The man comes forward, so now he’s squarely in Simon’s field of vision. Lamonte has an aura the same deep brown as a grizzly bear, and he looks as if he’d like to hit everyone in the room over the head with a baseball bat just so he can get a little peace and quiet.
“Miss Pace,” he rumbles, “I have been very patient, and I am not a patient man. I recommend that you stop lying to me, because if you continue to waste my time ...”
But Simon isn’t listening anymore.
He knows who he is, and what he can do. He could do this for his own sake, for revenge or for pleasure, but what he’d really like to do is to offer it like a service. As a gift. If Nomi can shed tears for him, the least he can do is give her this gift in return ...
But is Nomi prepared to wield such a weapon, if someone puts it in her hands?
“Nomi.” He tastes blood on his lip as he speaks—he must have bitten his tongue. “Nomi, look at me.”
Her eyes drag away from Lamonte, find Simon’s. Her voice comes out a whisper. “You killed Brittany.”
Simon shakes his head. “Forget ... forget that now. Just tell me. Do you want this over?”
He ignores Hart, capering with the bolt cutters. Ignores Lamonte, still droning, and Ameche and Dinkins, laughing. There’s a bubble in the room, and he and Nomi are enclosed in it, and the only sounds Simon can hear are his own voice and hers.
“Yes,” Nomi breathes.
“You have to say it,” Simon says.
He can see her mind casting back to that day they first met, the incident in the hall, Simon’s clumsy attempt to force Malcolm to get lost.
Don’t hurt him,Nomi said then.
That’s not what she’s saying now.
She looks directly into Simon’s eyes. “Do it. Fuck them up.”
Simon sighs, and smiles, and stands from his chair.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
October 1987, Saturday
Thunder booms in the warehouse, and Simon stands, and Nomi thinks it’s possible that she may have miscalculated.
She’s seen evil; she’s familiar with it. But when she witnessed Gino Hart at work with the drill and the battery cables, something inside her broke a little. She knows what Simon Noone is, but watching him writhe in pain flipped her perspective—because how is Simon any worse than these guys? Is a sociopath worse than garden-variety evil, if you’re the victim of it? All she could think wasIt’ll be me next; it’ll be me, and maybe when this is over, Simon will make it quick, because god knows Lamonte and his crew won’t be showing her any mercy.
But now Simon’s standing, she’s having serious misgivings.
He winked at her—she’s got no way to interpret that—and right now he’s too tall and still, there in his filthy jeans and boots and sweat-loose black Henley, like he’s poised to take flight; if he suddenly sprouted sharp-bladed wings and mowed down every person in the room with them, she wouldn’t be surprised. He looks calm as an ocean, but she can see the way his blue eyes are lit like torches.
She asked for this—Fuck them up—but now she’s not sure what she’s unleashed.
He told her about the experience of his migraine auras at the club; he told her she looked purple, yet in this moment, Nomi thinks Simon’s haloed in black: black as the underworld, black as a nightfire, black as the furious cosmos Nomi sees when she cuts her skin and closes her eyes.
She was scared of him before? Now she’s fuckingterrified.
And she’s not fast enough to look away as he steps forward and grabs Gino Hart’s hair from behind, wraps long fingers around the handle of the bolt cutters, wrenches Hart’s head to the side and bites down on his neck. Nomi hears thecrunch, flinches. Blood spurts, Hart screams. His arm lifts automatically with the tool, and Simon uses the weight of momentum to yank the bolt cutters’ closest blade into Hart’s right eye.
Hart shrieks, Dinkins screams. Lamonte jerks away.
Ameche lifts his gun.
Fuck that.This is Simon’s time now. Nomi smacks both her tied hands up, into Ameche’s arm. His aim flies north, and the Colt goes off at the ceiling with a crack like a whip. Ameche snarls, backhands Nomi off her chair. As the chair tips, she tumbles onto the concrete with a yell; hitting the concrete fuckinghurts, but she kicks out as she falls, manages to shove the legs of her chair into Ameche’s crotch. He curls over, moaning.
Above her, like he’s releasing a dance partner, Simon lets Hart tumble down. Simon’s still holding the handle of the bolt cutters, so the blade comes free with a ghastly pop. Nomi’s distracted by that, and by the sight of Hart choking on his own blood on the floor in front of her.
