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i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
e.e. cummings
1.
When a human body died, the soul would not vacate it as a pilot would be ejected from a crashing fighter jet. Rather, it seeped out, bit by bit, like fragrance diffusing into the air through sticks of reed. It was a familiar sensation, to Vincenzo. Familiar, and tantalizing. He looked down to the cooling body in his arms, smelled the coiling fragrance of sweet alcohol in the air. Just like well-crafted perfume, it was tempting—and all too easy—for him to simply inhale.
He didn’t know how he obtained this ability, or when. All he ever remembered was the time he discovered it, when he inhaled the soul of his foster parents’ freshly dead murderer. It felt as if it was the most natural thing to do, the instinctive first gasp of breath by an infant whose umbilical cord had just been severed. The sudden, immediate knowledge of what he’d done—that he had just eaten a man’s soul—did not quite settle in him, but rather made itself present as if it had always been there in hiding, waiting to be discovered. Maybe it had. Maybe he’d always been able to consume a freshly dead soul, break it apart, and use it to fortify himself.
And fortified he had become, throughout the years and his rise in the family’s ranks. When he fled his family and arrived in Korea, he was nigh-unkillable, powered by the crushed remnants of dozens, if not hundreds of the blackened souls he’d stopped from ever reaching the afterlife.
He was careful, though, ever so careful. He gave himself one rule: he did not consume the leaking souls of good, innocent people. If heaven existed—and he believed it did, with a conviction some would call superstitious—he didn’t want to rob them of it. And if he was wrong and no afterlife existed, those souls still deserved better than to be made batteries for his wretched life.
When Hong Yu Chan died, Vincenzo crawled away from the wreck until he could no longer smell the cigarette smoke of his soul.
When he found the cooling body of his mother—her soul thick in the air like the aroma of half-burnt incense sticks—Vincenzo held his breath.
Later, when he put a bullet through the brain of her murderer, he feasted.
The rule was clear. Convenient. Easy enough to follow, because his life was of dark and light and he walked the line in between.
But then Hong Cha Young threw herself between him and the muzzle of Jang Han Seok’s gun, and he was made to understand the old adage:
Rules are meant to be broken.
He never told anyone about this ability. Not even her, even though some nights, in that lulling space between the emptying of her makgeolli bowl and him refilling it, he would get tempted. He would arrange the words in his mind like plates on a printing press. He wondered if she would laugh in his face, if that laugh would peter out into a “wait seriously?”
But Vincenzo took only calculated risks, and she was a mathematical problem too advanced for him to solve, and he was leaving her anyway, and—well, it just never came up.
Some deaths were slow. Some were too fast to comprehend.
Cha Young’s death was somewhere in between. Slow enough to observe. Too fast to stop. He was on his knees; she was limp in his arms, her head lolling back. There was a searching, urgent look on her face, but then their eyes met. Her lips parted then slackened, her half-bloomed smile withering like a cut flower.
A sweet and slightly alcoholic fragrance filled the air. Thin at first, but gradually turning viscous. No, he thought, or maybe he said—no, no, no—she was dead, and she’d died for him, she’d died because he had never told her he wasn’t quite human, she’d died and it was his fault, and he was clutching at her emptying vessel, and he didn’t know what to do—because her death had never been in his plans, because she was most like him than anyone else, because she was neither good nor innocent, because she was all that this universe was good for, because he could not lose her—
—because he absolutely, definitely could not lose her—
—he swallowed her whole.
2.
She tasted like makgeolli, sweet and smooth as a mistake. The horror of what he’d just done shook him loose. He had just eaten her, as if she’d been some common criminal. He knew what would happen next, what always happened after the consuming: the digesting, the absorbing. The surge of life force bolstering him from his end.
But he did not want to digest her. He did not want to crush her soul inside of him.
Something in him… shifted. He would never comprehend how, but he understood what was happening—he was carving a space for her, and as if it was the most natural thing, as if it was by design rather than a series of accidents and panicked choices, she slid into that space and settled, blooming alcohol-warm in his chest.
“What the hell?” she shrieked. He jerked in surprise, jostling her body. She was loud, her words ringing so clearly that he had to check her face, had to scan the glassy eyes and half-parted lips that were definitely not moving.
“Oh my god,” she said, her voice not quite a real sound, yet too much like her to be a delusion. “Is that me? Ew, I look dead.”
He didn’t answer.
“Shit. I’m dead, aren’t I? Why am I holding my own dead body—no, nope, you’re holding my dead body, and I’m—seriously, what the hell? I’m in your body? Yah, Byeonhosa-nim, can you explain—”
Gunfire, half-muffled, a broken sound, followed by the thinnest groan. Jang Han Seok aimed his revolver at Vincenzo, finger uselessly clicking the trigger; on the floor his brother writhed, something like uncomprehending agony on his face.
Cha Young went quiet for a while, but then she said, low and urgent, “Drop me—drop my body and go to him.”
Vincenzo didn’t need to be told twice. He let go of her dead body—not as carelessly as she would have liked but still with less reverence than she deserved—and rushed forward. To which brother, he wasn’t sure either—but Jang Han Seok turned away and leapt off his balcony and so Vincenzo landed on his knees next to his mangled brother. “Hyung—” Han Seo croaked, but Vincenzo shushed him as he took off his jacket, bundled it up, and pressed it to the wound on Han Seo’s stomach with one hand, dialing the emergency hotline with his other.
The dispatcher picked up the call. He rattled off the information needed—one man in his twenties, bleeding from a gunshot to the abdomen, one woman dead, please come, the address is 49-8, Yeonseo-dong, Sangu-gu—with a calmness he didn’t really feel. In his mind, he charted a map for the following days, a cartography of plans and contingencies, strings to pull and payments to be made of, arrangements for—and here, he stumbled, reality wedged unceremoniously under his feet. Arrangements for a funeral. For her funeral.
Slowly, he turned to Cha Young. She remained where he’d dropped her by the door, her limbs sprawled as inelegantly as they had used to be when she’d slept on his futon. Now, though, there was a frozenness that was unnatural about her. She had never been able to stay still for so long, not even in her sleep, not even when she’d tried. She was—undoubtedly—dead, yet the air smelled only of mortal blood and gunpowder now, her soul gone from it.
She was dead, and he had taken her soul, and she was silent.
Had her voice in his head been a hallucination, then? Had he crushed her after all like he had crushed so many others before her?
“No, I just didn’t want to distract you,” she said, startling him. On the floor, Han Seo whimpered in protest as the pressure on his wound suddenly increased.
“Sorry, Han Seo-yah,” Vincenzo muttered. The kid, however, seemed to be completely out of it, and after they watched him breathe reedily for a few seconds or so, Cha Young said—
“Will he be okay?”
Vincenzo didn’t know. Maybe. Han Seo’s soul was still firmly planted in his body, which boded well. His blood, however, proceeded to exit said body despite the applied pressure, which was less than ideal.
She didn’t respond, even though she obviously could—for lack of a better word—read his mind.
To the benefit of no one in particular, he said anyway, “The ambulance is on the way.”
Jang Han Seo was brought into emergency surgery; the doctors were tight-lipped about his chances, promising only that they would do their best. Vincenzo didn’t wait around. Waiting wouldn’t make Han Seo’s chances better, and he had some things to sort out. Before that, however, he took the time to visit Cha Young in the morgue. Mr. Nam was already there, and for once, he held no expression whatsoever on his usually animated face. Such was the magnitude of his grief, that it hollowed him out.
“I’ll take care of her,” said the paralegal, steady and careful. “You have other business, right, Byeonhosa-nim?”
There was no question as to what the other business referred to. There wasn’t much left to do, at this point. Still, Cha Young helpfully supplied, “He means you should go kill Jang Han Seok and Choi Myung Hee.”
Vincenzo ignored her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
She snapped, “Oh, shut up, I can make my own choices,” but Mr. Nam merely shook his head tightly. It stung. He usually always had something to say, something to break the tension in the room or make a bad situation seem somewhat better—yet in this one moment, all he appeared to be able to do was to send Vincenzo away.
But then, all Vincenzo was able to do now was to punish his enemies, a hundredfold more painfully now that they’d taken Hong Cha Young from this world.
“Please,” she scoffed. “I’m right here.”
“Samujang-nim,” Vincenzo ventured, once again ignoring her. “I’m sorry, I’ll take care of that business in a moment, but can I have some time with her first?”
Mr. Nam acquiesced, the morgue door clicking gently as it closed behind him, its sound a final judgement. Vincenzo sighed and turned his attention to the body before him, laid bare but for the plain white sheet covering it from the neck down, her skin pale and drawn and alien. Soon, they would take the body away to prepare it for the cremation. Soon, it would be nothing but ground-down bones, chalky-white in an urn.
Sentiment propelled him to reach forward and touch her temple, stroking her hairline. The skin was cold, almost rubbery, absolutely wrong; in him, Cha Young flinched.
She didn’t say a word, yet the reaction was so visceral, a burst of something that felt physical, almost violent. His fingers jerked back, curling into a fist.
“Sorry,” she said, and he eased his palm open once more. He made no attempt to touch her again, merely resting on the cold metal next to her arm as he waited for her to speak again.
“I’m okay—it’s just… I’m really dead,” she said wonderingly. “You know, they say people never really get to see what they look like, because mirrors are reverse images and cameras distort and—what I’m saying is, have I always looked like that?”
“No,” he replied, low enough that if anyone walked in, they would assume that he was talking to the dead body. “You were alive.”
“I don’t feel dead, is the thing,” she said. “I can feel everything you’re feeling. When you walk, it feels like I’m walking. When you see things, I see them too. I mean, sure, it’s a little different—you should really get your eyes checked, by the way, I think you’re slightly myopic—and I can also sort of read your mind, but none of this feels like how I thought being dead would feel like.”
And then—
“Is this normal? I mean, you… you did this, right? I feel like this isn’t normal. Also, can you look away from my cadaver for a little bit? It’s disturbing.”
He obliged, turning his gaze ceiling-ward. His eyes watered in the face of the dry brightness of the neon lights, his throat a knot of fishbones. There were no words to quite explain what he was and what he had done; instead, he let himself think it, hurling his mind to the past—distant and otherwise—and allowed her to watch the memories unfurl, from the first time he’d eaten a soul to the moment he panicked and entombed her within him.
Eventually, she said, “I see,” and he wasn’t ready for the sheer relief brought by her matter-of-fact response. She added, after a while, “I don’t suppose you can… reverse it? Pour me back into my own body?”
A futile question, futilely asked. He didn’t bother with lies and platitudes. The knowledge was real in him: she was a shard of glass lodged in his flesh; pulling her out wasn’t going to make the mirror whole again, and he might even bleed to death from the wound. Now, there was only living with it, with her—only the pain of her fragmented life as he carried her around with him.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s my fault.”
“Yah,” she chided, dragging the sound long and hard. “I mean it, I can make my own decisions. And besides, you weren’t the one who’d kidnapped me and held me at gunpoint.”
But he was the one who had never told her how hard he was to kill, how absorbing so many souls for about two decades meant he wasn’t quite human anymore, or perhaps more than. If she’d known—
“I doubt that would’ve changed much,” she said. “I didn’t really think about any of that, when I jumped in front of you.”
He mumbled to the ceiling, “You are aware, Byeonhosa-nim, that the best decisions are informed.”
She snorted. It was almost like every other time except not, because her voice wasn’t quite her speaking voice and her loudness rang only inside his head. Still, the noise managed to express both impatience and irritation. “Are you a trial lawyer, now that you’ve got one in your head? That I made a decision on impulse does not negate my agency. Besides, I didn’t have time to think. There was practically no time between a gunshot and the bullet landing, as I’m sure you know. Speaking of time…”
“I have to go and kill some people.”
“You have to go and kill some people,” she confirmed. “Can we look at me for a little bit more?”
“I thought you said it’s disturbing,” he said, though he lowered his gaze nonetheless, imprinting the last of Hong Cha Young’s physical existence to his memory.
“What a shame,” she said. “I was really beautiful.”
She was. Or rather, she had been; the vase was nothing as lovely without the flowers in it. He still remembered the first time they had met. Even through the antagonism and suspicion, he’d thought her striking, and as he became more acquainted with her, as he learned more of her character—she was singular. A force of nature.
“By the way, you better spring for a good funeral home,” the force of nature said, interrupting his musing. “I want the freshest flowers and the best-looking photo frame. And stand there on the side for the whole time. My old classmates will be coming to rubberneck and the least you can do is make me look very rich and very loved.”
He pulled the sheet up to shroud her face and ignored the pang of loss at the knowledge that he would never see her again, not in the flesh. “Shall I use the photo that we took with my mother?”
“Sure,” she said. “That was a good day.”
It was, he thought, and so long ago.
Choi Myung Hee’s death was a party that Cha Young had been meant to host. She’d chosen the venue (a dingy abandoned warehouse, just like in the movies), the music (a vinyl she had purchased with him from a vintage store), the refreshment (gasoline on sprinklers), and the entertainment (dancing and bonfire). It was unfair that she couldn’t attend it in the end.
“I told you,” she said irritably. “I’m right here.”
But she wasn’t, not in person. It had been his suggestion to pull Choi Myung Hee’s nails off one by one, and Cha Young had enthusiastically demanded him to teach her. He’d thought of her delicate hands wrapped around a switchblade, prying nails away from its bed the way they had levered the door to the gold vault open with a crowbar. He’d purchased a knife that should fit in her palms—had even engraved the blade with her name.
But now, those hands would never hold anything anymore.
“Do you have it with you?” she asked, and something in the question sounded more than mere curiosity.
He did. It was a narrow, vicious thing. A pretty thing. The hilt was inlaid with mother of pearl, the steel blade tucked to its side. When he unfolded it, her smiling soul felt like a drunken, pleased warmth in his belly. “How sharp is it?” she asked, and in answer he pressed the sharp edge to the pad of his thumb, drawing a blooming bead of blood. The cut healed immediately, his skin knitting together in a blink, but the convex island of crimson remained. As he swiped it over the engraving—red pooling in the grooves that formed her name like ink—she was a shiver of thrill down his spine.
“Use it tonight,” she said. She didn’t say, for me. She didn’t need to. “And don’t lose it. I can’t believe you engraved a potential murder weapon with my name. What’ll you do if I get posthumously charged with murder, huh?”
But she was pleased. Vincenzo could tell. She was mostly quiet, but she was present. When Choi Myung Hee’s blood sprayed from the nailbed and landed hot and wet on his skin, he knew Cha Young felt it. When Choi Myung Hee tried to taunt him with Cha Young’s death, she snorted in indignation.
And finally, when Choi Myung Hee screamed and screamed and screamed, Cha Young said, “Let’s get out of here before your eardrums rupture.”
It was different with Jang Han Seok’s death. As Vincenzo strapped him onto the chair, placed the drill over his ribcage, and set the timer, Cha Young was quiet. It was only later at her funeral that she said—
“You didn’t enjoy it.”
Vincenzo lowered his head—it was turning into second nature now, ducking to preemptively hide his expression whenever she was talking to him—and he thought, Sorry?
“You were… satisfied, I guess, with the job. But it felt more like ticking a chore off your to-do list than anything else. You didn’t have fun.”
You were supposed to be there.
“I was.”
I can’t bring you back no matter how much I torture them.
“I’m still here, though,” she insisted, and before he could argue that it wasn’t the same—it would never be the same again—mourners trickled in, one by one, and for the rest of the day she was preoccupied with telling him the backstory of each frenemy who came to pay their respects.
They were to leave after her funeral. He offered to stay to help Mr. Nam and the family sort out her belongings. See if there was something she would like to keep. She refused, point-blank. “What for? It’s not like any of my clothes will fit you.”
The day before Vincenzo went, he asked the family to keep the house and all her things anyway. Her disapproval was an acute thing in the back of his head as he transferred the funds for her house’s upkeep to Mr. Nam. It was more than the courtesy silence she gave him in the shower or bathroom, where she pretended she didn’t exist so he could have an imitation of privacy. No, this time the quiet was a swollen, sullen kind. Like a boil. He tried to prod her, thinking as loudly as he could, In case you change your mind, but she refused to give him anything. Not even a stubborn “I won’t!” or some other repartee so she could have the last word.
She so loved having the last word, which only made him feel worse when she refused to take it.
He tried to convince himself that this almost felt normal, as if he was no longer sharing a body with another soul—but her absence ached like the hollow of a wound refusing to close. Eventually, when night nearly tipped into dawn, he said to the dark, water-stained ceiling of his Geumga apartment, “It’s my money. I can do whatever I want with it.”
When no response came, he rolled over and went to sleep.
Cha Young finally broke her silence at Incheon with a statement said so imperiously, it could only be a demand: “I’m going to miss Korean-style iced americano.” Vincenzo—too relieved by her return to protest the demand, question what made Korean-style iced americano different from American-style iced americano, or for that matter ask why a beverage so foul deserved to drag the name of two countries at once into the mud—obligingly procured himself an unreasonably large cup of it and finished it all just before bonding. It was absolutely disgusting. Nothing more but watered-down sewage so cold it made his teeth hurt. And every drop of it was worth the satisfied hum she made in the back of his head.
After this gesture of reconciliation, she returned to her talkative self, commenting endlessly on his life, his choices, and their situation. For example, she did not care at all for long-haul flights, but she did appreciate the first-class seat. At her request, he reclined his seat to the degree she preferred (all the way down) and swiped through the in-flight entertainment screen in front of him until she decided on a movie for them to watch (a Hollywood-produced heist movie, starring an all-women team).
“When I grow up,” she declared as the band of thieves furtively passed the broken-up diamond necklace to each other, then walked out wearing the pieces, “I want to be just like them.”
He only muttered, “You already emptied a safe full of gold with me,” and didn’t point out that she was already a full adult and—more importantly—dead and therefore incapable of further growing. She didn’t point out that he was thinking these thoughts. He didn’t point out that she no longer reacted to his thoughts the way she had done when she’d just first started inhabiting him. It was as if somewhere along the way, they had fallen into some sort of unspoken accord to make this cohabitation bearable for the both of them, which included her only commenting on the thoughts he aimed her way and him indulging her whims—such as ordering white wine when the flight attendant stopped by to ask him if he needed anything.
Drinking too much alcohol on a flight is gauche, he thought pointedly as he smiled and took the refilled wine glass from the flight attendant.
“So is eating your partner’s soul. Drink up, I miss being tipsy.”
He drank up. He got tipsy. The movie ended and she chose a Disney flick to watch next and he obliged, heavy-lidded, lulled by her delighted giggles until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.
Cha Young embraced Malta with the fervor of a wide-eyed tourist. Vincenzo happily played the role of both her chauffeur and her tour bus, and he was eating gelato at Dwejra Bay for her benefit when she said, “The healing thing, how does it work?”
He thought of the right words to explain it as he turned the cone in his hand around and licked up a strip of deliquescing gelato. It had been a while since he’d had a chance to have a proper stracciatella. Eventually, he settled on the simplest explanation: “The more souls I eat, the faster I heal.”
He fiddled with his earphones, making sure they hadn’t fallen out. He’d started wearing a pair of them around just so he could pretend taking a call when he was talking to her. It felt off, still, talking to the voice in his head—it hadn’t been a week since she’d died—but saying things out loud felt an inch closer to normal than just thinking his words really hard.
She didn’t like it. She thought he sounded weird, when heard by his own ears. Like his usual voice, but off. She much preferred what she called his thought-voice, which according to her sounded completely different and therefore less disturbing.
He argued, however, that if she got a say on what they ate and drank, then he got to choose how he talked to her.
She went quiet for a while. He used the time to carefully lick a trail of melted gelato off the side of the cone and the side of his index finger; why she insisted on a cone rather than a cup, he had no idea. When she finally spoke, her words were careful, but her tone was curious. Wondering. “You healed really fast, that time with the knife.”
“I’ve killed enough people. At this point, methods that most people use to kill simply won’t work on me.” The answer came quickly, without hesitation. He’d already told her the barebones of how it worked, and at this juncture of their relationship—and considering she could read his thoughts anyway—there was no point in lying. The fragments of a revolver bullet would tear through his flesh, but the damaged tissue would slowly push them out as it healed. The bullet that had killed her and the bullet that had put Han Seo in a wheelchair would’ve been—at most—a temporary inconvenience to Vincenzo.
It wouldn’t have hurt much, either. His system would’ve been so flushed with adrenaline that the pain wouldn’t have registered, and by the time the adrenaline was gone, he would’ve been healed.
Which meant that Cha Young’s death—the sacrifice she’d made unthinking, as if it had been the only choice on the table—had been a complete and utter waste. She shouldn’t have died. If he’d just told her about his ability, she would have lived. This was what he’d been trying to explain to her. This was what she’d refused to understand as she’d continued to eavesdrop on and deny his churning guilt.
He had robbed her of her life, stolen her soul from its final destination, and imprisoned her in the shell of his body.
Of all his crimes, this was the one he couldn’t live with.
Of all his crimes, she was the one he had to live with.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, so loudly that he flinched and turned to look behind him, half-expecting her to be right there. “The ice cream’s melting all over the place!”
Her mind had always been opaque to him, even now with her soul ensconced in his body, but he knew a transparent attempt at a subject change when he saw it. As he tried to lick the melted stracciatella off his sticky fingers, he thought in protest, gelato isn’t ice cream.
“Are you killable at all?”
The question arrived at the most inopportune moment. They were testing the newly installed aerial silk rig at his apartment; his limbs were currently arranged in ways his limbs were not usually arranged. She had declared one day that while his usual regime of weight training and calisthenics had been working just fine, they’d also been far too boring for her. She had been missing aerial yoga, and it hadn’t taken much convincing for him to indulge her, though he had staunchly refused to do it in a studio where anyone else could see.
She’d said, victoriously, “That’s fine, I’ll be your instructor.”
So now, he hung suspended from a silk hammock in a pose she had deemed not nearly good enough. He wasn’t very limber, though his upper body strength was ‘adequate’. All in all, not an ideal position to be having a potentially fraught conversation.
He considered her question. Considered also the fact that with a few wrong twists, he could end up with an impromptu noose—not that he was hanging from a great height. “Arch your back a little more,” she instructed, and he arched his back a little more, which felt exactly as arched as it had been two seconds ago, which was to say: as arched as he could possibly make it. Mercilessly, she added, “And answer the question.”
She was becoming even bossier lately. But then, if he was the one trapped in someone else’s body, unable to do things on his own, he too would boss the body’s owner around. He said, “I suppose in theory, I’m still killable. It’s just that no one has gotten hold of me long enough to get creative with it.”
He had thought about it, though. In the long sleepless hours between the violent waking of a nightmare and the start of another day, he had often pondered how he would kill someone like himself. He wasn’t so hubristic as to assume that he was unique—surely somewhere out there someone existed with the same abilities as his, or at least the same healing factor. How would one go about killing a person whose healing kicked in almost instantaneously after he was wounded? What would it take?
Assuming—and assumption was all he had, considering this whole thing was closer to magic than science—the healing factor was nothing more but another factor controlled by the brain, destroying the brain would work. A double-tap to the head with a big enough gun, or something as efficient. A bomb might work too. He was reasonably sure he wouldn’t be able to reassemble pieces of himself like a 3D puzzle.
Those were quick deaths, though, and quick deaths were boring.
“It’s not that I want to kill you. I kind of have a vested interest in your survival, obviously.”
“Obviously,” he said with half a chuckle.
“It’s just that I’ve always wondered how my dad died from getting hit by a truck and you didn’t even need to be hospitalized,” she continued lightly. Then: “Hold the position.”
He held. Some muscles that he hadn’t known existed were beginning to burn, but he’d always been good with pain. It was a talent that had predated even his descent to the criminal underworld. Back then, he’d never questioned it. Now, he wondered if it had something to do with his more unnatural skills. Being hit by a truck had definitely hurt, but not so much that he had lost his consciousness. He’d crawled away from the diffusing soul of Hong Yu Chan, breath bated until he smelled nothing else but rain and asphalt. By the time the ambulance arrived, he had already healed through most of the internal tissue damage, leaving him with a cracked rib, minor cuts, and a few bruises—all of which were gone within twenty-four hours.
“Byeonhosa-nim,” he said, but she snapped, “That’s not what you called me in your head.”
It wasn’t. He tried again.
“Cha Young-ah.” When she said nothing, he repeated, “Cha Young-ah. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Choi Myung Hee did it.”
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry I never told you.”
“Because I wouldn’t have died? I told you it wouldn’t have changed much.”
Maybe not. He couldn’t know for sure, and neither could she. They were neither of them in the business of time travel. Only lawyers, arguing a moot conditional clause over and over again. But—beyond the injustice of her death—he realized there was yet another reason he should apologize. “Because,” he said carefully, “you deserved to know.”
She laughed. It sounded like half a sob. “Well, I know now.”
“You do.”
“Let’s move on and do a flip,” she suggested. “Turn your grip around—wrist out—”
He followed her instruction, folding and unfolding his body to her direction until it failed him, all of a sudden. An electric, hot pain lanced through the muscles of his calf; his leg was cramped—his grip on the silk slipped—his body slid—
—in the back of his mind, she exclaimed in alarm. His body moved as if it had always done this, regaining purchase of the hammock and twisting until they were safely deposited on the floor, the cramped leg extended before them.
He hadn’t done that. There was no possible way for him to have done what his body had just done, which meant it was her.
“Stretch the leg,” she panted, sounding as surprised as he felt. “And try to kiss your knee.”
As he did so, she helped, a warm pressure on his back until the pain faded to nothingness.
3.
She learned to borrow his body. Nothing big like the complete takeover she’d done the first time around, but little things. She corrected his pose during their aerial sessions. She reached to get the salt because she preferred her food a little saltier than he did. And sometimes, when they were doing nothing at all, she stretched his hand out before him, wriggling his fingers as if testing a prosthetic.
It was a lazy afternoon when she suggested getting a punching bag. Or rather, it was an even lazier afternoon than their already lazy afternoons with them lounging on the sofa, a soap opera playing in the background. She was once again staring at his hand, turning it this way and that. His knuckles were uncalloused. They had been so for more than a month, now. He asked, “Why a punching bag?”
She shrugged with his shoulders. “I want to learn how to fight. I know you can already fight, but…”
She trailed away. He supplied, “I can teach you.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Can you teach me how to shoot too?”
“I’ll make the arrangements.”
Teaching Cha Young how to punch a bag and shoot a gun proved easier than her teaching Vincenzo how to do aerial yoga. She didn’t seem to mind. “I guess it’s not called muscle memory for nothing,” she said cheerfully as she emptied a mag into the target, leaving a smattering of holes on it.
Once she finished the rounds, they looked at the target together. He said, “You’re better at absorbing the recoil.”
“It’s still not as good as when you do it.”
“At the rate you’re going, you’ll be there next month,” he replied, chuckling. “Do you want to go again?”
“No, let’s go home now. We have to start cooking soon if we want to have dinner on time.”
Tonight’s menu was jjampong. They’d bought the seafood fresh and the Korean ingredients from the Asian supermarket. She cooked for them—for him—and even made the broth mild enough that he could withstand it.
“I have a hypothesis,” she said as she ladled jjampong into a bowl, “that my heat tolerance died with my body.”
“That seems reasonable,” he said, relieved.
She portioned out a second bowl of jjampong. “I thought so too, but then I thought we should test it anyway.” And then, she dumped an unholy amount of chili oil into it.
After three consecutive visits to the toilet, she whined, “Why is your body so lame?”
There was no longer any veil of modesty between them. After her stunt with the spicy jjampong, it was impossible to pretend that the body they shared, like any other human body, could be pretty disgusting at times. They stopped pressing pause on their conversations for bathroom breaks; his state of undress was no longer a factor, especially since—as she helpfully pointed out—it was also on some level her state of undress.
Their state of dress, she left for him to decide. Every so often she would ask him to wear a certain shirt (she particularly liked him in blue) or choose which watch he should wear, but that was the extent of it.
“If I tell you to put on a dress, would you do it?” she asked, when he’d apparently asked her one too many times if she didn’t want to be a bigger influence in their choice of attire.
He looked at himself in the mirror, tried to imagine himself in a dress, and noticed how green he started turning, but he said anyway, “I would try.”
She hummed appreciatively, no doubt enjoying the mental image he had. “Maybe one day,” she said. “When we’re both more used to this.”
He breathed a sigh of relief, choosing not to comment on her absolutely evil snickering.
Since he’d sent Luca off with a contract and eight million won, Vincenzo had been receiving semi-regular updates on Paolo’s big misstep of the… well, these updates wouldn’t be semi-regular if they happened within fixed time increments. They would just be regular. At first, not a week would pass without some sort of gaffe--some stupid, amateurish, masculine-ego-driven bullshit--and Luca would tell Vincenzo, and Vincenzo would advise Luca on the matter, and Luca would reply, “Si, Consigliere,” even though that wasn’t what Vincenzo was anymore. And then, they would have one week of relative peace, at most, but no more--and it didn’t take long for the space in between incidents to gradually contract, for the mistakes to occur more frequently. It was once a week, then once every five days, and now, at least every other day.
“Time is running up, Consigliere,” Luca said in his last phone call. “When will you come?”
“I bought two months from the Lucianos. We have time.”
But more than half that time had drained away. Sooner than later, he would have to go to Milan and fix things, and while his work was always thorough and tidy, it was rarely bloodless. This work in particular already smelled like carnage from all the way across the Mar Tirreno, and once he was in it, he would be in it for life. Fabio Cassano’s legacy would be Vincenzo’s, to be passed on to whoever came after him if he could die at all. He wasn’t sure. He had been aging slower than most people; maybe a couple hundred more souls would leave him well and truly immortal.
Luca sighed, loud enough that Vincenzo could hear it rattling tinnily through the phone speaker. “If you say so, my friend.”
The afternoon after that call, he brought it up to Cha Young tentatively, half-apologetically. She wasn’t surprised. She couldn’t be, being practically in his head twenty-four seven. “Well, we can’t be tourists forever,” she said lightly.
“We’re rich enough,” he countered for the sake of it. It was like a dance with an old partner, her anticipating his every move and him saying the right things to get the right responses from her. She had always been a pleasure to spar with.
As he’d known she would, she said, “Yes, but we like being busy too much. We’d get bored. And who knows what you’ll do when you’re bored and stuck with an even more bored ghost in your head?”
“You would get bored. I wanted to retire from that life and live off the gold here, forever.”
She scoffed. “You wanted to spite the inheritance that should have been yours. Like a kid whose toy got taken away saying, ‘well I never wanted it anyway!’ then sulkily breaking his piggy bank so he could buy a new, bigger toy.” She borrowed his arm to pluck a piece of candied almond from its jar and press it to his mouth. He obligingly received it, and as he chewed she continued, “You want to lead the family. Vincenzo. You know it’s the right decision to do this. Why are you trying to convince me it’s not?”
“It’s an ugly life. I don’t want you to—”
“See that side of you? I already have.”
“—have to carry the weight of it with me,” he finished. “Cha Young-ah, my life is quite literally not my own anymore. Not solely. I wanted you to be sure.”
No answer.
“Cha Young-ah?”
“Shut up, I need to think. Your brain is too loud.”
This, he hadn’t expected. She always had something to say to him. A parry, a riposte. At least a silly quip to make them both laugh. She knew. Surely, she knew half his life was his. All, if she wanted it, but he knew saying so would only piss her off.
“You’re still thinking. Stop it.”
“Stop thinking?”
“Yes. It’s nice to not think sometimes. You should try it.”
“‘Not thinking’ is how you died.”
“I saved you the trouble of coming back for me, though,” she said, which proved that he’d been complacent. That he’d thought they’d known each other so well, they could no longer surprise each other. But he had stunned her with what he’d thought was an obvious thing, and now she stunned him with… whatever this was.
Oh, but he loved her.
She said, “If I hadn’t died, I would’ve followed you, or I would have spent the rest of my life wishing that I had thrown everything away and followed you.”
She borrowed his hand. Grabbed his phone off the coffee table and looked up Luca’s contact. And finally, returned the arm to his control.
He pressed the call button.
The moment they made the decision was the end of their slow days in Valletta. They still trained together. They still took turns choosing what they would eat. But there was a certain agitation in their every action and as a result, their days contained less lingering, less savoring, less idleness. Vincenzo made arrangements with the malcontents of the family, instructing them to get ready. They couldn’t go and meet him in Malta; he couldn’t go and meet him in Milan yet. Days passed in a blur, a countdown marked by almost hourly reports of the family’s movements.
It wasn’t long at all before there was only one week left before the two months would be up. It wasn’t long at all before their last night in Malta. This morning, Luca didn’t even call. Just sent texts after texts from a burner phone. Apparently, Paolo was getting paranoid. He was getting desperate. And the other families were not pleased with the whispers on Vincenzo’s return.
“Why do they hate you so much? Because you’ll make the Cassanos less easy to bully?” she asked as they lazily strolled the streets, enjoying Valletta for one final night. It was about dinnertime; the sun was slowly making its descent, dyeing everything pink.
“Because I’m not white,” he said, snorting. “And being inferior to me is worse than being peers with Paolo.”
“Didn’t you say people respect you?”
“They do. And they hate that they do.” His head tilted up, his chest rising as they inhaled the sea air. He hardly knew who’d done that. He’d stopped keeping track.
“Tough luck. You’re all they’ve got.”
“And you’re all I’ve got.”
She glowed alcohol-warm in his chest, but said anyway, “I see we’re not counting our countless riches.”
“Our?”
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “My countless riches.”
As he laughed, something to his right caught his eye. A shop window. A jewelry shop window. The glittering gems on display sparkled invitingly in the summer sunset.
“What did we do with my necklace?”
He couldn’t remember. That night had been a blur—the delivery of her necklace, doused in blood; the mad rush to Jang Han Seok’s apartment; her death. “Probably still in my car,” he confessed. “Sorry. I should’ve brought it here with us.”
“It’s okay. What am I going to do with it, anyway?”
He didn’t really have an answer to that, but he did find an answer for their conundrum. Turning on his heel, he pushed the glass door and entered the store.
They were rich. They could just buy more jewelry. And on this momentous night, it was clear in his mind what kind of jewelry he should buy.
“Hello,” he said to the woman at the counter. “I need to buy a pair of rings.”
In the end, they decided on a plain ring for Vincenzo to wear on his finger and a delicate band with diamonds all around (“It’s called an eternity band,” Cha Young said, breathless even as a voice in his head) for her to wear on a chain around his neck. The size of the second ring didn’t really matter, but he bought one that she could’ve worn anyway. It was so small. Her hands had been so delicate, and—just like that, with that one small recollection—he mourned her all over again.
“You really should stop doing that,” she said. “It feels like… like rain inside the house.”
Sorry, he thought rather than said. They were still at the store, hence the indoor voice; he was holding the diamond-paved ring for her inspection. It’s just that I would’ve married you.
“We’re living together and you bought us rings. What else would you call that, if not marriage?”
She was right, he supposed.
“Horrible proposal technique, though. Where’s the romance? Where’s the kneeling? I only said yes because you’re getting me that ring.”
He stifled a chuckle; the shop attendant took it as approval of the goods. “Is it to your liking, sir?” she asked, clearly expecting nothing else but glowing praise.
Cha Young took over his mouth and said, “It’s perfect. I’ll take it.”
They wandered aimlessly for another few minutes, but then Vincenzo said, “I don’t really feel like eating out.”
What he really didn’t feel like was spending more time with her around other people, people who didn’t and couldn’t understand him. He was tired of modulating his tone so he sounded like he was just speaking into the bluetooth earpiece, tired of how he had to carry the little jewelry bag around as if he was buying it for a woman somewhere else and not for the one currently living in his brain.
Cha Young said, “Then, should we buy some takeout?”
They did, and when they got home—odd to still call it that when they were leaving it in a day, but it had been their home for about a month now—she made him lug the big standing mirror in the bedroom to the dining room, placed on the other side of the table.
As they surveyed the effect—it looked like he was sitting across from himself, she said, “I miss being able to see your face when we eat together.”
Like this, he could see every flicker of emotion on his face. Since when had he been so transparent? That was a silly question. As with many things in his life, it all began with her last year—a lifetime ago.
He said in reply, “I miss being able to see you.”
She snorted. “Me too. I was really beautiful. A work of art. They should’ve preserved my body and put it on display.”
“Build a cathedral around your glass coffin,” he said. “Make a religion out of you.”
“Now that’s a get rich scheme that doesn’t depend on sneaking some gold bars out of a dead Chinese billionaire’s stash.”
“Only depends on your death.”
“Please. You think I can’t lead a cult when I’m alive? I’ve got a delightful personality. It’s why you couldn’t help but gobble me up.”
The grin that had been spreading on his face dropped. “Cha Young-ah—”
“No! Not another word about how you’re so sorry about my death and whatever happened after. We’ve been through this before. And every time you beat yourself up feeling guilty, you should know: I’m part of you, now, which means you’re also beating me up.”
“That’s unfair.”
She made a sound that was not at all close to laughter. “Nothing about life is fair. But we’ve been dealt our cards. It’s time we build a house out of them.”
He didn’t point out that that wasn’t how the saying goes. She was right. For better or for worse, she had made her choice, and he had made his. He stood and walked around the table, turning the mirror to face him. It was important, somehow—the most important thing—that she saw him do this. From his pocket, he extracted their ring box and opened it. He picked her ring up and threaded the necklace chain he bought through it, then—looking straight at his reflection in the mirror—clasped the necklace around his neck. The chain was long enough that he could tuck the ring under his shirt, where it hung resting over his heart.
An odd warmth bloomed at his nape, then vanished. In his head, she was quiet, but it was neither sullen nor comfortable. He didn’t know how to describe it. He didn’t have to. She was in his head; she knew.
Then, he picked up his ring, and she said, “Let me.”
He let his hand go; she took it, sliding the ring onto his finger with a certain finality.
“Until death do us part,” he murmured, wishing he could kiss her right about now, thankful that he could be with her at all.
“Death brought us together, darling.” Cha Young reached forward, palm-to-palm with the Vincenzo in the mirror. “And if death thinks it can take away what it gave, it has another thing coming.”
4.
Their arrival in Milan happened without fanfare. Luca waited for Vincenzo at the arrivals gate, a sincere, joyous smile spreading when he spotted him. Vincenzo couldn’t tell if Luca was actually glad to meet him again, or if he was glad that someone finally was here to drag the family business out of the fire.
With the hug came the greeting: “Welcome home, boss.”
Boss. The title snagged something in him. Like a barbed wire, or a fishhook. It shouldn’t surprise him that they would no longer call him consigliere, considering he came here to run a coup. And yet.
“I could get used to being called boss,” Cha Young said. “You know, I still don’t understand much Italian, but it feels like your mind is subtitling it for me.”
Vincenzo has always just assumed that by living in his brain, she could immediately understand every language he spoke, instead of… whatever that was she’d just described. You never told me.
“I’ve been pretending to give you some privacy, but I feel like—since we’re now properly married and all—you should know, darling. I’ve been listening to all your phone calls.”
Vincenzo snorted; at Luca’s confused glance, he tried his best to school his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I just remembered something funny, that’s all.”
Mercifully, Luca didn’t ask. He took Vincenzo’s luggage and led them to the car, then drove them to a safehouse where the Cassano malcontents had been meeting. It was, to the best of their knowledge, still unknown to Paolo.
“Another thing, boss,” Luca said. “He wants to meet with you.”
“He does?” Cha Young asked, and Vincenzo could almost see her wrinkling her nose. His own nose, at that, itched. “Don’t do it, jagiya. It’s a trap.”
“I’ll have to meet Paolo sooner or later,” Vincenzo said, both to Luca and to Cha Young. “Sooner is better. He has to know he can’t win, and I would much rather resolve this without shooting at our own men or widen the schism we already have.”
“What should I tell him, then?”
“Let’s do it tomorrow.” (Proudly, Cha Young said, “Nice. Make him wait.”) “Tell him to decide on the venue; I don’t care where as long as it’s not our estate.”
“Will do, boss.”
“I really could get used to that,” Cha Young said, leaning them back on their seat and closing their eyes as Luca took them through the streets of Milan.
Vincenzo’s army was a meager thirty-seven people. Two-thirds of them were runners and low-level enforcers, younger men and women tired of Paolo’s tyrannical rule; a few family members about his age, there out of personal loyalty; and one caporegime who hated Paolo’s guts even more than he was racist, which was honestly a pretty tall order. It was not ideal. Vincenzo already knew who they were and what they could do, but seeing them all gathered here—hungry for blood and any other leader but Paolo—he realized for the first time that the plan they’d made wouldn’t survive contact with the enemy; and even if it had, he might end up having to build the Cassano name again from the ground up, because there was no guarantee Paolo’s old (white) loyalists would agree to work for the new and very much not white boss.
But those old farts had been the ones to oust Vincenzo against Don Fabio’s wishes for him to inherit the family, anyway.
“You have them,” Cha Young offered. “And possibly a lot more youths and women who are sick of the mistreatment they get in the other families, if we pull this off.”
As usual, she was right.
The kids wanted to move in immediately, before Paolo found out about Vincenzo’s arrival, but he overruled it. They couldn’t take over the family’s weapon’s storage one night before meeting Paolo for potential peace talks. They were dismayed, but obediently dispersed to their personal hidey-holes, leaving a handful to guard the safe house and their new boss. Vincenzo was bestowed the luxurious privacy of the master bedroom of this slightly dilapidated house, where the sheets smelled only slightly musty.
“How many of them will die?” Cha Young asked as they settled in for the night.
“One-third, maybe,” he murmured. “More, if we’re unlucky. None, if Paolo agrees to retire to Maldives and leave the family business to me.”
“Will he?”
“Probably not. But I’ll have to try, if only to convince people on his side that I can be reasoned with.” He tossed an arm over his eyes and sighed. “Cha Young-ah,” he said for the pure pleasure of saying her name. “Cha Young-ah, Cha Young-ah. Did you know, Paolo tried to kill me a few times?”
“I’m aware,” she said dryly, pulling the dusty duvet over them. “Go to sleep. We can’t have eyebags when he tries to kill us again.”
It was still dark out when Vincenzo woke, thereby also rousing Cha Young. “What’s wrong?” she asked, still groggy.
Something’s off, he replied. Slowly, he reached for his gun, then made his way to hide next to the door hinges. He could hear it, now. The shuffling of people trying to be quiet. The low, pained moans downstairs, ending abruptly at the beat of a gunfire. Silencers were never as quiet as the movies made them out to be, especially not when he was so familiar with the sound.
Cha Young didn’t say anything, but she made her presence known, a steadying force in the back of his head.
They waited.
The staircase outside the room creaked.
Vincenzo breathed. In, out. Cha Young said, “Three sets of footsteps.”
Three they sent upstairs. I doubt Paolo’s so stingy that he only spared so few.
“We shouldn’t have stayed here,” she said.
If we’re compromised, we’re compromised. Paolo never cared about collateral damage; at least here, it’s people who signed up for this life. It occurred to him that she had never signed up for this, either, so he asked, Second thoughts?
She didn’t immediately answer. The footsteps stopped in front of their door. She said, “Too late for that.”
Whoever is behind the door emptied their mag through it, then kicked it open.
It took a certain type to obey Paolo’s every whim. The first man who walked in was that type. Vincenzo appeared from behind the door, gun first, and before that man even knew what was happening, his kneecap shattered under him. The second was still too alarmed to move, and it was easy for Vincenzo to twist around him and past the doorway, then shoved him down the stairs. He rolled down and into his friends, much like a bowling ball tumbling bowling pins in a smooth strike. In his head, Cha Young said, “Your left, shoot now,” and Vincenzo obeyed.
The third man fell, a dark stain on his chest.
“Nice catch,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, a certain breathless quality in her voice. “Are you going to eat him?”
He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t eaten any other soul since he ate hers, and he didn’t know what it could do to their situation.
“Come on, just do it. I want to know what it feels like.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’m safe here, don’t worry.”
He worried anyway, as was his wont, but he inhaled, and—nothing. Nothing new or unusual, anyway. The soul fueled him up, filling him with a temporary restless jitter like any other soul he’d eaten before hers.
“Ugh, that feels weird,” Cha Young said.
He shrugged. “You get used to it. Should we go down?”
“Your call.”
There were still footsteps and hushed voices downstairs; it was hard to tell how many. Invincible as he was, he had never been one for recklessness. He surveyed the terrain; the stairs, the room to his left, and the short, narrow corridor terminating in the master bedroom.
The rooms were dead ends. The stairs were the only way in or out, providing a good, narrow chokepoint. The men were instructed to take him; if they stayed here, all he needed to do was pick the enemies off one by one.
He opened the door to his left and stood at the doorway; cover was cover, and it seemed like the enforcers hadn’t brought anything stronger than handguns. From the master bedroom, the kneecapped man groaned one final time, then stopped, having passed out from the pain.
Nobody came.
The hushed whispers downstairs rose like a crescendo in this orchestra of goons; it sounded very much like an argument. Perhaps not everyone in this group was immune to sense.
“Make up your mind,” Vincenzo called out. “I have a breakfast meeting and I would like to get some more sleep before then.”
The whispers stopped. One voice rose, loud but even: “Surrender and let us take you to the boss, consigliere.”
Vincenzo recognized that voice as one of Paolo’s smarter enforcers. “Emilio,” he replied. “Did Paolo not tell you? I was already going to meet him in the morning.”
“Consigliere,” Emilio said slowly. “Do not make this difficult. He said we’re to take your head back to him. I don’t want to have to separate it from the rest of your body.”
The laugh that came out of Vincenzo’s mouth was not his. “Is he serious?” Cha Young said. “As if he can take you.”
She was right. His mouth was curled in a wild grin, one that would’ve been at home on her face. He asked, “How many did you bring with you, Emilio? Eight? Ten? You’ve got three down already, and I’m barely awake. I know you’re only offering because you didn’t want to lose any more of them, but I also know you’re a liar and you’ll shoot me the moment I go down those stairs. So here’s my offer: you go and tell Paolo I’ll meet him for coffee, and when I take the family, I won’t take your head for murdering my kids.”
Emilio was quiet for a while, then said, “We’re moving out. Let’s go.”
More footsteps. A car peeling off the street.
And then, a quiet.
“That’s weird,” Cha Young said. “Right?”
“It’s too easy,” Vincenzo said. Emilio was smart, but that mostly meant he knew how to play dirty. “Let’s see if he really left.” Even if he hadn’t, most of his men had. Slowly, Vincenzo descended the stairs, gun at the ready.
It was empty downstairs. Other than the bodies, that was. All his people; kids barely twenty-five, wasted before their time. It reeked of souls in here, but he sent a quick prayer and held his breath as he continued his search. He turned from the living room to the kitchen.
Something bright next to the stove blinked, a timer going to zero.
The world went white.
When Vincenzo came to, he did so to the smug face of his brother. Paolo was practically glowing in delight. “You overslept,” he said, grinning from ear to ear as if it was the funniest joke.
Vincenzo supposed it must be, for Paolo. The man-child had spent years hearing how he was inferior to his adoptive brother: he had worse grades, he couldn’t control his temper, he misplaced the family stash.
And, as Don Fabio had liked to remind him over and over again, Vincenzo didn’t oversleep, while Paolo did. All. The. Time.
“Don’t be mean,” Cha Young said. “Some people are genetically predisposed to be night owls. I’m like that.”
Are you really taking his side?
“I’m not, jagiya. But you know, you never told me your brother is this attractive.” Horrifyingly, Vincenzo felt his eyes scanning Paolo from head to toe.
That’s because I’m not attracted to him, he told Cha Young, scrunching his eyes shut.
“Well, I am,” she said, forcing his eyes back open. “Sadly, I am a married woman and he is holding us in chains, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have eyes.”
Those are my eyes, Vincenzo shot back, but he kept those eyes open and assessed the situation. They were in a warehouse—it was always a warehouse—and Paolo had five men with him that he could see. He was, in fact, held in chains. Vincenzo was sat on a chair, wrists rope-tied behind his back while a thick chain encircled his torso and legs. It was a bit overkill, even for Paolo.
“Chains, brother?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “Are you that scared of me?”
“My brother always told me I need to be more cautious,” Paolo said. “I’m just following his advice. You can’t be too careful when you don’t even know what you’re dealing with.”
He took out a knife; Vincenzo followed the movement, but said nothing.
“Vincenzo, my brother,” Paolo said, “what are you?” Slowly, he pressed the knife against Vincenzo’s jaw, dragging it away, leaving a keening wound in its wake. The blood ran warm and thick down his neck, soaking his collar, but he also felt the cut closing up, the skin knitting taut and perfect within seconds.
Paolo barked out a laugh. “I almost couldn’t believe it at first, but that bomb barely left a scratch on you. Emilio is at the church right now. He’s convinced you’re a devil sent straight from hell, and I almost want to believe him. You’re not human, are you?”
“You’re one to talk,” Vincenzo said, chuckling. “You haven’t been human for years.”
Paolo’s mouth twists into a snarl; turning the knife in his hand, he stabbed Vincenzo in the gut, in and out. The pain lanced through him and he rocked, teeth grinding against each other as he tried not to scream. In him, Cha Young made a trembling sound, then went quiet.
Cha Young-ah—
“I’m fine,” she gritted out. “I can take it.”
I’m—
“Don’t you dare apologize. If you do, I’m divorcing you.”
So he didn’t. He breathed, in, out, waiting as this wound, too, began to heal. It took longer than the first cut, but it was happening. He strained against his restraints, testing it. It didn’t budge. They’d done their job well. How many hours had it been since they’d bombed the safehouse? Long enough that most of his wounds from then had healed, certainly. His torso still throbbed with the ache of broken ribs, but that, too, was fading. He hadn’t killed many people in Korea; his healing factor couldn’t have developed that much more since then. The injuries he got from the bomb was probably worse than the truck collision, which meant it had been… a day?
A lot could happen in a day. Where were his people? Were they all dead? Were they hiding? Were they planning to get him?
“They better not,” Cha Young said. “They better be renouncing you up and down right now.”
They’re young.
“So are we, and we’re less killable.”
Vincenzo wasn’t so sure. Sooner or later, Paolo would get tired of playing with him, and he would press a gun against his head. Vincenzo wasn’t willing to find out if he could heal from that.
Later was better than sooner.
“Or maybe never,” Cha Young said irascibly. “But okay, go ahead and stall.”
It’ll hurt, he said. I’m sorry.
“I’ll live,” she said dryly. “You made sure of it.”
He had. Vincenzo kept his head bowed, kept the sound of his exhales and inhales harsh. Played up the pain.
It worked. Paolo didn’t say a word, merely circling him like a prey animal.
Vincenzo kept it for as long as he could, letting his body heal cell by abused cell, and just as the gut wound healed—and Paolo took a step closer in all his impatience—he tossed his head back. He displayed in its glory his sweat-glazed skin, licked uselessly at his cracked, dry lips. Paolo’s eyes narrowed like a vulture’s.
“Paolo,” Vincenzo rasped. “How do you think this will end? You can’t even hurt me in a way that matters.” He grinned. It felt more like a grimace, but that was probably better. “You never could. Even after everything you’ve done to sabotage me, Father still thought you were unfit.”
Paolo snarled, his knife a vicious arc slashing Vincenzo’s throat open. The blade was sharp; the cut was deep, despite the quickness of it all. His head lolled back, then forwards. Thick, hot blood spilled down his front, sticking his tattered shirt to his chest. It trickled down his esophagus and trachea, filling his sinuses with a coppery scent. Vincenzo choked as the blood drained, and drained, and drained. His head was dizzy—was his brain getting enough blood?—and his extremities grew cold. There was a warm, suffocating feeling in his lungs; he was drowning in his own blood, and that over everything else—that gasping, desperate need to breathe when there was nothing to receive the oxygen—hurt the most. In the back of his head, Cha Young trembled, reduced to nothing but a presence, a febrile warmth at his nape, and he focused every particle of his awareness there, and he imagined her hand—small and gentle and deceptively powerful—resting on that patch of skin between his collar and his hair, anchoring him as he became whole again, one jugular vein at a time.
At some point, his lungs expelled the blood and it came pouring out his mouth in a bubbly cough, which then tapered into a pathetic wheeze. It was difficult to breathe. Or think. Or do anything else but wait as his body did its job.
It was the worst he’d been hurt in a long time, but it was ultimately a cut. Lacerations were simple enough to heal from. Eventually, Vincenzo had enough in him to lift his own head and give Paolo a blood-flavored smile.
In his head, Cha Young cursed. “Don’t smile at him! He nearly killed us just now!”
Vincenzo ignored her. He tutted as if his mouth didn’t still taste like salt and rust. “Too hot-headed. Never think ahead. Always slow on the uptake.”
Paolo’s face twisted into an ugly scowl. Good. The insults should feel familiar to him, because it had been one their father had employed many, many times.
“Paolo,” Vincenzo drawled, almost drunkenly. Part of that was the blood loss; it made him lightheaded, halfway to delirious. Part of that was him trying to buy a few more seconds as he waited for his ribs to be perfect again and his blood to replenish. He sighed exaggeratedly; the knife in Paolo’s hand twitched.
Cha Young’s phantom hand was hot and tight on his nape. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. Don’t overdo it.
Vincenzo licked blood off his lips and teeth, but his mouth was dry. He looked at Paolo, who seemed to be solving some mathematical problem in his own head. Vincenzo interrupted him, asking, “Should I tell you how this works, since you’re not smart enough to figure it out on your own?”
The taunt worked. Paolo jerked forward, shoving Vincenzo by the neck and inspecting the smooth, blood-marred skin around his jugular. He squeezed. Vincenzo affected a desperate squirm. Paolo smiled.
“Why would I ask you?” he demanded. “You’d only lie.”
“My word means something, unlike yours,” Vincenzo choked out. The suffocation was real, and real enough that he might lose consciousness. He couldn’t afford that. Not again. “You must know I can still feel pain.”
Paolo’s gaze sharpened. “I did wonder. Why?”
“Why—why what?” His head was spinning. He scrunched his eyes closed, refusing to acknowledge his blurring eyesight. “Why pain? I’m only—human.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you, brother,” Paolo said, releasing him. He watched with unwholesome interest as Vincenzo hacked and coughed, then continued as if nothing at all had interrupted him. “You were the one who once told me that I was too easy to fool.” He placed the edge of the knife low on Vincenzo’s neck, pulling it slowly, casually. An experiment.
Vincenzo hissed through gritted teeth. It was not entirely a performance. His body felt like one raw nerve, it took so little to push him into reacting.
Paolo made a disbelieving sound that could almost be laughter. “You do still feel pain.” He turned the knife, still tracing a line to the side of Vincenzo’s neck, but then the edge of it hit the chain of his necklace. “What’s this?”
With the curved tip of his blade, Paolo pulled the chain from under Vincenzo’s shirt, inch by bloody inch—until he got to the ring hanging from it like a pendant.
Paolo’s eyes flicked from the bloodstained ring on the chain, then to the bloodstained ring on Vincenzo’s hand, and he put two and two together. “You found a woman,” he crowed.
“Yet another thing I have that you don’t,” Vincenzo said, which wasn’t really true. Paolo did just fine with women—at least until they stayed long enough to find out what kind of monster he was.
Paolo knew this too, and that was probably why he ignored this one taunt. Or perhaps he was enjoying this revelation too much. He turned Cha Young’s ring around, squinting to read the bloodied inscription on the inside. Vincenzo saw the moment he figured out what it said: their initials, and a date.
(Specifically, her death date. It had been her idea, because of course.)
“H-C-Y,” Paolo spelled out like a little boy. “This hers, too?” He held the knife he’d been using to cut Vincenzo on his palm, offering it. It was the first clear view Vincenzo had of the handle, which was mother-of-pearl under all the red, and the blade, which had Cha Young’s initials on it, the letters barely legible in the dimness.
Suddenly, Vincenzo felt something else than pain and ache and exhaustion. Suddenly, he felt the burning flash of anger—and so did she, her sparks lighting his embers, their fire catching in their shared chest.
“Brother,” he said warningly. “Give that back. It’s not yours.”
“It’s not yours, either,” Paolo said. “She can get it from me herself. Or maybe I’ll deliver it to her doorstep when we’re done, along with the news of your tragic death. I wonder what kind of woman she is, to make you sentimental like this. Is she fun? No, don’t tell me. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun with her.”
He turned the handle of the knife again, gripping it in his fist. He swung high—and slammed his fist down, splitting the flesh of Vincenzo’s thigh with the motion, its trajectory stopped by a bone, the sharp tip of the blade scraping at it.
Vincenzo didn’t scream—he had prepared himself the moment Paolo twirled the knife—but he got halfway there. His breaths came out in staggering pants; his eyes scrunched shut as if by removing his sight, he would hurt less. In him, Cha Young trembled, but she didn’t scream, either. Furiously, she swore up and down and said, “I’ll kill him. I don’t care that he’s your brother. I’ll kill him for this.”
We need to get out of here, first.
It wouldn’t take long, he knew. Paolo was stupid, but even he could put two and two together—and he so loved cruelty, it was impossible for him to not figure it out. “Come on,” Vincenzo wheedled. “I won’t die from one stab to the leg, you know that.”
“You won’t,” Paolo said. He poked at the hilt sticking out Vincenzo’s leg, smiling even wider at the pained groan it earned, but didn’t take the knife out.
Good, Vincenzo thought. He finally understood.
And then Paolo placed his whole weight on the knife.
This time, Vincenzo did scream, and in him Cha Young screamed too, her voice echoing his in some twisted harmony until they were nothing but an unending wail. Except it did end; Paolo leaned back, still not pulling the knife out—and some of the bleeding, broken tissue in Vincenzo’s leg pushed it away.
Not enough to expel it entirely, but the pressure against the bone eased, and his scream stuttered away.
This was according to plan. This was not how he’d thought it would be.
“But I was wondering,” Paolo continued, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “How will you heal, if the knife is lodged there? Actually, how will you heal if the injury is… continuous?”
Paolo twisted the knife, but Vincenzo refused to give him the satisfaction—he bit down on his tongue so hard it gushed blood down his lips and down his throat, shuddering through the nauseating pain.
But Cha Young screamed again, and without his own scream, he could hear it in his head with crystal clarity.
She had never screamed like this. Not when her father had died. Not even when she’d taken that bullet for him.
It was that that undid him.
He clenched his hands, then unclenched them, trying to focus through the radiating pain in his leg. No, trying to focus on it, using it as an anchoring point, feeling it in its entirety, picturing the shape of it in his mind. Like a bundle of barbed wire. Then—not knowing if what he was attempting could be done at all—he gathered all of the barbed wire to himself and built a wall between his soul and Cha Young’s.
It didn’t take immediately. The act was unnatural, counter-intuitive to how they’d been living together, sharing limbs and guts and nervous system, but it worked. One painstaking brick at a time, he shielded her from the brunt of it, the pain twice as crippling when he succeeded.
It wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t be; he didn’t even know what he was doing, other than adamantly denying Cha Young another second of misery. It was a shaky, ramshackle thing, some weird magic he didn’t understand—but the wall stood and from behind it Cha Young threw all of herself against it, again and again, her protests muffled by the all-encompassing pain yet came across no less desperate.
Good. Her angry screams were infinitely preferable than tortured ones, and she had always been at her best when she was absolutely furious. His head lolling back, Vincenzo gave Paolo another smile. Never let your enemies see your pain, Cenzo, their father had once said, and it was perhaps too late for that, but Vincenzo smiled anyway, half-crazed, half-relieved that he’d successfully protected Cha Young. “I was going to spare you,” he said, as calmly as he could manage considering the situation, “but for that, I will kill you.”
“And how do you plan on doing that?” Paolo asked. He snapped his fingers; two of his men came forward with jerry cans.
Cha Young grew more frantic, behind the wall, her voice rose an octave. Vincenzo ignored her. If Paolo was going to do what Vincenzo thought he was going to do, it was even more important that she couldn’t access any of his nervous system.
“I’ll figure it out,” Vincenzo said.
Paolo didn’t laugh, merely giving him a small, pitying smile, and before him, his men doused Vincenzo in petrol. Vincenzo closed his eyes and held his breath. It smelled horrible. It would feel worse, soon.
This was still according to plan, he reminded himself. He’d expected Paolo to do something stupid in the name of torture, and this counted—burning him alive meant the ropes that bound his wrists would burn away and the chains would expand in the heat, allowing him to escape. In theory, anyway.
In reality, Vincenzo remembered the screams of the people he’d burnt alive, and his heart leapt in his chest like a wounded animal trying to break free of its trap.
Paolo told his men to leave—possibly out of some perverted wish to be the only one to watch his brother’s death, or a sudden moment of lucidity where he realized that bad blood aside, Vincenzo had been a Cassano, and those men didn’t deserve to see his death.
He clicked open a lighter. It was golden, embossed with the family crest. It could’ve been Vincenzo’s. It might even be, really. Paolo had always lacked creativity. Even now, he had to plagiarize the person he was trying to kill.
He took a few steps back. Flicked the flint wheel, igniting the flame.
Tossed it to Vincenzo’s feet.
The fire caught.
At first, it was nothing—but it didn’t last long. The flames ate up the fuel, then his clothes, then it began consuming him, scorching and vicious. He gritted his teeth, closing his eyes, holding his breath like a diver. In a way, he was one. Around him the air grew thin, the fire eating up all the oxygen around him. The chains around him grew unbearably hot, but slackened as they expanded. The knife in his thigh branded him, searing his flesh. It all smelled like chemicals and gasoline and barbecue. Barbecue! His skin was boiling. He didn’t know if it really was, only it felt like it. It felt tight all around him, as if there was a simmering, bubbling thing trying to break out of him. His fat deposits? Possibly. It was hard to think, but he tried. He needed to keep sharp even as the fluids in his body bubbled and shifted, and the inside of his head began to slosh around. The wall shook, but held. Her voice came across more clearly, now, or maybe she finally got loud enough.
“Let me out!” she yelled, over and over again, her voice breaking into choked sobs. “You bastard, you coward, you promised we’d share the pain, asshole. What you have is what I have and let me have it so I can carry some of it for you—please—please, Vincenzo—”
But he didn’t. He held whatever air was left in his lungs and closed his eyes. The heat had evaporated all the moisture on his eyeballs, and so he scrunched his eyelids shut and tried to pretend the stinging was nothing in comparison to everything else. He let his neck go limp, his head falling forward—the fire had reached his hair, now, and he was crowned in flames, wreathed in light, and even behind his eyelid it was bright and red—and focused all his strength on pulling his wrists away from each other. That part was burning, too; all the nerve endings on his palms were screaming.
He tugged. And tugged. And tugged. It was hard. He could barely keep himself conscious.
“Stay awake. Don’t you dare pass out, Vincenzo. Stay awake, do you hear me?”
He heard her. He muttered through burn-numb lips, “I’m sorry, Cha Young-ah,” and he didn’t know for what sin he was apologizing this time, only that he felt like he should. He tugged once more against the ropes holding his wrists, straining—
—it gave, and his arms were free under the chains—the loose chains—and he could stand up. He could just—
“Stay awake. Don’t leave me, Vincenzo, you did it, you broke the ropes, we’re almost there, stay awake—”
Cha Young-ah, I’m sorry.
5.
One moment, Cha Young was behind a wall she didn’t even know he could make, and it was awful; the next, she was jerked into the seat—the driver’s seat and also the burning seat on which Vincenzo was dying—and it was worse.
She shuddered, and with it the whole body shook. She wanted to see, and her eyes—no, not her eyes, Vincenzo’s eyes—opened. It was intuitive. Automatic. She didn’t need to take control of each organ and limb from him, and he didn’t need to surrender it. It felt, for the first time, like she had been in her own body.
Except the body was enveloped in fire, the eyes were slightly myopic, and—right, of course—it wasn’t her body at all, and the reason she was there at its controls was because of its original owner’s untimely… No, not death, surely he hadn’t died. He couldn’t have. Unavailability? Yeah, that worked.
“Vincenzo,” she muttered with his mouth. Nothing. She tried again, thinking pointedly, yah, Vincenzo!
Still nothing.
“No,” she breathed out. This was not how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be here; she was supposed to be with him every step of the way. But the steps would be his and his only, or at least she wouldn’t be stepping on her own.
She sobbed. Well, tried to, anyway, but quickly ended up choking instead. The cells of Vincenzo’s body were quickly reforming as they were burnt away, an endless fire on a seam of coal, but there was smoke everywhere and when she inhaled it felt like being burnt from the inside out, and really, there was only one conclusion to this: she had no time to gripe. If she just let the fire burn, this body might actually die, and then there would be no hope for either him or her.
She took stock of the situation. He’d broken through the ropes holding his wrists; she twisted his arms around—the chains were slack, but they also dragged iron-hot against his now-naked skin, and it hurt.
But… muffled, somehow. As if something was still holding most of the pain back. No, not something—him.
It must’ve been too much for Vincenzo to take all that pain for himself and stay on the surface, she realized. Fool. Bastard. She never asked him to be so stupidly heroic.
This knowledge fueled her as she opened his eyes and brought the arms forward, moving—or rather, shimmying—his shoulders until the chains fell to his waist and his arms were free. Beyond the shifting, mirage-like fire, Paolo was watching intently, greedy eyes reflecting the bright orange-red of them. He still hadn’t noticed, Cha Young realized. He thought her writhing was merely one of a dying man.
He would pay. For underestimating them, for burning Vincenzo, for using her to hurt Vincenzo. She would kill him for that.
Cha Young closed Vincenzo’s fist around the hilt of the knife—her knife—and yanked it out with a yell. The hilt burnt against his palm like a brand, but she closed their fingers tight around it as she placed one hand on the distorted metal back of the chair and—inch after painful inch—rose to their feet.
Paolo staggered back, falling on his ass, trying to crawl. Cha Young tried to take a step, but her legs gave way and she fell on the dusty ground. She writhed, trying to get up, but then realized—their front was no longer on fire.
Of course. Stop, drop, and roll. She should’ve remembered. From between burning eyelids, she squinted at Paolo, who had stopped crawling to watch her instead, curious. She writhed a little more and faked a groan. He leaned forward, rapt.
What an idiot.
Cha Young rolled around, pretending she was in so much pain, wailing and writhing until all the fire was extinguished. She waited a little more, taking shallow breaths as she willed the rest of their body to stay limp like a corpse.
And then, she stood.
Paolo staggered back and took out his gun, shooting wildly. Most of the rounds flew wide; one went through their upper arm, but the pain barely registered. Cha Young looked down at the wound as it knitted back, then at the pathetic man out of ammo who had begun screaming for his men.
She rolled Vincenzo’s still-arid eyes and walked slowly, lazily, more burn than person, and when he pulled out another gun, she stepped on his wrist and ground their heel down until he screamed and let go of it. She kicked it aside, almost carelessly even though it felt like stubbing her toe on a wall.
Cha Young crouched on burnt legs, rocking unsteadily until she pressed a knee down to rest on Paolo’s torso. Their body began its earnest attempt at healing the burns, closing the wounds, expelling the smoke damage in their lungs. It hurt. Healing hurt, even as Vincenzo shielded her from the worst of it. Nerve endings that had been burnt away reformed, inflamed, screaming in protest.
Paolo gazed at her uncomprehendingly, his face a rictus of terror as if he was seeing a ghost.
She supposed, in a way, he was.
“I would make this slow,” she told him, “but I don’t really have much time. I’m about to keel over myself, and your men might return anytime soon. So…” She pressed the tip of the blackened knife on Paolo’s neck, gauging the right angle. She probably couldn’t hit his brain stem, like this. Should she just stab him in the eye?
Paolo said something. She wasn’t really sure what—as was with everything he said, it was in Italian—except it had a lot of Vincenzo and a mix of probably swear words and pleas.
“Sorry, yeah, I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said, laughing. “My translator’s out of commission right now. Which is part of why I’m killing you, by the way. You’re cute, but I can’t forgive you for what you’ve done to him.”
Paolo spoke again, and this time he spat out something like Coreano, and well. He really was lacking in creativity, was he? A pathetic, stupid, boring man, who was only ever second best even at cruelty. The only reason he’d managed to get them at all was that one of his subordinates was smart enough to try to kill them by bomb. It wouldn’t even be fun, torturing this sad excuse of a mafia.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Fuck it.” And quickly, without hesitation, Cha Young shoved her knife into one side of Paolo’s neck and dragged it across. As she admired her handiwork—a jagged red smile that could be a bit more symmetrical, actually—he gurgled, drowning in his own blood like how Vincenzo almost did earlier.
It didn’t take long at all until Paolo’s soul was diffusing into the air, smelling like bottom-shelf whisky. It didn’t take long at all until his men burst through the door, gun raised, only to freeze at the sight of their dead boss and their undead consigliere.
Cha Young realized: she would have to fight them. Their body was bare and sore and still struggling to heal. She felt bone-tired, drained. She had one knife, and maybe Paolo’s spare gun if she could get to it fast enough.
Lifting her face up to meet her enemies, Cha Young inhaled.
She understood, now, why Vincenzo ate souls. How could she not? She had never felt more alive.
Including when she’d been actually alive.
The cavalry arrived, eventually. Short of a dozen kids with so much stolen firepower and even more injuries, all came to rescue their boss—who stood among corpses, clothed only in blood and viscera.
Cha Young said, “You’re late,” and promptly passed out.
∞
“Do I have to?” Vincenzo said, wrinkling his nose, shifting the glasses on their face.
“I refuse to live another day with your horrible eyesight,” Cha Young said, reaching up to adjust where the frame sat. “And besides, you look distinguished.”
“We agreed you wouldn’t use that word again,” he said, frowning at the silver hairs sprouting at their temples. They’d showed up the moment their hair began growing back, and for the first time, Cha Young exerted her rights over how they looked and vetoed his plan to dye them black.
“You’re such a vain baby,” she said, her voice suffused with fondness. “Does it help if I tell you I’ve never been more attracted to you?”
“Maybe,” he begrudgingly admitted.
I love you, she thought, loud and clear even when she didn’t say it with her ‘indoor voice’. Another change from before; if he hadn’t been able to hear her thoughts, back then, now they came across unbidden.
It was as if their trial by fire had burnt down every remaining boundary between their souls, and now he knew her as well as she did.
“Stop that, it’s embarrassing,” she said, even though her soul was all pleasure and joy. She sniffed. “Let’s go, jagiya. Your empire awaits.”
He smiled, adjusting the glasses one last time, and said, “Our empire, mia anima.”