by Paula Stokes
I miss it.
Jesse makes a “hurry up” motion with his hand and I slide open the window. I wriggle through the narrow opening and out onto the streets of K-Town.
I follow him to a rental car parked two blocks away. He unlocks it and I slide into the passenger seat. I don’t even ask him where we’re going. I’m just glad to be away from the man I killed.
Jesse slides behind the wheel and signals as he pulls out into the street. The area is deserted, except for one older woman watering the flowers in her front yard.
“How did you know what to do in the room?” I reach for the center console and turn the temperature gauge into the red. It’s not a particularly cool morning, but for some reason I’m shivering.
He leans over and turns the heat on for me. “I asked Baz for help.”
“Baz knows about this? Did you tell anyone else?”
“No.” Jesse shakes his head. “It’s not like Baz will rat you out. He wanted to come with me, but he’s been helping Adebayo deal with Gideon’s effects and keep the building and club running.”
“I still can’t believe you’re here,” I say. “I figured you’d be in the hospital for days.”
“I’m mostly better. But it hurts when I cough or laugh, so try not to be too funny, okay?”
I snort. “I’ll try, but you know me. Always cracking jokes … when I’m not blacking out and stabbing people. I guess we all have our special skills.”
“What you did back there was self-defense,” Jesse says. “The same goes for what you did in St. Louis. It doesn’t make you a killer.”
“Technically it does.” I lean over and turn the heat down a notch.
“Fine. It doesn’t make you a murderer.”
“What if I told you I wanted to kill Kyung?” I say softly. I’m expecting Jesse to tell me that there’s a difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it, that all of us have murderous impulses but that doesn’t make us all murderers.
But all he says is, “Kyung deserves to die.”
It’s true. But what does it mean that I want to be the instrument of that death?
“You were limping,” Jesse continues. “Where did you get hurt?”
“My leg. I’m not sure what happened. I think a bullet grazed my calf.”
“You got shot? Jesus, Winter. Why didn’t you say something?” Jesse looks over at me, his face a mixture of frustration and worry.
“I’m saying something now. It’s just a flesh wound. Apparently, Ro—I cleaned it really well after I called you. I can clean it again when we stop.” I glance around. “By the way, where are we going?”
“To a hotel.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ll be safe there. So we can make a plan. And you can get some sleep.”
“I can’t sleep, Jesse. I have to get the ViSE tech back. Plus, what if Kyung got Jun?”
Jesse looks left and right as he slows for a stop sign. “Who is Jun?”
“My brother. I’m surprised Baz didn’t tell you.” I quickly explain how Kyung sent me the pictures of Jun on Sung Jin’s phone and how I tracked him down once I got here.
“What if this guy told Kyung where to find you?”
“He wouldn’t do that. You don’t betray your family.”
Jesse sighs. “Winter. How do you know he’s actually related to you? Maybe he’s just some guy that Kyung hired.”
I shake my head. “No. He can’t be. I have a brother. I remember him, Jesse. I remember my mother with a baby. Jun showed me his ID. And he knew things. Family things.” But even as I say this, a seed of doubt takes root in my brain. Fake ID isn’t that hard to come by. And anyone can find out almost anything if they know where to look for it, can’t they? Kyung somehow found those pictures of my mother. Maybe he did learn just enough personal information to be able to set me up. I wanted so much for Jun to be my brother. It’s not like I quizzed him very hard.
“We’ll go check out his place,” Jesse says. “But first we really ought to drop your stuff off at the hotel and take a look at your leg.”
“But Jess—”
“We’re almost there,” Jesse says. “And if Kyung took him, he’s already gone. But hopefully you’ll get a phone call with demands.”
“You’re right.” I slouch down in the car seat, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in my calf and skull. Trying to ignore the reality that my brother might be dead, or that he might not be my brother after all.
* * *
The hotel Jesse booked online assigns us a room on the fourth floor. We limp up the stairs together. As I listen to Jesse’s labored breathing, I wish more than ever that I could get over my fear of elevators. He sounds like he’s going to die before we make it to his room.
“Let’s rest for a few seconds,” I say.
“I don’t need to—”
“I need to,” I lie.
Jesse and I both lean heavily against the wall of the stairwell. He doubles over. “Shit, I feel like an old man,” he groans.
“You shouldn’t have left the hospital,” I chide.
“You sound like my mother.”
“Well, she’s right. You need rest, time to heal.”
He doesn’t respond, but I know his expression well. I’ve seen it on my own face—the look of someone who feels like no matter what they do, it’s wrong.
“But I’m glad that you’re here,” I say. “Thank you for helping me.”
“You’re welcome.” He pushes a couple sweaty tendrils of hair away from his eyes and starts creeping up the stairs again. Eventually we reach the fourth floor.
The room has two beds and a kitchenette. I drop my backpack on the bed closest to the door and again find myself thinking about the last time Jesse and I were in a hotel room together. Things got a lot more intimate than we expected, or I expected anyway.
Jesse is apparently thinking the same thing. “Are you going to be okay sharing with me? I could book a second room.”
“This is fine.” I reach out and smooth a wrinkle from the bedspread.
“Okay.” Jesse closes the door and dead-bolts it. He turns to me, his face deadly serious. “Let’s take a look at your leg.”
I go into the bathroom, sit on the edge of the bathtub, and roll up my pant leg. I peel away my makeshift bandage. Jesse starts the tap and adjusts the temperature so the water is warm without being scalding. Still, the shock of heat on my wound makes me gasp in pain.
Jesse squeezes my shoulder gently. “Hang in there,” he says. “Just keep rinsing it. I don’t have any triple antibiotic, so you want to make sure it’s really clean.” I nod. Neither of us speaks for a few seconds. Then he brushes my hair back from my face. I wince as his fingers find the spot where Snake Tattoo backhanded me. “That’s going to be an impressive bruise.”
I reach up to rub the spot, my fingers brushing against Jesse’s. “I’m lucky he didn’t break my jaw,” I say. “He hit me on the back of the head too. Trying to knock me out because I wouldn’t go willingly with them to see Kyung.”
Jesse blinks hard, his eyes focused on our hands, which are still touching. I slide my fingers away from his and search for the tender spot on my scalp. There’s a lump the size of a golf ball. I probe the rest of my skull gently and find a smaller lump on the side of my head. It must have happened while I was dissociating.
Jesse turns away from me. He grabs one of the hand towels and uses a pocketknife to cut it into strips. “This’ll have to work for a bandage for now.”
“Thank you.” Our eyes meet just for a second and I see so many emotions in Jesse’s gaze. I wonder if he sees anything in mine or if I’m projecting nothing more than a dead, black stare.
“I’ll, uh, give you some space,” he mumbles. He leaves me alone in the bathroom.
I shake my head. Jesse has never been very good at giving me space. He’s so convinced that he’s what I need, that he can somehow love me back to normal. It’s sweet. If only it were true.
After I finish rinsi
ng my wound, I tie a strip of hand towel around my calf and knot it securely.
I find Jesse out in the main room. I hold up a clean, damp washcloth. “Your turn.”
He turns and heads for the bathroom. “I can do it.”
“I know.” I follow him. “But it’ll be easier if I do it, so let me help.”
“Okay.” Jesse works his hoodie and T-shirt over his shoulders. My pulse accelerates a little. He doesn’t have the definition that some guys his age have, but he’s solidly built, with broad shoulders and a muscular torso. He’s got a long, straight bandage down the center of his chest, as well as pieces of gauze taped over his shoulder and ribs. “The big one is where they had to crack my chest,” he says. “One of the bullets apparently ended up lodged in a weird place, so they couldn’t get to it any other way. The smaller ones are the entry wounds.”
“I still can’t believe you got shot trying to protect me.” I loosen the edges of the largest dressing on one side to expose the incision beneath. It’s a smooth red line, crusted over, with tiny white pieces of tape perpendicular to the wound.
Jesse’s eyelids flutter shut the moment I touch him. His face flushes slightly.
“Am I hurting you?” I ask.
“No.”
I lift the washcloth up to his skin and start gently scrubbing away bits of dried blood. His heart pounds, robust and steady, beneath my fingertips. The rhythmic thumping grounds me, like it’s my own heartbeat instead of his. A sigh escapes from his lips.
I stop scrubbing for a second. This is the first time Jesse and I have been close since I found out that he lied to me. I wasn’t sure if I would ever feel the same way about him, and I still don’t know if I will, but the pull of physical attraction is definitely still present. My eyes trace the lines of his tattoos—an eagle wrapped in a Mexican flag on his chest, an elaborately decorated skull on his right shoulder. Then lower on his arm, a military insignia and the initials of four friends who died in Afghanistan.
He swallows hard. “Winter.”
There are so many different ways for someone to say your name. I’m not sure I ever realized that before I met Jesse. Prior to him, it was just Rose calling out to me with love and affection or Gideon relaying his quiet approval or disapproval. Crisp, clear notes. When Jesse says my name, it’s a chord, a mash-up of several intense emotions all reflected in two syllables.
“Yes?” I say.
“I will never stop being sorry for what happened between us.”
“I know.” I’m hoping that this simple answer will be enough to silence him. Jesse and I slept together when I was dissociating. I know this because I found a ViSE of it that my alter recorded. I know he didn’t mean to take advantage of me, but it’s hard to think about how things are imbalanced between us now. He knows me intimately, but I don’t even remember being with him. To be honest, I wish my mind would take back the memory of finding that ViSE and file it away somewhere in a dark, forgotten place so then we could be equal again.
“I still ask myself if somehow I might have known,” he says. “I should have known, right?”
“Jesse.” I pause for a second, trying to decode all of the notes beneath my usage of his name. Kindness. Forgiveness. Affection. “I didn’t even know. How could you have known?”
He opens his eyes and looks down at me. “Okay, maybe not that you had DID. But that you weren’t yourself that night. I think I did know and I just didn’t acknowledge it because I wanted you so bad.”
He looks away, toward the doorway. Gideon told me once that when people look at doors or windows it’s because some part of them is trying to escape. When Jesse found out about my condition, he felt like he’d assaulted me. I felt like that too, at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t have expected him not to be with me that night. He’d liked me for months. He’d been drinking. I was the one who instigated the physical contact. I was the one who talked him through all of his reservations.
I wipe the cloth along the other side of the incision. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” I turn his head back so he’s facing me, so I’m looking into his beautiful hazel eyes. “I know I said—I did—terrible things to you, but I was in shock. Since then I’ve had time to think about everything and I don’t blame you for being with me that night. I don’t feel violated and I understand why you hid the truth. Let’s just leave it in the past.”
“Seriously?” he asks.
“Seriously.” I pat his incision dry with the other side of the washcloth. “What are these little white pieces? Are they holding your chest together with tape?”
“The nurse called them sterile strips or something. Apparently they help keep the wound clean. They’re supposed to dry up and fall off on their own.”
I clear my throat. “Well, it looks good. No redness or swelling.” I loosen the tape of the smaller bandages on his shoulder and rib cage and it’s more of the same. Angry pink incisions, but no swelling, and minimal drainage. I wipe them down with the washcloth and then restick the tape as best I can since we have no gauze for fresh dressings.
Jesse’s phone buzzes and he turns away from me, still shirtless, to retrieve it from the bedside table. I study the muscles in his back as he crosses the room. He lifts the phone to his ear and turns to face the big picture window that looks out on the neighborhood as he talks.
I can’t make out what he’s saying, but when he ends the call, he turns to face me. Flicking off the light in the bathroom, I step back into the main part of the hotel room and toss him his sweatshirt. “So was that Baz?”
“Yeah.” Jesse pulls the hoodie back over his head.
“What did he have to say?”
“Unfortunately, as far as he knows, Jun never arrived in St. Louis.”
CHAPTER 13
Jesse and I head immediately to Jun’s apartment. My mind spins the whole way. My brother got taken by Kyung’s men. My brother betrayed me to Kyung. My brother isn’t really my brother after all. I can’t decide which possibility is the worst, but it doesn’t take us long to figure out which is true.
The first thing I notice is that the mailbox no longer says “Song.” The label has been scraped off but not replaced.
“He’s not my brother,” I whisper, a lump rising up in my throat. “He tricked me.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Jesse says.
But I do. Why else would the name be gone? How could I have been so foolish?
Jesse and I ascend to the second floor and I let him knock on the door. No one answers. I pick the lock with a couple of bobby pins but the chain is also on the door.
“Kick it down,” I bark.
Jesse gives me a look. “Maybe we don’t need to go there just yet. I have an idea.”
I follow him down the stairs and back outside. He heads around the back of the building and pulls down a rusty fire escape. We climb up to the second floor. The bedroom window is closed around a small air conditioner. Inside, Jun—if that’s even his name—is sleeping.
Jesse pulls his gun and motions for me to lift the window from the AC unit. Holding my breath, I slowly raise the window to Jun’s bedroom. He stirs beneath his white sheet but doesn’t open his eyes.
Jesse and I step over the air conditioner and slide through the opening one at a time. We approach the bed from opposite sides. Too late, Jun’s eyes blink open. He looks from Jesse to me, his eyes taking in my bruised face before focusing on Jesse’s gun.
“You’re not my brother, are you?” I ask. I can tell immediately by his expression that he’s not. Sadness stirs in my gut and I bite my lip to keep it from trembling. How could I have been so stupid?
“I’m sorry that I lied to you. I didn’t know you were going to get hurt,” the boy says. “They told me that you stole something from the company and they just wanted to know where you were staying so they could send the police to recover it.” He glances nervously at Jesse and then back at his gun. “Please don’t hurt me.”
&nbs
p; “Do I even have a brother?” I ask.
“I don’t know. My name is Kevin. I moved here from Seoul with my family when I was eight years old. I’ve never even been to Taebaek. A couple of UsuMed execs told me that you might show up here. They gave me the fake ID and told me to play along. They said that I’d get promoted if I did well.”
I sigh. “I want your badge. Call in sick tomorrow and you can tell them the next day that you lost it.”
Kevin shrugs. “Okay, but it’s just a janitor’s badge. You can’t get very far with it.”
“How do I find Kyung?” I ask. “Which building is he in?”
“He has an office on the top floor of the round tower,” Kevin says. “But I heard he’s going to be out of town for a while, heading up a big project in Seoul.”
“Of course he is,” I mutter. It makes perfect sense that Kyung would take Gideon’s tech out of the country to work on it. Korea is full of brilliant engineers. I’m betting he can find someone to fix the neural editor even without Gideon’s notes. And even if I could claim some sort of patent violation, Gideon’s patent on the technology is under a fake name and my papers are also fake. I’m not sure how all that would be resolved legally, but I know enough about the American justice system to know we’d be fighting court battles for years.
I don’t want to fight Kyung in court. I want to stick my knives into his chest and watch him die, slowly. But first I want to regain control of the ViSE tech.
“Looks like I’m going to Seoul,” I say.
* * *
Jesse and I head back to his hotel, where I call Sebastian.
“Hello?” he says.
“It’s Winter. I need your help again.”
“Yeah. Sorry about your brother. I checked in with a friend of mine who has access to passenger manifests and as far as he can tell, no one named Jun Song has gotten on a plane anywhere yesterday or today.”
“That’s because Kyung played me. His men had one of his employees pretend to be my brother.”
“Shit, Winter. I’m sorry. Are you and Ramirez okay? Did you handle the hotel room?”
“I don’t know about handle. We left it as is.”