“Clear as the floor of your office.” He can’t be alive. I watched the Hag scrape his guts out and sew them up into her dress. Surely he wouldn’t really break all my arms and legs. Would he?

The presence behind my back is gone and I’m floored for a second by how cold I am. I hadn’t realized how much heat he was throwing off until he was gone.

There’s no way he’s alive. It can’t be Ryodan behind me. Is Barrons alive, then, too? How could they be? I know they’re tough to kill and all but folks don’t survive being gutted! Where did they get new guts from? Did somebody take them back from the Hag and sew them both up again? Will he look like Frankenstein’s monster?

I don’t want to turn around. I don’t like any of the possibilities confronting me. If it’s not Ryodan, I’ve gone nuts. If it is Ryodan, dude, I’m dead.

“Turn around, kid.”

I can’t make my feet move. I can’t wrap my brain around that he’s standing behind me. I’m shaking like a leaf. Me! What the feck is wrong with me? I’m tougher than tough! I ain’t scared of nothing.

“Now.”

I take a deep breath and turn around. I absorb his face, his body, the way he stands, the look in his eyes, the arrogant, faint smile.

It’s either Ryodan or a perfect clone.

I do something I can’t believe I do. I hate hormones, I hate Chester’s, and I bloody fecking hate Ryodan. I’m never going to be able to live this down!

I burst into tears.

Ryodan turns and stalks off for the stairs.

I trail miserably behind him. The whole fecking club is watching Dani Mega O’Malley cry and walk behind Ryodan without saying a word, like a dog brought to heel. I can’t fecking believe it. I hate my life. I hate myself. I hate my stupid face. I want to snap, “He broke my ribs and I’m crying from the pain of one them puncturing my lung but I’m tough and I’ll kick his ass and be okay and then I’ll kick all of your asses, too!” to save face, but I’m pretty sure if I say a word he really will break my leg. I wipe angrily at my eyes. My stupid, pansy, betraying eyes with their stupid, pansy, betraying tear ducts.

The whole club has gone silent. Folks and Fae part a wide path to let us walk through. I’ve never taken a long walk of shame before and it chafes real bad. Jo’s standing there, white-faced, looking from me to Ryodan’s back, and back at me again. She might be his flavor of the month but I can tell by the look on her face that she’s afraid of pushing him. She mouths, Apologize! Bend. Or he’ll break you!

Over my dead body. The Mega doesn’t bend. I pass Lor at the bottom of the steps to the upper level. I turn my face away because I can’t stand him to see me being such a baby. He leans in close and says soft-like against my ear, “Honey, you might just have saved your life with those tears. I thought you had too much ego and too little common sense to know when to turn on the waterworks. He can’t stand a woman crying. It fucks him up every time.”

I look at him. He winks at me.

I flash fire at him with my eyes because I ain’t allowed to use my tongue. They say: I ain’t a woman and I ain’t crying and I ain’t afraid of nothing.

“He can deal with not being able to control you as long as you let the world believe he does. He’s king here, honey. Kings can’t be challenged publicly.”

Nobody controls me. Ever, my eyes snarl. And I challenge whoever the feck I want wherever I fecking feel like doing it!

He grins. “I hear you, kid. Loud and clear. Just remember what I said.”

I jut my jaw and follow Ryodan up the stairs.

He turns on me the second I close the door.

“Turn it off. You don’t cry. I expect you not to cry. Stop it. This fucking instant.”

“I’m not crying! I got stuff in my eyes when you slammed me into the column. And I expect dead people to stay dead! So, I guess we both got disappointed, huh?”

“Is that what you are? Disappointed? You watched me get gutted and die and now that I’m standing in front of you alive you feel disappointed?”

“Did I just hear, like, three question marks?”

“Do not fuck with me right now!” He slams me back into the wall so hard I feel the pane rumble behind my back.

“You don’t care what I feel! You never have. You just order me around and expect me to obey and get pissy if I don’t. I’m nothing to you so don’t pretend you give a royal rat’s ass what I feel!”

“Loyalty stems from what you feel. Or don’t. You aren’t on thin ice, kid. You’re underwater and my hand is on your head, holding you down. So choose well: ‘D’ is for disappointed to see me. And Death. ‘L’ is for loyalty. And Life. Convince me I should let you live.”

His face is an inch from mine. He’s breathing hard and I feel violence in him. Lor said I should use my tears to manipulate him. There’s no way I’m stooping to such wussy-girl depths. I’m just as big and bad as he is.

He’s alive. He’s here. Bullying me. No doubt getting ready to eventually — after he’s done killing me — order me to report to work again.

We’re back to being us. Robin to his Batman.

He’s alive.

Tears stream from my eyes.

“Stop it!” He slams me back into the wall again so hard my teeth clatter but the idiotic tears just keep coming.

I bounce off and use the ricochet to smash into him as hard as I can. He grabs my wrist when I hit him and when he goes flying back, takes me with him. We crash into his desk. I go flying up on it, roll over it and leap to my feet, tossing my hair from my eyes.

I slam my palms against the desk and snarl across it, “Don’t you think I would if I could! Do you think I liked looking all sissified in front of your whole fecking club? In front of you? You stupid fecking stupid fecker! What were you doing outside that wall anyway! Why did you have to be right there in that exact spot when we came out? I mean, who has that kind of crap luck? Ever since I started to hang with you, my life has been a total fecking nightmare! Couldn’t you just stay dead?”

He slams his hands down on the desk so hard it cracks down the middle. “Not. Convincing. Me.”

I glare through my tears. “Not trying to! I don’t convince nobody of nothing. You take me or leave me just the way I am! But I ain’t changing for you or nobody else and I ain’t faking either, and if you think breaking my bones one by one is going to accomplish a thing besides, like, breaking my bones, good luck with that!”

I’m sobbing now and don’t have any clue why. Just that it feels like ever since I came out of the wall with the Crimson Hag and watched it kill Barrons and Ryodan, I’ve been all trussed up in one great big painful knot, and the second I looked at him and realized he was alive, really, truly alive, and I wasn’t going to have to walk around for the rest of my life with his death on my head, never seeing his smug-ass smile again, that knot relaxed, and when it let go, everything in me came apart and my whole self heaved a sigh of relief and somewhere I guess I got a well of tears in me, like maybe everybody has a certain allotment of them and if you never let them out, the second a single one sneaks out, it opens a floodgate and you can’t shut it again. Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me the rules of life? If I’d known it worked this way, I would have taken myself off somewhere private and cried until I’d use up my quota! This is worse than getting off on the wrong foot when I’m freeze-framing. This is emotional careening with no control.

I look at him and I think, Crimeny, if only Alina could have stood back up from what I did to her. Mac could have had her sister back. And I wouldn’t have to walk around all the time, every single minute of every single day, hating myself because even though I’m pretty sure Ro did something to me that night that made me some kind of automaton that didn’t have a will of her own, I was there. I was there! I led her to the spot where she died by lying to her and telling her I had something really important to show her and I’m just a kid so she trusted me! I stood in that alley and I watched Mac’s sister get killed by Fae that I could have stopped with one flick of my sword and I can never undo it and I can never scrape it out from behind my eyes. It’s seared into my soul for the rest of my life, if I’ve even got one after all the shit I’ve done!