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I’d loved him. Loved him with all my heart. I’d thought him trapped like a toy in Adair’s plans, but he’d admitted he’d been the puppet master all along. I was the toy. My whole life was a lie of Devere’s making.
The more I turned the truth over in my mind, the more it scorched my soul, and the love I’d felt turned to barbs piercing my heart.
It was over. All of it.
The wind howled down Minerva’s main street, shoving snow with it. I stumbled through thickening slush, the only person outside in the storm, and staggered to a stop outside the door to the gentlemen’s club.
Piano music flowed from inside, mixing with the rumble of men’s voices. I raised my hand to knock. Russo was a doctor in Massalia’s lunatic asylum… He shouldn’t be here, but he would be, because none of it was real.
I thumped hard, rattling the door. The doorman opened the door, raked his glare from head to toe, then slammed the door in my face. Or tried to. I’d shoved my boot in the way and pushed the door open on him. “Constable Russo, where is he?”
“Sir, I’m asking you to leave politely. If you do not, I will be forced—”
I clutched the man’s shirt in my fist and pinned him to the wall. “Do what? Call the police? Please do. I’ll wait.”
“Unhand him!”
I pulled the pistol from inside my jacket—the one I’d taken from beneath Devere’s shop counter—cocked the hammer, dropped the doorman, and spun around to aim at the gentlemanly fool attempting to stop me.
The piano player stopped his relentless plinking and all the fake laughter faded away. Were any of these people real? I thought perhaps they were. They were real people, absorbed in Devere’s fantasy, trapped here, unknowing, oblivious. Or were they all puppets on the ends of his strings?
“Devere Barella murdered the toymaker,” I said. “Where is Russo so we might deliver the only kind of justice a monster such as Devere will understand?”
A disturbance at the back of the crowd saw Russo emerge from their midst, his expression wary. “Mister Anzio, what proof do you have?”
“Nowyou want proof?” I laughed and lowered the gun. “He confessed. He is everything you said he was. Everything we’ve known him to be since we were boys.”
Russo lifted his chin. “Where’s your sponsor?”
My sponsor? “Rochefort?” I laughed again, dismissing his concerns and the rest of the townsfolk looking on. “Russo, you have wanted Devere to pay for his crimes your entire life. That time has come.”
He narrowed his eyes, trying to read my face and my intentions. If he was real, we’d likely been around this carousel many, many times, but we’d never been here, in this moment, about to endallmoments.
He nodded at the rest of his troupe behind him, then ushered me back toward the door. “Get a rope,” he told one of his gang.
My treacherous heart stuttered in its cage. It would be all right. All Devere had to do was end this and set me free. Nothing would happen to him in his own fantasy. He’d end the lie before it got that far.
The real world waited for me, and it didn’t matter if it was cold, or if I was poor and lonely. It didn’t matter because it was mine to control.My life.It was freedom, whatever that meant.
The gang spilled from the front of the gentlemen’s club, with Russo and me at its front, and as we marched up the street, more people joined us. Whispers circulated of how Devere had killed the toymaker.Justice, those whispers said with a hiss. This was justice. It was right. It might even be destiny that I would be the one to break this cycle.
We reached the toy store’s glowing shopfront, with its quaint displays of toys and games. Jacapo’s World of Toys, a world I’d believed was a sanctuary, but it was a prison.
Someone yelled, and a brick sailed overhead and smashed through the window, scattering jagged pieces into the store and onto the snow-covered sidewalk.
“Come out, Devere! We know it was you!”
Devere would end this. He had the power to. None of it was real.
“He’s in there?” Russo asked me.
I nodded. “I came from here, right after he confessed to everything.”
“Then you were stringing him along the whole time so he’d confess?” Russo asked.
I nodded. A lie, but what did it matter in the face of all Devere’s lies? I was a boy again, telling the others that Devere was queer, that he’d touched me, knowing they’d beat him, and they had. I knew what came next.
Two gang members crashed through the store’s door, flinging it open so hard that its glass smashed.
