But me, I was ashamed.

Ashamed I’d screwed up.

Run away.

Fell into this person’s scheme.

I felt stupid and juvenile and more destructive than I ever had been, with Maggie on the line.

She could’ve lost her job, and Dad could have paid six mill for my stupidity. And anyway, I wasn’t going to see this asshole ever again.

“What was my son doing in this room with you, Fairhurst?” my dad asked.

Maggie snatched me into her arms. Mom turned to the Fairhurst guy, her body tense.

“Harry?”

He looked between them, at everyone but at me. His eyes glittered with something desperate, but I didn’t know what it was. He pointed to the broken statue at his feet, and my heart skipped a beat.

The motherfucker.

“I accidentally dropped this,” he explained nonchalantly, the smile returning to his voice. “Vaughn here heard the crash and rushed in. He said he’d help me clean up. I told him that was not necessary, that he needed to go back to whoever was calling for him.”

Lies. But I thought they worked in my favor, so I kept my trap shut.

Dad turned to me. “Is this true?”

Harry Fairhurst did not dare to breathe for the duration between Dad’s question and my answer. Mom took a step away from Fairhurst, her eyes wild with something I couldn’t read—not just worry. She was aghast. I couldn’t do it to them, not when I knew Harry still had a napkin with that wet shit on it in his breast pocket.

“Yeah,” I answered finally. “I wanted to see what happened.”

“You can tell us the truth,” Mom said quietly. She had that look, like she was going to cry.

“I am.” I scoffed. “I am telling the truth.”

That day, I unraveled two amazing discoveries:

I had the ability to destroy my parents. All I needed was to tell them the truth. The guilt and prospect of my being all fucked up about it would do the rest.

I would die before destroying them.

Harry Fairhurst was right about one prophecy, though. I was a bit of a Tutankhamun. At nineteen, I no longer had a beating heart. I wore a death mask everywhere I went, and I was thirsty for revenge.

For his blood.

There was just one, tiny problem that did not occur to me beforehand.

Namely, his niece, Lenora, who’d shoved a heart back into my chest.

Now that it was beating again, I didn’t know what to do.

Fairhurst abused me two more times.

The next was a few years after the gallery incident—on that vacation in the South of France when I gave Lenora the brownie. In the private beach’s restroom.

I came out of a stall just when he walked in, both of us in swimming trunks. He grabbed my arm, squeezed it, and smiled. I thought he was probably grateful I hadn’t told anyone about what happened.

After all, years before, in the gallery, he’d looked like he was ready to piss himself when my parents walked in and he’d realized who I was.

But now, when he knew I wasn’t going to tell on him, I soon realized he wondered if he could get away with it a second time.

“How’s life treating you, Tutankhamun?” His thumb rolled down my cheek.

Heartless prince, he implied. Empty-chested mummy.

I jerked my arm free, turning my face the other way. I no longer cared that he talked to me and treated me like a grownup. He was the same asshole who’d threatened to tell my parents I’d done something I didn’t. I advanced for the door, every fiber in my body shaking with rage.

“Oh, Vaughny-boy, I would not do that if I were you, my dear lad.”

I stopped, but didn’t turn around. I’d changed in the years since he’d demanded I do what I did to him. It was gradual, but persistent. I’d come to feel less everything—jealousy, love, compassion, happiness—and therefore needed to hurt more.

I’d started picking fights at school. Got suspended three times. Cut myself a little where no one could see—upper thighs, stomach, chest. It felt like feeling something, and feeling something was better than feeling nothing.

As it happened, I liked to bleed, and Len liked the taste of blood. We were, without even knowing it, very fucking suitable for each other, in the worst and best possible ways.

All this time Knight had bantered about putting hats on hamsters, but I knew no social circle or blow job could hide the very apparent fact that I. Couldn’t. Fucking. Feel.

“Take a hike,” I said without turning back to look at Fairhurst. I took another step toward the bathroom exit, but what he said made me pause.

“Your mother is going to be vastly disappointed when she discovers I’ve blacklisted her from all of my galleries and refuse to work with her—especially now, when she’s on the brink of a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

I turned around and stared at him, dumbfounded. By this time, I knew my mother adored the ground he walked upon. He was the epitome of talent in her opinion—in many people’s. That gave him an untouchable shine I couldn’t pierce through.

“I’m going to tell them what you made me do,” I said, my voice low and steady. I only half meant it.

He smiled, rearranging the waistband of his swimming trunks suggestively. He’d done some growing up the past few years, himself. His eccentric style had been replaced with the generic look of a self-made millionaire.

“I’d like to see you try, two years after the fact. Especially when your mother is trying to enroll you at Carlisle Prep for summer session. Seems a lot like the boy who cried wolf because he didn’t get in,” he pouted theatrically.

“I don’t care about the prep school.”

“Do you care about your family, though? Their reputation?”

This time, the only thing he asked was for me to get naked in front of him in one of the stalls. He didn’t touch me, but seemed well-versed in the ritual when he bent me against the wall, jerking off behind me. I wondered how many boys he’d done that to at Carlisle.

The last time, at thirteen, it had happened in the darkroom.

That was the time Len caught us red-handed, and I’d wanted to die, because out of all the students, of all the schools I ever went to, she was the one person I didn’t want pity from.

She’d walked in when his lips were wrapped around my cock, no less. I was half-mast, desperately trying to get hard so we could get it over with. Harry and I were tucked in the shadows of the room, my arm braced against the wall.

I wasn’t hard when she walked in.

But I sure as fuck was when she ran out.

I imagined it was her, grabbed his hair, and fucked his mouth mercilessly, irrationally mad to a point that all I could see was red. He took it with little, helpless, joyful moans, and I slapped him, shutting him up so I could pretend he was Lenora. He came when I did.

That time, he promised me the internship at Carlisle Prep when I graduated high school. And by then, I knew what I wanted to do to him, what needed to be done. I was too young to do it then, but I swore I’d come back and avenge what he’d done to me.

What he’d done to all of them.

That darkroom had been occupied every single night, I noticed.

The boys of Carlisle Prep always looked red-eyed, tired, broken.

Haunted. Ghost-like. Not unlike me.

I was going to kill the fucker and make sure he couldn’t touch anyone ever again. But when his lips were around me, I’d thought about Lenora Astalis.