The words detonate somewhere behind my eyes.
Bright lights. Noise, so much noise. The smell of gunpowder and something metallic and wrong. My head splits open and the room lurches sideways.
My knees hit the floor. I’m gripping my skull with both hands, and somewhere far away Natalia is saying my name, the borrowed one, and the only thing I know for certain is that whatever I am, whatever I was, it’s nothing good.
She has no idea what she dragged off that beach.
10
JOHNNY
The images hitlike a strobe in a dark room. Each flash burns a different scene into my retinas before ripping it away.
Red. So much red. Walls, hands, the front of my shirt. Fluorescent light bouncing off something metallic. Slot machines. Rows and rows of them, shrieking their idiot jingles while something terrible happens twenty feet away.
The disconnect between those sounds and the violence is so sharp my stomach folds in on itself.
A gun. Heavy in my grip. Familiar the way a toothbrush is familiar, the way you don’t think about it, you just reach for it and your hand already knows the weight.
Figures beside me. Men I trust. I can feel that certainty in my bones even though their faces won’t hold still, blurring every time I try to focus.
One of them is built like a wall. Another wipes blood off his knuckles without breaking stride, already looking for the next problem.
And behind us both, a man whose face I can’t pin down but whose presence straightens my spine on reflex. Dark suit. Silver at the temples. The faint bite of cigar smoke clinging to expensive wool. When he speaks, every man in the room stops what they’re doing and listens. I can’t make out the words, but my body already knows the voice. Knows to stand straighter when I hear it. My fists clench, and something behind my ribs pulls tight enough to ache.
Then a hallway. Industrial carpet. The copper smell of blood so thick it coats the back of my throat. My knuckles split and aching.
Then a shower, scalding water, and the pink swirl circling the drain as someone else’s blood washes off my skin.
Vegas.
The word pounds through me like a second heartbeat. I live there. I work there. I do things there that require showers like that one, and I do them alongside men whose faces I can’t see but whose presence I trust the way you trust gravity.
Then it’s gone.
All of it, snuffed out like someone yanked the plug from the projector. Hardwood under my knees. The surf outside. Natalia’s hand on my shoulder.
“Johnny! Talk to me, please.”
Her voice cuts through the last of the static. I blink up at her, and the worry on her face is almost worse than what’s in my head.
“Hey. Stay with me. What happened?”
I open my mouth to tell her what I saw. The gun. The blood. Vegas?—
And something in me slams a door shut.
Not a conscious decision. Something deeper, hardcoded. Even without my memories, this instinct stayed intact. A reflex so strong it bypasses thought entirely:Do not tell her this.The certainty is absolute.
Whatever I was, I was the kind of man who kept secrets. That impulse survived when everything else didn’t.
I have maybe two seconds to decide what comes out of my mouth, and in those two seconds, I look up at the woman who pulled me off a beach, cleaned my blood, checked my pupils every morning with steady hands and worried eyes. The woman who just trusted me with the ugly truth of her life because I pushed her to.
And I lie to her.
“It’s fading.” My voice sounds like it’s been through a shredder. “I got flashes, but they’re already breaking apart. Nothing solid.”
The words taste wrong. Physically wrong, like biting tinfoil. Her eyes search my face and I hold steady because apparently I’m good at this. Apparently whatever I was before I washed up here included being a man who could look someone in the eye and feed them bullshit without blinking.
