GILBERT

Dominik and I leave Alice to sleep with her painkillers. We go to Dominik's office, and he brings out a bottle of champagne.

"Dominik, you asshole," I say admiringly. "Drinking in the workplace?"

He shakes his head. "Not drinking, just a little celebration of a successful surgery. Obviously if I was going to operate today, I wouldn't be getting sloshed."

"I'd love to see you get sloshed. It's been—what? Five years since we last hung out for a night?" I watch him pour us both a glass of bubbly stuff. "We gotta hang out again. I miss livin' it up with you. How'd we end up only together once in a blue moon?"

Dominik smiles fondly up at me, leaning against his desk. "Well, we just got busy with life, didn't we? I got married to a woman who already had a life of her own going on, so I was more focused on fitting into that routine. Never have a teenage daughter, that's my advice, Gil. Plus, the transitioning was newer to me back then. I had a lot of priorities, and I'm sorry to say you got pushed down the list."

Jeez, this guy has the answer to everything, doesn't he? And he has the therapist superpower of saying things, no matter what they are, in a way that won't make you get mad. He's a perpetually reasonable guy who came from a fiery girl, but I love her in the past and him in the present. Not Alice-love, but friend-love. Comrade love.

I don't have an army behind me, but I have a surprise bag of people who'll help me if I need it, and that's better than nothing.

"Not to mention," Dominik adds, handing me my glass, "that it's hard to hang out with someone who sleeps during the day."

"Yeah, well." I shrug, feeling my lips quirking into a smile without me even telling them to. "I thought there was nothing for me during the day. But I kinda like the light now. Even though the sun is a bastard."

Dominik laughs. "I call that positive progress. I'll drink to that. Cheers."

We clink our glasses together, and just as I tip mine back to chug it all in one go 'cause I party hard like that, I see a flash of movement in the corner of my eye. In the hallway, someone striding by, glimpsed for a second through Dominik's office doorway.

We are not expecting guests.

"Hey," I say loudly, expecting the footfalls to cease. When they don't, I push the glass into Dominik's hand and run into the hall. "Hey! Get back here!"

The man does not get back here. He goes into Alice's room, the only door that's open. When he turns in profile, to enter the room, I see two things I don't like.

One, he's fucking insufferably handsome, which can only mean that he's Alfred fuck-ass Jones.

Two, he has a gun in his hand.

I sprint down the hall. It's like a fucking nightmare where you're running but you don't move. It's fifteen feet I have to run, but it feels like it takes a lifetime. Any second, I could hear that gun go off. I claw into the room.

Alfred is standing beside the bed, staring down at Alice, a hand moving to touch her face.

"DON'T FUCKING TOUCH HER!" I crash into him, dragging him back, away from her. He tries to fight me. I grab his shoulder and his wrist and I break the fucker's arm with a hideous grinding, creaking, splintering-under-flesh noise. Alfred screams, the base single-syllable of utter agony. The gun clatters to the ground, and I pick it up, press the muzzle against Alfred's temple. One final trigger pulled. The last person I ever kill. The perfect end to an illustrious career of murder. One last bullet. I—

"No." The weak, whimpered word comes from Alice, who has to fight through pain and painkillers to see us, to speak to us. "No, Gil . . . bert, don . . . don't kill .. . him . . ."

I look at her, almost trembling with how much I want to kill this motherfucker. He made her run away. He got Ivan on her trail. He caused all of this. People like him caused all of this.

Alice's heavy lidded gaze does it best to focus on Alfred. "I'm . . . a lady . . . Like I . . . wanted . . . no more . . . Arthur . . . sorry."

Alfred's breaths are big, and I realize that he's crying. "How could you do this to us? We were so happy, everything was great . . ." His voice shakes too much too speak through; he clears his throat and continues, "I wanted to talk to you about having kids. And then you go and do this? How could you?"

He sounds less like a sad, stupid bitch and more like an angry, accusing bitch, so I flick the safety on the gun and smash the muzzle into Alfred's cheekbone. "I don't like the fuckin' tone, Yankee Doodle."

Alfred yelps at the blow and looks miserably at Alice. "You killed him. I loved him, and you killed him. I'll never . . . I'll never get him back." And then he drops to his knees on the floor, head in his hand (the other arm flops uselessly, kinda broken a little bit), and he sobs. Big ol' sobs, wracking his body.

Did I do this when Elizaveta turned into Dominik? No. I got drunk, I woke up in an alley, I had a shower, and I got on with my life. There's no way this rich kid is more mentally unsound than me, so why the fuck is he having an issue here? Goddamn transphobic idiot.

Alice is, of course, kinder than me. "It's al . . . alright, Alf . . . red . . . I for . . . give you."

He doesn't deserve it. At all. I don't care how broken his heart is. He doesn't deserve anything from Alice, much less forgiveness. Really, I don't deserve anything from her, either. Do you see how good a person she is? She deserves way, way better than the two fuckers in front of her. But she wants me. Like I said before, fuck God, but damn. Thanks for this, man.

Alfred looks up at the girl in the hospital bed, and I see the emotions changing on his face. Confusion, first. Then contempt, the desperate kind where you know you're in the wrong. Then bitter, bitter sorrow. And then just a light sadness, like the look you have when you drive by a dead cat on the side of the road. Like, oh, poor thing. Like oh, that's a shame.

Alfred gets to his feet. "I don't want to see you again," he says, his tone matching his face. Light, polite. "Any of you. I want to . . . start fresh. I want to move on. I want to be rid of it. So." He looks up at me, down at Alice, and over at Dominik watching in the doorway. "Goodbye."

And with that, he walks out, clutching his arm and stumbling every few steps. Maybe I was wrong about him being less crazy than me. Jesus Christ.

Alice is already asleep again, all her strength taken by this freak-out from Alfred. I see, though, that I was wrong about what Alfred had been doing when I came in. He wasn't touching her face, he was leaving something on the pillow beside her head. I pick it up with my thumb and forefinger. It's a pure gold ring with Arthur engraved in it in fancy cursive. But the inside is engraved, too. Fresh, I can tell. The font is a lot easier to read this time, as if that would make it more true.

Always.

Not quite, Jones. Not quite.