between us as we face off.
They’re still blocking the door.
“Don’t?” Gregory mocks me. “Or what? You’ll cry? Beg, and maybe we won’t beat the shit out of you and toss you off this building.”
“Try it!” I snarl, losing my patience. “You want to fight? Get it the fuck over with, then. Come at me! Try to tackle me off the fucking roof if you want! But goddamn, just get started so I can go back inside!”
“I don’t think he gets it, Greg,” Leonard elbows his brother. “He thinks he’s gonna walk away from this and rejoin the party like it’s nothing.”
“Even if we let you,” Gregory threatens, the rain pounding like war drums all around us, “we still know the truth about you. It would be so fucking easy to expose your long con for what it is.”
“We probably should,” Leonard says with a cruel smile. “Kira shouldn’t be tricked into marrying a fraud. We should protect her, shouldn’t we?”
“I’m going to make this really simple for you,” I growl, cutting off their charade. “We have two choices now. This is where your stupidity has brought us, so listen close. Either we fight, and all risk getting seriously injured or even tossed off this fucking roof to theconcretethree stories down, or you back the fuck off and get out of my way.”
“Ha! No, I don’t think so,” Gregory blusters, both brothers getting flustered and edgy at my continued disregard for their threats. “Either you take our payback like a real man, or we’ll tell everyone that you’re a fucking grifter that’s preying on Kira for her money. You won’t be able to leave town fast enough to avoid Sokolov. He’ll gut you, dude.”
I don’t see any good way out of this. Even if they let me go, and I run straight to Young-gi to tell him that his smoke screen for my past has been breached, what good does that do me? It just gives him more work to do, more fires to put out. More shit to shovel just to deal with me and my issues. This is all my fault, and I don’t see how it’s right to ask him to fix it for me.
And I can’t falsify records, make a new past for myself. I can’t fix it like that. I only know one way to fix my problems.
“You’re right,” I say grimly, finally letting go of the idea of getting to the door, which has started to rattle in its frame from the storm raging around us. “I’m not Tommy Claremont. I never have been.”
The atmosphere changes when I stop looking for a way past them and start lookingatthem, taking them apart with my eyes, picking out their weak points.
“W-we know!” Leonard stutters, raising his knife defensively, reacting to my change in tone. “So hold still while we get even and maybe we’ll keep your dirty little secret.”
“Shit,” I laugh grimly. “What a stupid way to die.”
“What are you–?!”
I don’t let them finish talking. I’m already in motion.
Chapter 32
Young-gi
“Stand back,” I snap, ripping the incompetent grunt away from the locked door he’s been uselessly fiddling with. Time presses on my throat like a boot. Every single second that Tommy is separated from me by this locked door is unacceptable. “I don’t have time for this.”
Shoving him out of my way, I rear back and kick the door down, splintering the old wood, snapping the ancient, rusted lock. It flies open, letting in the vivid sounds of the storm, wind gushing past me, pushing on me as I charge into the rain, prepared to find anything. Prepared todoanything, depending on what I see.
But somehow…I’m still caught off guard.
I freeze just outside the door, taking it all in. The rain pouring around the edges of the bell tower’s shelter separates me from Tommy like a living wall. Lightning flashes, illuminating the scene and burning it into my irises, like the negative of a Polaroid.
