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The fire alarm sounds. Sam jumps up and starts shoving his feet into sneakers.
“Grab the PlayStation,” he says to me.
I shake my head, covering the phone. “It’s a prank. Someone pulled it.” Then I nearly spit into the phone, “You idiot. Even if you wanted me to leave, there’s no way I can now. They will take a head count. They will make absolutely sure we’re all back in our rooms.”
Sam ignores me and starts unhooking his game system.
“I already made your hall master forget you,” Barron says. The words send a chill up my spine.
I file out with Sam and all the other kids to stand on the grass. Everyone’s looking up at the building, waiting for wisps of smoke to unfurl or flames to light the windows. It’s easy to back away until I’m near trees and shadows.
No one’s looking for me. No one but Barron.
His gloved hand comes down on my shoulder heavily. We walk away from the school, along the sidewalk, toward houses bathed in the flickering blue light of televisions. It’s only around nine, but it feels much later.
It feels too late.
“I’ve been thinking about the Zacharovs,” says Barron too casually. “They’re not the only game in town.”
I should never have let my guard down.
“What do you mean?” It’s hard to look at Barron now, but I do. He’s smirking. His black hair and black suit make him into a shadow, as if I conjured some dark mirror of myself.
“I know what you did to me,” he says, and although he’s trying to keep his tone even, I can hear rage bleeding through. “How you took advantage of the holes in my memory. How for all your bellyaching about doing the right thing, you’re no different from me or Philip. I met two nice men from the FBI—Agent Jones and Agent Hunt. They had a lot to tell me about my big brother—and about my little one. Philip told them how you turned me against him. How somehow you’d messed up my head so that I didn’t remember that I’d been in on his plan to make Anton head of the Zacharov family. At first I didn’t believe them, but I went back and looked at my notebooks again.”
Oh, crap.
There are master forgers in the world, folks who know exactly what chemicals ink had in it in the sixteenth century versus the eighteenth. They have sources for paper and canvases that will carbon date correctly; they can create perfect craquelure. They practice the loops and flourishes of another hand until it is more familiar than their own.
It probably goes without saying that I am not a master forger. Most forgeries get by because they are good enough that no one checks them. When I sign my mother’s name to a permission slip, so long as it looks like her handwriting, no one brings in a specialist.
But if Barron compared the notebook I hastily forged to his older ones, the fake would be obvious. We are all specialists in our own handwriting
“If you know what I did to you,” I say, trying not to seem rattled, “then you know what you did to me, too.”
That brings out his lopsided grin. “The difference is that I’m willing to forgive you.”
That’s so unexpected that I have no reply. Barron doesn’t seem to need one. “I want to start over, Cassel,” he says, “and I want to start at the top. I’m going to the Brennan family. And for that I need you. We’ll be an unstoppable team of assassins.”
“No,” I say.
“Ouch.” He doesn’t sound all that put out by my refusal. “Think you’re too good for such a dirty job?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s me. Too good.”
I wonder if he really could rationalize what I did to him, really treat betrayal like the slight transgression of a recalcitrant business partner. I wonder if I hurt him.
If he can rationalize what I did to him, it’s easy to imagine how he rationalized what he did to me.
“Do you know why you agreed to change all those people into inanimate objects? Why you agreed to kill them?”
I take a deep breath. It sucks to hear the words out loud. “Of course I don’t. I don’t remember anything. You stole all my memories.”
“You would follow Philip and me around like a little puppy,” Barron says. I can hear the violence in his voice. “Begging to do a job with us. Hoping we’d see your black heart and give you a chance.” He pokes me in the chest.
I take a step back. Rage flashes through me, sudden and nearly overwhelming.
I was their baby brother. Sure, I idolized them. And they kicked me in the teeth.
