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Snow-white cotton is soaked crimson with blood in an instant, no different in color from the emblem of the Red Leader. Tom does not know why, but his blood is brighter. More vicious. It seeps into every broken line of his palms, stains them beyond cleansing, refusing to wash away by any means. It is everywhere, merciless. It stirs primal fear and clinging disgust.
But Tom keeps his composure. Like a loyal dog licking his master’s wounds while the latter smokes a thick cigar in absolute tranquility. His fifth of the day. He usually smokes around eight.
Usually, they do not expect a sudden attack from the resistance. Usually, the Leader does not step onto the battlefield in the very heat of combat.
Ridgwell presses the cotton between his fingers. Barely perceptibly, yet even that slight pressure is enough for blood to stain his fingertips, spreading, coiling around them like a snake as though studying the unique pattern of his fingerprints.
Damn it. Usually Larsson throws his soldiers forward as living shields instead of shielding a subordinate with his own body. His closest subordinate. His most loyal one. The one who ought to wish for his death more than anyone else in the world, yet instead sits in an office reeking of tobacco and blood, tending to his wounds. An office only the Red Leader himself has access to.
And his subordinate.
His closest.
His most loyal.
Tom swallows the nausea rising in his throat, wrapping bandages over the scratches and shallow wounds left by the fragmentation grenade. He winds the bandage around the other’s torso, forced to lean in closer to catch the roll with his other hand. He forgets to hold his breath and is struck by a cacophony of scents that cut through him like a freshly sharpened military knife. Gunpowder burning his nose, sickly sweet sweat, and blood unconsciously settling on his tongue with its metallic taste. Ridgwell swallows again.
It does not help.
Everything is finished. The last bandage is tied, the final piece of cotton thrown away, the last note played. Now he is free to leave.
The thought is oddly soothing, though not without a bitter smirk and the inevitable question:
What kind of freedom, exactly, is he about to receive?
Truth be told, outside the Red Leader’s office he can at least allow his lungs to breathe without strict regulation and let his eyes wander wherever they please, no longer afraid that they might meet the face with muscles laid bare beneath torn flesh. Yes, Tom is afraid.
But not of the Leader.
He is afraid of his own thoughts, of the faded memories of Tord. Afraid of the sharp pain that shoots through the back of his head every time his mind fails to reconcile the man in the military uniform with the boy in the red hoodie.
No, he never missed Larsson. The thought had never even crossed his mind. Yet it would be foolish to deny that everything had been easier before his everyday clothes became nothing but different variations of a dark navy military coat.
Now those old dreams of killing Tord have become almost a duty, a silent oath Ridgwell swore to his comrades the moment he was taken prisoner.
Yet he never fulfilled it.
At first, he merely waited for the right opportunity, biding his time and counting the hours until justice would finally be served. But now, having earned the Leader’s trust and possessing a plan polished almost to perfection…
“Thomas.”
A cloud of thick smoke drifts straight into the secretary’s face.
“Have you finished?”
A faint tremor runs through him, forcing him to straighten abruptly as he snaps out of his daze.
“Yes, everything is done, sir.” Tom clears his throat, restoring the practiced composure to his voice. “Still, you ought to go to the infirmary.”
Which is exactly what you should have done the moment you returned to base, he leaves unsaid.
“My soldiers need help far more than I do,” the Leader says with a shrug, resting his mechanical arm against his own chest, carefully wrapped in bandages here and there. “And you’re perfectly trained to administer first aid.”
Scarlet metal slides lower, toward his torso, grazing the edges of the gauze along the way. Not a single muscle flinches beneath its cold touch. Not a single tendon twitches when the heavy hand comes to rest upon Tom’s living, olive-toned one. Only the chest concealed beneath the dark fabric of his shirt rises sharply in surprise, then falls just as unevenly beneath the quivering anticipation of the inevitable.
Despite his losses, despite being far from combat-ready, despite his injuries, Larsson has hardly lost any of his swiftness or predatory thrill. More than once Tom had caught himself thinking that, to the Leader, everything unfolding around him was nothing but a performance in which he alone played the leading role, untouched by consequences.
With a single movement, the secretary’s hand is turned palm upward. Bloodstained fingers face the gleaming ceiling, radiating a warmth utterly foreign to the mechanical fingers tracing absent-minded patterns across Tom’s roughened skin.
No order to leave follows.
In the suffocating silence, Tord seems to have lost his sight, feeling every phalanx, every hangnail, every knuckle, every tendon beneath his fingertips. No… it resembles the detached curiosity of a cold machine trying to understand human nature.
Has it really come to this, Larsson?
“Tom,” the Leader calls more quietly than usual, silently asking his subordinate to meet the gaze of his digital eyes. “What do you feel?”
“Cold, sir,” he answers crisply.
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because you’re touching me.”
Tord nods, though not in agreement. It is a conciliatory nod instead, as though granting him a fleeting right to his own opinion.
Ridgwell freezes, holding his breath the moment metal clamps firmly around his wrist like a pair of handcuffs.
“But whose fault is that?”
His thumb settles directly over Tom’s pulse, and Tom is genuinely grateful that, deprived of nerve endings, Tord is incapable of feeling the blood hammering frantically against the walls of the artery.
A leaden tension settles over the room, heavy upon his shoulders. Larsson’s patient silence, coupled with that living eye the color of rain-soaked asphalt—squinting in that unmistakably Tord-like way—makes the secretary’s insides knot and freeze over in an instant.
Tom knows that gesture among a thousand.
Whenever Tord wants to toy with someone, to drive his victim slowly toward madness, he always resorts to this.
The damn thing that makes Tom’s teeth grind.
“Are you waiting for an apology, sir?”
Only at the very end does his voice threaten to crack, as the grip around his wrist tightens.
A loud chuckle escapes the Leader’s chest.
So deliberately carefree.
So absurdly familiar.
Enough to make Tom’s stomach turn.
“An apology won’t give me back either my missing arm”—the Leader removes the bandage from his eye—“or my eye, Thomas.”
Resolutely lowering his gaze, Ridgwell has no idea what to say. He does not understand what is expected of him. Repentance? Even if he wanted to, Tom would never regret firing that harpoon straight into—
His thoughts are cut short by a violent jerk.
Grabbing Tom by the tie, the Red Leader finally forces him to look up. The eye that had remained hidden beneath the bandage until now stares directly into the secretary’s alcohol-soaked soul with its terrifying, clouded lifelessness.
The mask of composure, perfected over long months of service in the Red Army, slowly but inevitably begins to slip from the secretary’s face. Tom had believed he had already learned every trick of the perpetually wound-up Leader, that nothing could shatter the fragile balance he had built without a single nail in the farthest corners of his mind, where faith still lingered and memories of the life “before” had been carefully preserved.
But now, feeling the smoldering cigar mere inches from his face, feeling the acrid, uneven breath ghosting across his lips, feeling the unbearable pressure driving him into a corner, Ridgwell can no longer quietly endure Tord’s presence.
He tries to pull away, turning his face aside. His free hand catches hold of the other’s wrist, trying to tear his tie free. His legs tense instinctively, ready to flee the moment the opportunity presents itself. His ears ring with the deafening thunder of his own heartbeat.
This is one of those rare occasions when Larsson has managed to break through the thick layer of ice that has grown around Tom, and he does not even attempt to hide how thoroughly pleased he is with himself.
His lips are stretched into an openly predatory smile, baring canines far too sharp to belong to any human. In his healthy eye dances a profoundly unhealthy spark of pure arrogance and unquestionable superiority.
He revels in his impunity, in the knowledge that, in his hands, even his bitterest enemy can be turned into an obedient watchdog.
He has nothing to fear. He knows exactly which strings to pull. He knows his opponent inside and out.
“I don’t need your apologies or your regrets. You know that,” Tord hisses through clenched teeth with a note of indulgence, as though explaining a simple axiom to a five-year-old child. “I need us to be even.”
“So you’ll cut off my arm?” the secretary snaps back. “No need to bother with the eye.”
A muffled chuckle slips through his teeth. Heavy, promising nothing good. Yet still carrying that infuriating trace of playfulness. Enough to make Tom press his lips into a thin line.
“I’ve already managed to disfigure you, Thomas,” Larsson says through his teeth, closing the already pitiful distance between their faces. “I’ve already won. Haven’t you realized that yet? I trained you. I made you forget why you joined me in the first place.”
His heart skips a painful beat. The fingers wrapped around the hand clutching his tie loosen. His gaze fixes squarely between the Red Leader’s eyes. Right where a bullet should have left its mark long ago.
“Tell me, Tom. What would you do if I gave you my pistol?”
The answer has no chance to leave his lips before something heavy settles into his numbed hand.
Ridgwell does not immediately realize that he has been released.
That the face filling him with revulsion has finally moved away.
Tord leans back lazily into his chair. Resting his elbows on the armrests and spreading both hands wide, he once again surveys his secretary from above with that same appraising squint.
Exactly the way he had on the day the captured Tom first found himself at his feet.
He makes no attempt to conceal either his sadistic delight or his genuine curiosity. Quite the opposite. Time and again, his gaze deliberately drops to the pistol in his subordinate’s hand, issuing a silent command.
Raise the gun. Point it straight at me. Come on.
Tom remembers how much effort it had taken, back then, simply to stop his hands from shaking whenever he picked up a gun. But now, as he raises the barrel and aims it directly at the spot between the Leader’s eyes, his hands remain perfectly steady. His finger settles on the trigger. His breathing slows, falling into a measured rhythm. The world around them seems to hold its breath, waiting for a mind-shattering conclusion. Every cell in his body rejoices, whispering words of gratitude. But then—
His hand trembles.
Once. A second time. A third.
He lowers the pistol, horror washing over him as the smile appears on the face across from him. That same smile. One he had thought long forgotten.
Far too genuine.
Far too alive.
The very smile Tord used to wear whenever Edd admitted he had been right in one of their stupid arguments.
He had realized Tom was incapable of killing him long before the secretary himself had allowed the thought to enter his mind.
Tom feels sick.
Sick at how terribly out of place that smile is here.
Sick at how utterly disfigured he himself truly is.
The pistol comes to rest against his knees, yet Ridgwell cannot focus on anything except Larsson’s laughter rumbling through his chest. His laughter is neither loud nor contagious. It is far too simple for the world he himself has created.
Tord leans closer once more, draws his secretary toward him again, and enunciates each word directly into his ear, as though driving the final nails into a coffin lid.
“That was your last chance.”
One.
“Now we’re even, Thomas.”
Two.
The pistol slips carefully from Tom’s limp hands and lands carelessly atop the Leader’s desk, buried beneath scattered papers.
“You’re dismissed,” Tord orders.
Unable to object, Tom all but flees the office, instinctively clutching at his chest, where nothing remains but torn, mangled scraps. He makes his way toward his room at a rapid pace, more by muscle memory than conscious thought, pushing through crowds of soldiers he barely notices, shoving aside anyone unfortunate enough to stand in his path. The moment he stumbles into his bedroom, his skull erupts into a deafening siren, rattling as though a crimson alarm light has begun flashing somewhere inside his head.
He needs a bottle of Smirnoff.
Something to drown out the storm ripping away his outer shell, clawing its way toward the fragile foundation beneath. If he does not lose himself in drunken unconsciousness, he will die. Die as Edd’s friend. As a loyal comrade of the resistance.
As Tom.
With trembling hands, he grabs the bottom drawer of his bedside table as though it were a lifeline and pulls out the last half-empty bottle of liquor. Not enough. Nowhere near enough. But even this is better than nothing.
Ridgwell empties the bottle in a single swallow, nearly choking as he does. A thin trail of Smirnoff slips from the corner of his mouth, but he pays it no attention. The room is suffocating. His tie is too tight. It digs into his neck like someone else’s heavy hand trying to strangle him, to intimidate him.
In a flicker of panic, Tom loosens the knot. It isn’t enough. He can still feel the lingering warmth of Tord’s hand. There is only one solution. Throw the tie as far away as possible. The waistcoat follows the tie. Then the shirt.
He throws the window wide open, but the fresh air barely stirs the stale atmosphere. How Tom regrets that there is a mirror in his room.
That it stands directly opposite the bed, showing everything exactly as it is, without embellishment or mercy.
The man sitting on the mattress, dressed in rumpled clothes hastily unbuttoned, hair disheveled, bears little resemblance to the secretary who is always impeccably put together.
This man, with sweat-damp temples, dried alcohol clinging to his lips, and trembling hands, is revolting.
Tom cannot believe that it is him.
Or perhaps…
He simply does not want to.
He cannot be like this.
Broken.
Like this.
Trampled—
Disfigured. Call things by their proper names, Thomas.
A voice not his own, like the scrape of metal against metal, sends a dull ache through the back of his head and a relentless pounding through his temples. He wants to silence it. To bury himself beneath the blankets but nothing helps.
Pressing a pillow over his ears only creates a more perfect silence, one in which those caustic words sound sharper, more real. Spoken with that unmistakable Norwegian accent. Unable to bear it any longer, Tom slaps himself hard across the face.
Once.
Twice.
A third time, just to be sure.
He strikes himself as though he could drive the demon out of his head by force alone.
To his surprise—
It works.
A blessed silence settles over his mind, and not even the sting burning across his cheeks can disturb the peace with which he collapses onto the bed. His exhausted body immediately longs to surrender to sleep. Tom does not resist. He does not care that he is still wearing his uniform. That he never showered. That by morning his awkward position will leave his back aching. He does not care that tomorrow he will, as though nothing had happened, continue carrying out the Red Leader’s orders. He will hate himself for all of that tomorrow. Tonight, he wants to fall asleep one last time without fully realizing his own capitulation and without the million unanswered questions burrowing through his mind.
He will fall asleep as Tom Ridgwell.
He will wake as Thomas.
A loyal, well-trained dog.
And for the first time in his life, he will be fully aware of it.