Now, of course, the world had changed. Santoro slaughtered my family, nearly killed Junie and me, and I have become so comprehensively fucked in the head that maybe I have no stones left to throw at Toys. I cannot say with any real certainty that every life I’ve taken over these last weeks has been a justified kill. I’d love to say that, but I really don’t know. There are too many blacked-out spaces in my memory that could be my fragile brain trying to hide the truth from me.

We sat there in our silence. I wondered if he was going through the same process of thought that I was, and when I looked at him, I knew he had been. His eyes were hard as marble, and there was no smirk. For a moment, I saw behind the veil of his practiced defenses, and there was the real man. Hurt, ashamed, angry, filled with the kind of refined self-loathing that comes from deep self-awareness.

Then he saw me looking, and the shutters dropped behind his eyes and that sly, nasty little smirk of his reappeared.

“How’s Junie?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Oh, she’s effing wonderful. Skips along singing tra-la all day long. How do you bloody think she is, you dreary git? You lose your damned mind and vanish from the radar without so much as a postcard to let her know you haven’t been turned into fish chum. She was hurt, too, remember. Or are you so self-involved that you forget she lost family, too? Maybe not blood relations, but she—for some unfathomable reason—loves you with her whole heart. She doesn’t have a family, and so yours became hers. She watched them die. She lost them, too. And she nearly died. So, sure, she’s the happiest girl in the world, you dick.”

God, how I wanted to punch him.

God, how I wished he’d just shoot me.

Fuck.

Junie.

God help me.

CHAPTER 73

ROTTERDAM MARRIOTT HOTEL

ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

I had no answer to what Toys had just said. We both knew he was dead right.

Instead, I got up, took clothes from the dresser, went and turned on the water mix in the shower, then stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway.

“Order room service,” I said. “Get some for Ghost, too. I don’t know when’s the last time I fed him. I’m going to take a shower.”

“That’s it? I come all this way and you decide to take a shower?”

“That’s all I can do for now,” I said honestly. “Order something to drink, too, and I don’t mean coffee. We’ll eat, and then we’ll see if there’s anything more to talk about.”

He studied me for a long, cold time. I expected some caustic remark, but instead, he merely nodded. I went into the bathroom and closed the door.