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“Thank you, Barron. And Cassel, of course.” I can hear the grind of his teeth as he thanks my brother and me for a lie. “Why don’t you both go with Lila and wait for me in the kitchen? We’re not done here. Desi, you make sure they don’t wander off.”
“You,” Anton says, looking at me. “You did this. You made this happen.”
“I didn’t make you into a moron,” I say, which maybe isn’t the smartest thing, but I’m dumb and giddy with relief.
Plus, you know I’m terrible at keeping my mouth shut.
Anton lunges at me, closing the distance before I can react. We crash backward into one of the stalls, and my head slams into the tile beside one of the toilets. I see Grandad grabbing for Anton’s neck like he’s going to pull him off me, but Anton is way too huge and hardened for that.
His knuckles slam against my cheekbone. I lean up, cracking my forehead against his skull hard enough to make me dizzy with pain. He arches, like he’s going to punch me again, when his eyes lose focus. He falls heavily on top of me and just lies there, heavy as a blanket.
I scrabble backward, not caring about the filthy floor, just trying to get out from under his weight. He looks pale, his lips already going blue.
He’s dead.
Anton is dead.
I’m still staring at him when Lila leans down and touches a wad of toilet paper to my mouth. I didn’t even realize I was bleeding.
“Lila,” Zacharov says. “Come on. I need you out of here.”
“You ever think you’re too clever for your own good?” she asks me softly, before going back over to her father.
Grandad is holding his own wrist, hunched over it protectively.
“Are you okay?” I ask him, pushing myself up and leaning heavily against the wall.
“I’ll be okay when we get out of this bathroom,” Grandad says. Then I notice that his right hand is bare and his ring finger is darkening, blackness spreading down from the nail.
“Oh,” I say. He saved my life.
He laughs. “What? You didn’t think I still had it in me?”
I’m embarrassed to admit that I forgot he’s still a death worker. I’ve always thought of his being a worker in the past tense, but he killed Anton with a single touch, a press of fingers against a vulnerable neck.
“You should have let me help you,” Grandad says. “I overheard them talking after dinner that night when they dosed me.”
“Lila, Barron,” Zacharov says, “you two come with me. We’ll leave Cassel and Desi alone for a moment to clean themselves up.” He looks at us. “Don’t go anywhere.”
I nod as they go.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Grandad says.
I’m still pressing the wad of paper to my cheek. Real blood drooling from my mouth drops onto my shirt next to the fake blood. I look down at Anton’s body. “You thought I was still memory worked—that’s why you were trying to drag me out of here.”
“What was I supposed to think?” Grandad says. “That you three had some ridiculously complicated plan? That Zacharov was in on it too?”
I grin in the mirror. “We’re not in on anything. I forged Barron’s notebooks. Barron believes everything in those books. He has to, what with his memory loss.”
That’s what I did that last day and a half. What I stayed up all night doing. Rewriting pages and pages of notes in handwriting easy to forge because I already knew it so well. I constructed an entirely different life for Barron; the kind of life where he’d want to save the head of a crime family because Zacharov is Lila’s dad. The kind of life where my brothers and I worked together for noble purposes.
The easiest lies to tell are the ones you want to be true.
Grandad frowns, and then understanding smoothes his features out into shock. “You mean he never met with Zacharov?”
I shake my head. “Nope. He just thinks he did.”
“Did you meet with Zacharov?”
