Nora meets his eyes with brazen confidence. The instant Seth asks a question and her mother’s attention is diverted, she sticks out her tongue.
Cyril tears off a chunk of sandwich and chucks it at her. It hits her square on the forehead and bounces onto the table next to her plate. For a split second her face goes blank with disbelief, and then she opens her mouth wide to let loose a piercing banshee shriek.
Seth laughs so hard he tips his chair over and tumbles to the ground. “I’m fine! I’m fine!”
“It’s not funny!” Nora wails.
“Sweetie—” Robin bites her lip to keep herself from laughing until, finally, she fails. She puts her head in her hands and laughs so hard Seth asks if she’s crying and all she can do is shake her head.
The first time Cyril had seen her laugh like that—helpless and utterly unselfconscious—Seth had been about two or three. Tavis had brought the kid with him to Cyril’s place and stayed too long playing Counterstrike and she’d appeared, not quite angry, to fetch them home for dinner. Seth had turned around, having managed to find a sharpie while the adults were talking, and proudly displayed his “mussache.” He’d drawn it across the bridge of his nose. Robin had laughed so hard she’d choked on her own spit and had to go to the bathroom to splash her face with water. Cyril, who had never laughed like that in his entire life, wanted only to make her do it again, somehow, and never ever stop.
It takes a moment for Nora to realize her mother is not, in fact, on her side—but when the realization sinks in, her angry wails turn to grief-stricken sobs.
“Oh, Sweetie,” Robin says, using her thumbs to wipe the tears laughter has squeezed from her eyes. She reaches for her daughter, pulling the child into her embrace. “Come here. You gotta learn that not everybody is gonna put up with your nonsense the way we do.”
Robin loves her children more fiercely than anything in life, and when she presses her lips to the top of her daughter’s head, lifting her eyes to look at Cyril, it shows. “I swear,” she says, “someday she is gonna say something to the wrong person and get herself punched in the face.”
It would be so easy, now, to surrender to this domestic daydream. But they both know it’s bullshit. Robin. The kids. This asshole sitting here, like he’s part of the fucking family, like Tavis isn’t dead. “Why are you doing this?”
Robin gives her daughter a pat on the behind, sending her back to her chair. She sits back, ignoring the kids as they begin to bicker again, and studies him. Not angry. Almost half-amused, as if to say, really? Here? In front of the children? She rests an arm on the table and pushes her soda can from her thumb to her forefinger and back again. “I told you. I want you—”
“To stay? What, as your nanny?” Just as he had done when Tavis died and Robin was alone and terrified and about to give birth to his fatherless child. Cyril had wormed his way into Tav’s family, pretending to be the friend Robin so desperately needed—while privately indulging the pathetic fantasy that he was her husband.
Robin gives him another long, steady look, her eyes slightly lidded. “Well,” she says, finally, “if that’s all you’re comfortable with for now, then yeah.” She lifts the soda to her lips. “Sure.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Only as he speaks does he realize the children have fallen silent. He glances at Seth, who looks stricken. “Sorry.”
“Fuck!” Nora exclaims, with relish. It is clearly not the first time she has heard this word. “Fuck, fuck, fuuuuck!”
“Oh my God, Cyril.” Robin tilts her head back, running her hands over her short hair, and lets out a laugh that is partly a sigh. “Are you really going to make me spell this out?”
Her laughter is infuriating; the more so because he cannot stop his eyes from following the sinuous curve of her neck. “Spell what out?”
She sits forward, letting her hand hover for a moment before placing it on top of his. Still, he cannot help but flinch. Her touch is electric. He watches, frozen, as her fingers turn and slide under his soft white palm. She brushes a callused thumb over the dimples on his knuckles. “Cyril—”
“No.” He jerks his hand away.
“No?” her voice is amused.
“Don’t play this game.” She’s fucking with him, and he knows it, and she knows he knows it. Trying to get him to lower his guard, to admit he is besotted with her, waiting for the perfect opportunity to insert the blade. But that kind of subterfuge is his forte, not hers. “Because you will lose.”
And yet—he cannot pretend he does not see the hunger in her eyes.
They were just letters. Only words. That was what he told himself. Prison was exactly what he’d deserved; she was protected from further harm, and, ultimately, she would recover. Pull her life together. Move on. She might forgive him, sure, in theory. Eventually. But this—no.
The children share a nervous snicker. Her gaze does not waver.
“Fuck!” Nora announces, again.
Robin lifts a hand, slowly, and places her palm on his cheek. In front of the kids. He feels the warmth of her skin, and the smooth cold line of her wedding band.
Once upon a time, she was a strong, independent woman, and now—could he have damaged her so badly that she thinks she needs... him? Tavis? Someone? No. It must be a ruse.
“Oh, Chica,” he whispers, covering her hand with his own. “Don’t let me ruin you again.”
Stage 2
Denial
Chapter 7
On his second morning post-incarceration, this asshole is awakened by a cold little finger poking around in his navel. Ordinarily his response to being touched in his sleep would be sudden and violent, but the unfamiliarity of the sensation delays his lunge-and-swing by a fraction of a second. His fist, as Nora darts back, just misses her head. The television remote clatters to the ground, disgorging batteries. “Jesus—”
She giggles, oblivious to her brush with disaster, and dashes out of the living room. A door slams, and Seth’s shout comes from their bedroom: “Nora! Stop!” Her screeching rejoinder pierces the thin walls.
“If Nora’s up,” Robin says, shrugging a robe over her shoulders on the way to the kitchen, “everybody’s up.”
This asshole rubs his eyes with his palms. “Guess I’m not the only one who hasn’t changed.”
She opens the fridge. “Damn it.” Her footsteps come back, past the dining table and into the living room. She tosses her phone, which lands on his stomach with a plop. “If you’re gonna keep bingeing, at least order more food.” She starts into the hall, then catches the doorframe and leans back around the corner. “Oh, and your lawyer’s been texting. I’m free later this morning, so see what you can set up.”
It’s that easy.
Even having known Cyril since they were kids, Tavis had always assumed, like everyone else, that hacking was about code. Typing in strings of numbers and letters and symbols that magically unlocked digital doors. While this asshole could and did do that, on occasion, hacking was primarily about opportunity. Having the audacity, for example, to open a browser on Robin’s phone and download an incognito tracking app. Cyril has no immediate motive for doing so, but that’s not the point. Want is weakness. Information is power.
That accomplished, Cyril opens her messages and sees that his lawyer has, in fact, been peppering Robin with a string of half-coherent texts. At... 6 AM. Jesus. Before replying, he peruses Robin’s recent texting history. (As if he wouldn’t.)
There’s a lot of back-and-forth between her and some guy named Charles Dugan, whose roof she has apparently just replaced. Atcha wants a new pergola and is willing to wait until Robin has time. Lydia wonders if Robin knows someone who does plumbing. All recent work requests have been politely declined; after she wraps up her current projects, Robin plans to spend the next few months working on her own house.
The only person she texts with on a personal basis is Greta, no last name supplied. The most recent exchange (Nora just woke up, we’ll come when she’s re
ady) makes it clear that this is the woman who brought the kids home. He scrolls backward through their correspondence, sees a reference to a “Mr. Cooke,” and connects the dots with a twinge of surprise: Greta is the wife of Samuel Cooke. The man Cyril worked for, from time to time—and whose company he had hacked en route to the military intel which had landed him in prison. Robin had done some repair work on the guy’s condo down in Thousand Oaks and had planned on coming up north to work on his house the summer Cyril went to prison. In the intervening years, Cooke and his wife have apparently turned into something more than employers.
Cyril is about to tap back to the list of Robin’s contacts when his thumb stops on a line from Greta. Have you decided? I need to know in advance if you want me to take the kids. Surely this is a reference to his arrival, but the timestamp on the message shows it was sent more than a week ago. When Robin had picked him up the day before yesterday, she had complained about the last-minute notification.
He scrolls upward a bit more and, finding nothing more enlightening from Greta, returns to his lawyer’s correspondence. The words pop out at him like they’re written in fire.
Per our convo yesterday: Your letter was persuasive, but the Bureau will not consider early release without guarantee of housing. If you agree I will send paperwork via DocuSign. If not, we can explore other options.
Robin’s answer is one word: Okay. The timestamp shows she took a full twenty-four hours to reply.
“Oh look.” Robin stands framed in the kitchen doorway, hand on hip. “What is this, forty-eight hours out? And you’re already violating my privacy?”
He holds up the phone. “You—you fucking got me out?”
“Oh.” She snorts, hand dropping loosely to her side as she crosses the floor. “Right.” She plucks the phone from his hand, glances at the screen, and slips it into her back pocket. “You only had a year or two left anyway. Assuming you could keep up the good behavior.”
Only. “I fucking know how much time I had left.” God, he’s an idiot. She doesn’t want him. He doesn't know what her game is, but it's a game. And she doesn’t seem to be bothered that he’s found out. “You’re a goddamn liar.”
She lets out a bark of laughter. “Gosh, I wonder who I learned that from?” She plucks the phone from his hand, slips it into her back pocket, and turns to yell toward the hall: “Grab your masks, guys and dolls! We’re going out for breakfast! You too,” she adds, giving him a nod.
This coy, plotting creature is not the scrupulously honest woman he’d once known. Who the hell has she become? He heaves himself forward, to the edge of the couch and then to his feet. “Why are you fucking with me?”
She lifts one eyebrow. “Am I, though?”
Robin’s dilapidated Victorian sits on the largest lot in a leafy neighborhood filled with cutesy arts and crafts bungalows and immaculately tended gardens. It's only four blocks to the center of town, though the kids do twice that running to each corner and back, apparently unbothered by their masks. This asshole is winded, but not incapacitated. Yeah. What a triumph. So much better than before.
“Is it weird?” she asks, ducking under a low-hanging branch.
Being free, she means. Apparently they’re no longer discussing her newfound talent for lying by omission. He casts his gaze down the shady, tree-lined streets. The cool morning air is raucous with birdsong. “Yeah.” No guards. No gates. No barbed wire. And no other assholes. “It’s weird.” His paladin—a repeat offender who’d been downgraded to the camp from a medium-security facility up north—spoke of experiencing a kind of vertigo, out in the open. Cyril doesn’t feel that, but he had forgotten the world could be anything but yellow and gray.
They go a few more steps in silence, though his breathing is loud. Their elbows bump. He shifts to the curb.
“Was it bad?” She keeps her voice low.
“Oh,” he says, “I know this one. That’s code for ‘did I get raped.’”
“Cyril.”
“I didn’t get raped.” Stabbed, yes, the once. “They don’t put rapists in low-security facilities.”
She rolls her eyes and sighs. “Well, good, but—”
“It was fucking prison, Chica. Of course it was bad.” He hesitates. “But not in the ways you’d think.”
Tavis had complained that the unofficial motto of the Navy was “hurry up and wait.” That military life was mostly long stretches of boredom punctuated by absolute terror, and often the boredom was worse. This is also a strikingly apt description of prison.
Most of the terror had been up front, before his commissary funds had worked their way into the system and he’d had nothing but his wits for leverage. But people were people—which was to say, dumb as fuck—and once he’d acclimated to the routines of dormitory-style prison life, the primary challenge had simply been not losing his goddamn mind. He couldn’t check enough books out of the prison library to keep himself occupied, and they had a shit selection anyway. The GED and skill certification classes were useless to him, and he was not interested in volunteering to teach a bunch of morons. Eventually they’d realized the fat guy was worth more in the kitchen than out, no matter how much he ate, but food prep had only occupied five hours a day, at most. Without the internet at his fingertips, that left eighteen hours to kill. You could only sleep so long.
Four months in, it hit him: everyone else was as bored out of their skulls as he was.
“Do you want to talk about it?” She asks this quietly, darting a glance at the children.
He tugs his shirt down. It may fit, but only when he’s standing still. It’s not much of a distinction, but if he’s going to be seen in public he’d rather be ogled for being huge than for being unable to fit into his own clothing. “D&D.”
“What?” Her head snaps forward, attention shifting lightning-fast. “Seth! See the car in the driveway? Grab your sister’s—yeah. Thanks, buddy!” She lets out a puff of air and lifts a hand, gesturing for him to continue.
“Dungeons and Dragons. The tabletop role playing game. That’s how I survived.”
“I know what D&D is,” she says, giving him a withering glance. “But perhaps you could elaborate a little.”
He shrugs. “I didn’t have an actual manual to reference, so I had to wing it.” He’d recruited a couple of disillusioned ex-army thugs who hadn’t adjusted well to civilian life—natural fans of his government-fucking exploits—to start the core of his campaign. Dice were forbidden, but they sold playing cards at the commissary. He’d modified a deck to function as a D20, and paper for character sheets was easy to come by. The story he kept in his head.
Nothing escaped attention. He expected to catch some flak for playing what amounted to a child’s game, but in prison, novelty trumped cool, and soon everyone in the unit wanted to know what the hell they were doing, using cards to tell stories about elves and cowboys and cactus-people in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. He let them watch and, when the time was right, permitted a couple more guys to join.
After that, everything came at a price. Nothing so crude as pay-to-play, of course. He never promised campaign success or equipment upgrades in return for commissary, although there was definitely some degree of correlation. No; it was mostly a you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours arrangement. Donate a few snacks, and this asshole would lift the purgatorial boredom that makes you want to hang yourself with a bedsheet. If the Oreo supply dries up, maybe your party spends an extra week dicking around in the woods on a planet that might or might not be Earth. It also provided him with a reasonable amount of protection: it was awfully hard to think up new adventures when someone had ganked your shower shoes. So it wasn’t only about the food. It was power. Control.
Within weeks, everyone wanted in. Even in low security, the prisoners segregated themselves, so when the Blacks and Latinos started asking questions, he’d had to construct separate campaigns for each group. He synthesized the stories within a single future-fantasy world, borrowing liberally from China Mievi
lle, Octavia Butler, Gene Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, Robert Howard, and Connie Willis. Prisoners were not discerning readers, on the whole, and even if they occasionally identified his sources (usually when he ran out of ideas and started cribbing from Stephen King) they weren’t apt to gripe about plagiarism. Balancing everything in his head kept him sharp, while also ensuring he never lost anything of real value in the periodic shakedowns.
Once the guards were satisfied that his goal was entertainment and not revolution—he was, after all, responsible for one of the biggest intelligence breaches in US history—they were happy to let him do his thing. Keeping everyone quiet and content made their jobs a hell of a lot easier. By the time he did cause a small riot, nobody was willing to finger him. If he went down, so did the game; with enough inmates invested, he was too big to fail.
And anywhere—even an imaginary fantasy world—is better than prison.
Robin laughs, incredulous. “Did you not learn anything?”
“Oh, was prison supposed to be an educational experience? My bad.” They are standing outside the window of a doughnut shop, a hole-in-the-wall kind of place on a narrow side street off what looks like Healdsburg’s main square. The kind of place you don’t patronize unless you already know it’s there. He does not remember arriving, and he is not sure how long he has been standing on the sidewalk, talking. Things happen so quickly, now.
“No, I mean...” The cowbell hanging from the door by a shoelace clanks, and Robin steps back to let a grizzled, gray-haired bear of a man in biker gear make his exit. “Hey, Joe.”
His grunt of acknowledgment, muffled by a paper mask, seems to be all the encouragement the kids need to follow him down the row of parked cars to a big Harley. An old milk crate, strapped to the back with bungie cords, contains a grinning jack-o-lantern made of hard foam. As the kids step up to the curb, expectantly, he reaches into a pocket of his worn leather jacket to produce a small red ball. His fingers close, and when they open again, one ball has become two. Seth and Nora giggle, urging him on, and two balls become three. They begin to appear and disappear from pockets and ears.
Cyril in the Flesh Page 5