He breathed hard, labored, like he was struggling for air.

“Everyone else you have to hold prisoner!” I snarled. “You have nothing and no one! No one can stand you!”

“S…s…stop,” he gasped, sucking in air. “Just please stop.”

“I hate you!”

“Winter, please don’t,” he begged, and then I felt him move away, his body hitting the wall and sliding to the floor. “Please stop. Just stop.”

He grunted, like he was in pain, and I stood there, still hot from my fury and tears welled in my eyes, threatening to fall.

He said again, barely a whisper, “Please stop. Please.”

I stood there, my fingers curled into fists. What was wrong with him?

Why wasn’t he storming out or charging for me and throwing me on the bed like he threw me on the floor in the haunted house?

He just sat there, the air pouring in and out of his lungs, turning calm after a few minutes, but I fisted my hands, staying charged.

Who was he? Who the hell was he?

He was a machine. A monster. A liar.

What the fuck was I supposed to do? What did he want from me?

But he didn’t say anything. He just sat there. Quiet.

Until finally I heard his voice again, solemn and calm. “My father had this rottweiler,” he said, “who was pregnant with mutts when I was about seven. He let me have one of them. Not sure what happened to the rest, though.”

I swallowed the tears in my throat, still standing rigid and ready.

“I’d never loved anything so much,” he told me. “That little thing wanted to be wherever I was. He followed me everywhere.” He paused and then continued, “He had this thing, though, about barking. At the drop of a pin. He barked so much, and I couldn’t shut him up, and every time the doorbell rang or a car pulled up to the house or someone knocked on my door, I…I couldn’t get to him in time to settle him down before my father heard him and got angry.”

Dread knotted my stomach, and I pictured seven-year-old Damon and his puppy with their sliver of happiness in that shitty house.

“Even at seven years old, though,” he continued, “I knew the horror of finding my dog hanging from a tree in the woods wasn’t as awful as the realization that my father made no attempt to hide what he’d done.”

My face cracked, but I stayed silent.

“He wanted me to find him.” His voice grew thick with tears. “Even then I understood that the dog wasn’t the one being punished, and that next time he’d make me do the deed. I never asked for another dog after that.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, tears spilling over. Jesus Christ.

“And I learned, really quick, that life wasn’t going to be pretty. Not until…”

Until…me?

I put the pieces together. His dog at seven, the party at eleven and how his father yelled at him and how his demeanor had already started to go downhill. I had nothing to do with any of that.

“I was so alone,” he explained from somewhere on the other side of my room. “I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have any friends. I was scared all the time.” His voice was thick with memory, as if it all happened just yesterday. “I just wanted to be invisible, and if I couldn’t be invisible, then I just wanted it to end. I was going to run away, because…” His sad voice trailed off. “Because the only other way to escape was to end it all.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. That’s what was going through his mind when I met him that first time? What eleven year old wants to die?

“You were so little,” he mused. “When you came into the maze and noticed me hiding and crawled inside and sat down at my side, it was like…”

Like you had a pet again.

“Like I wasn’t alone anymore,” he finished. “So little. So quiet. But it was everything. Feeling you next to me.”

God, what was he doing to me?

“You taught me how to survive that day,” he said. “You taught me how to be strong and how to get to the next minute. And the next and the next. I could never forget, and when you came back in high school, and I had changed into this, because I’d seen so much shit,” he went on, “and my desires had morphed into something ugly and twisted, but I’d fucking survived, nonetheless, and didn’t swallow the bad for anyone anymore, because you had taught me how to get rid of the shit. I finally craved one more thing I realized had been missing when I laid eyes on you again.”

I didn’t understand. I was eight. What could I possibly have taught him to keep him surviving? To keep him fighting? And what was missing from his existence after he’d gotten through all that?

“I wanted something good,” he admitted. “Beauty, maybe? The night of the pool party, the house was quiet. It was just us, but you didn’t know I was in the house, too. I watched you dance.”

I remembered that night so vividly. For the two years after that, I’d looked back on it, excited and terrified, but also with this weird sense of being safe in that closet with him.

“You made the world look different,” he told me. “You always had, and it struck me as odd, because I had hated to watch my mother dance growing up. It was just some elaborate lie that I couldn’t stomach, but you…” He trailed off, searching for words. “It was pure, and it was a dream. I didn’t want to change you. I just wanted to be a part of it all. Of everything beautiful you were going to do.”

He sat there for a moment, and everything in my body hurt. I didn’t realize every muscle had been tightened this whole time. This was the first time he’d ever said things like this. The first time he’d ever really talked to me.

“But I was still me, and I scared you that night, because that’s what I do,” he admitted, sounding like he hated himself. “Something amazing happened, though. You followed. You wanted to feel that edge, too, as long as you were at my side, and for a few incredible days, I felt…”

He didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what he wanted to say. It had felt the same with me.

“When it was time to come clean, I couldn’t,” he said, his voice growing thick. “I just wanted to stay there with you. Behind the waterfall, in the shower, in the ballroom… Just stay with you.”

He rose to his feet, and the walls felt too close, and my clothes too tight, and I couldn’t get my lungs to open, because there was too much to take in and not enough said so many years ago. Why didn’t you say all of this years ago?

“Nothing was a lie,” he whispered.

And then he walked out, and my chest ached so badly, for air or for him, I didn’t know, but I ran to the window, yanked it up, and drew in a lungful of air, feeling everything give way. Slip away, fade, and ease.

My fear. My worry. My hatred.

My anger.

Why didn’t he say all that years ago?

Why?

Damon

Present

The elevator doors opened, and I charged into Michael’s penthouse in the city, turning the corner and strolling into the apartment.

Walking into the great room, I saw Michael, Kai, and Will sitting on chairs and couches, while Rika stood near the wall of open balcony doors, a rare, balmy evening breeze drifting through.

Michael allowed the doorman to let me come up, so he must be intrigued enough to indulge me, and I was glad most of them were here.

I threw the piece of newspaper that I’d folded into an airplane on the table in front of Michael, watching him take it with very little enthusiasm.

He thought he’d have the first word. Nope. I was controlling this conversation.

I looked at Will. “Do you hate me?”

He fixed me with a guarded stare but didn’t say anything.

Then I looked at Rika. “You?” I asked.

She locked her jaw, averting her eyes.

But not answering the question, either.

I’d hurt them the most, and if they could get past this, then I had a chance.

“You’re not my enemies,” I told everyone. “I don’t want that.”

“Then what do you want?” Kai retorted.

I saw Michael open up the airplane to see the article that was in the Post yesterday about the Throwback Night being organized at The Cove this weekend, the old abandoned theme park in Thunder Bay.

I knew they were interested in buying it. It was time.

“I want for us to get back to the plan,” I answered. “To run things.”

We wanted Thunder Bay, and not just a resort. We wanted everything. A whole seaside village as our little clubhouse.

But Kai just scoffed. “We were eighteen. With no clue of the money or connections it was going to take.”

“We have money.”

“No, Rika has money,” Kai shot back. “We have our parents.”

I inched forward. “I’ll control thirty-eight percent of the hotels on the eastern seaboard, twelve television stations, and enough land to start my own state if I want to.”

“When your father is dead,” Will pointed out.

Yeah. Which would happen sooner or later.

“You, Michael, and Kai can have the premier resort destination in three years right here in Thunder Bay,” I explained, “making it the new Hamptons and drawing the elite of America’s major cities.”

“We wouldn’t even be able to get permits,” Michael told me. “Your father and my father have had no trouble convincing the mayor that any jobs a resort will create isn’t worth the business it would take away from their real estate and hotels in the city.”

I cocked my head. “What mayor?”

The four of them stared at me, looking befuddled as they wrapped their heads around exactly what the hell I’d been doing all this time as Crane helped me gather information the past couple of months. Taking down Winter’s father wasn’t just to get Winter.

Kai shook his head. “Jesus.”

“They’ll elect someone new, Damon,” Will argued. “They’re holding a special election in three months to replace Winter’s father.”