Now is the moment where I have to choose: my friends or my family. Mercy or loyalty.
My scramble with Hedeon is brutal and brief. I don’t want to hurt him, but I can’t let him kill the Chancellor. I hold nothing back. Perhaps Hedeon does—because I’m able to wrench the knife away from him and pin him down, both of us breathing hard, my cheek scraped and his nose bloody, but neither of us seriously hurt.
Maybe he doesn’t want to kill Hugo as much as he thought.
“Look,” I pant, “I’m really fucking sorry about this, but I don’t have a choice.”
I slash another cord from the drapes and tie his hands just like we did to the Chancellor.
“Those curtains are two hundred years old,” Hugo says, irritably.
“Time for some new ones, then,” I snap.
Hedeon isn’t fighting me anymore. He’s given up—on pretty much everything, from the look of it.
He only gives me one resentful glare as I cut Hugo free.
“And what am I supposed to do about this?” Hugo says, standing from the chair, sneering in the direction of the temporarily subdued Hedeon. “Pretend like he didn’t try to kill me?”
“Yes,” I say, testily. “I doubt you want to blow this thing up any more than I do.”
Hedeon is still watching the Chancellor mutinously.
“Try that again,” Hugo says to him, quietly, “and you won’t find me so easy to surprise.”
“You won’t see anything but oblivion,” Hedeon hisses back at him.
Not wanting the two of them to exchange any more words, or Hugo to consider more options for reprisal, I frog-march Hedeon out of the office—quietly pocketing the keys to Hugo’s cruiser on my way past the desk. I don’t want to have to come back for those tomorrow.
Hedeon is letting me lead him along, not struggling. I can tell he thinks the idea of me holding him captive is fucking ridiculous.
“What’s your plan now?” he says. “Keep me tied up the rest of the year so I don’t go blabbing about your weird secret deal with Hugo?”
I don’t have to keep Hedeon incapacitated the rest of the year—only until tomorrow night when I leave. But even that is going to be extremely difficult since I don’t have a private dorm room. I consider taking Hedeon to the library to lock him up in the archives, but my mother isn’t there to keep an eye on him.
I decide to simply take him to his own room, trusting that Kenzo is still on plague watch.
The Octagon Tower is so silent that the air seems thick and buzzing. I hustle Hedeon along, already starting to feel a sense of relief as we near his door.
Until Leo rounds the corner, heading back from the bathroom. He halts in the hallway, not sleepy enough to miss the fact that I’m marching Hedeon along with his hands tied behind his back.
“Uh . . . what the fuck are you doing?” Leo asks.
“That’s a great question,” Hedeon replies.
I shove Hedeon into his room, having no choice but to allow Leo to follow. Leo closes the door gently behind us, folding his arms over his broad chest and saying, carefully, “Is this consensual, or . . .?”
“No, it’s not fucking consensual,” Hedeon snarls.
Leo looks at me with an expression of mingled amusement and genuine concern.
“What’s going on, Ares?” he says.
I take a deep breath.
“I’m not Ares. My name is Rafe Petrov. My father is Ivan Petrov. He’s been imprisoned for three and a half years. Tomorrow, I finally bring him home.”
Leo and Hedeon stare at me with near-equal expressions of astonishment.
“Okay . . . that is not what I was expecting you to say,” Leo remarks.
Despite the fact that the night has been a fucking disaster, and I’ve now involved two more people in this mess, I feel the strangest sense of lightness, like my bones have been replaced with helium.
I’m finally telling the truth.
Hedeon frowns.
“Then who the fuck is Ares?” he says.
I tell them everything, starting at the beginning. I speak for almost thirty minutes uninterrupted, pausing only to set Hedeon free from the curtain ties.
When I’m finished, the stunned silence is even longer than before.
Leo breaks it by saying, “I’m coming with you.”
Now I’m the one who can’t speak. I just told Leo that I’ve been lying to him since the day I met him. That his roommate “Ares” doesn’t even exist. And now he wants to leave school to help me assault a near-impregnable compound.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I says.
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a very good chance that we’re all going to end up dead.”
Leo shrugs, tucking his hands in the pockets of his sweatshorts.
“Less of a chance if I’m there,” he says.
“I’ll go with you, too,” Hedeon says, quietly.
“Why do you want to go?” I say, feeling like the whole world is tilting sideways.
“Well, for one thing, I think Hugo’s gonna try to murder me back if he gets the chance,” Hedeon says.
“Wait, what?” Leo interjects.
“But mostly,” Hedeon continues, ignoring Leo, “I want to get the fuck off this island. I want to do something. And the only thing I planned for the last twenty years was kill my fucking degenerate father. So if I’m not going to do that . . . I’m going to need a new option.”
This is not what I expected, and it’s too much to process all at once.
All I can say is, “Look, I really appreciate it, but—”
“Don’t bother arguing,” Leo says. “What, are you going to tie both of us up in here? Don’t be stupid. You’re taking us with you, you don’t have a choice.”
As much as I’d like to keep arguing, Leo is right.
28
Nix
Breakfast is an odd affair.
Estas Lomachenko nods to me in the line for pancakes—not exactly friendly, but as if he no longer minds us breathing the same air in the same space.
The bruises on his face are still healing. I don’t think he’s softened towards me because of the beating from Ares—I think, strangely, telling me the full story of what happened between his brother and my father has unburdened his soul. He’s not blaming me for it anymore.
Maybe because he saw that I believed him.
I never did call my father that day. We haven’t spoken since before Christmas.
I’m sure he’s furious.
Well, I’m pretty fucking angry, too.
He lied to me when I asked if he killed Kyrylo Lomachenko. Straight up lied to me. He could have told me it was complicated, that he had his reasons . . . I wouldn’t have judged him. But I would have known the truth so I didn’t look like such a fool defending him to my own fucking cousin.
While Estas seems to have relaxed his hatred of me, Ares is behaving more strangely than ever.
He looks simultaneously exhausted and wired—dark circles under his eyes, unshaven face, and a jitteriness to his movements like he’s already had several cups of coffee this morning.
He sits by Leo and Hedeon instead of by me, which feels intentional.