Chapter 22
Sullen
His bones are beneath my fingers. So breakable, it wouldn’t take much.
I don’t say anything. I don’t make demands. I don’t think, given his position, I need to.
“I didn’t know,” Sanford Rule wheezes in the darkened corridor of Haunt Muren. “We spoke about this. You know I didn’t know. You knew there was a possibility. But I didn’t know anyone would ambush us.”
Yes, we spoke. Sure, he promised me answers and retribution and weaponry and assistance but I never believed him anyway as we sat at odds in that hotel room yesterday.
As he created a grand plan to construct Stein’s demise.
More silence filled the hours than actionable goals, but I expected as much.
Who could kill their own son, aside from Stein Rule himself? Then again, how could Sanford be any different?
How could I?
A future with Karia, a family with the broken princess, it is not meant for me. I will become just like them. The animals, the taxidermy, I am no different. I would be my own child’s worst nightmare.
I hate them for this.
“How would I know, Sullen?” Sanford gasps, the withered bones of his face seeming to bend and flex beneath my grip as I keep him shoved against the wall, my body crushing his. “I haven’t left my home in decades.”
But that’s another thing. I stare down into the amber of his eyes.
His arms are by his sides, as if he will not fight back.
Even if he did, it would not matter much.
Only half an hour ago, I stabbed one of my father’s lesser guards nearly one hundred times.
I could do the same to him, even if my shoulders ache a little from it. “And why not?”
“Do you think you were the only experiment to godhood? Do you think your father didn’t create a backup plan?” The sharp vulnerability in Sanford’s voice doesn’t move me, but it does give me pause.
I don’t speak as I look at him, one hand pressed to his sluggish heart, the other over half his face.
I would like to tear him to pieces.
I would like to shred him bit by bit, cracking his ribcage, sawing off his femur. Anything to get this twisted, disgusting rage out of my system.
I ignore Sanford’s insinuation that Stein practiced Burbank Gates’s ascension methods on him, too.
I do not see the same type of violent, mangled disfigurements anywhere on his person that I am forced to cover.
I do not see years of being treated worse than a stray dog anywhere in his countenance.
And when Stein took me away from Karia, Sanford did not stop it. He hid.
And he sedated her. He drugged her.
In my head, I see her with a knife to her throat, head wrenched backward.
Stein left a few guards here, no doubt to alert him if I came crawling back like the fool I am. It’s true, we did discuss the possibility of it, but if Sanford knew…
I let him talk me into this, but it wasn’t hard.
I want to know more. I want to understand why my life has been a living hell.
I can’t stay away from searching for answers, even if it means putting her in harm’s way.
So I agreed to the cab ride. I let the employee he fucked at Dreary Inn serve Karia and I coffee, giving Karia her own carafe.
I thought nothing of it, because my head was full of her.
The way she made me feel just last night.
The look in her eyes. The scent of her. How vulnerable she was, sleeping in bed beside me. The bruises along her side.
Proof of her love for me.
It did not take long for the sedative to come into effect.
Sanford walked through the door just as she dropped her head clumsily in her hands.
He said it would be better that way. That she did not want to go to Haunt Muren and she would have fought me on it. He said I had to understand how to control her, or she would control me.
And I… don’t disagree.
Fury snaked through my veins as I leapt from my chair to catch her before she hit the floor at the inn, and I loathed Sanford for drugging her, but I think I hated myself more for agreeing with his sentiment.
Still, I waited.
I wanted to see when she would wake.
And she did, on and off, over the course of several hours.
But when she opened her eyes in my arms inside the inn, a scream started to leave her lips.
I muffled the sound.
And I knew what I had to do.
It was either leave her for Stein to find, or take her against her will.
I will always choose the latter.
I made Sanford knock at the great double doors of this house but I sent the cab away as I waited on a bench around the stone fountain of gargoyles out front, Karia in my arms. A guard answered the door with a gun, but Sanford had the knife Karia took from the tree.
He made shockingly quick work of the body. I don’t believe he has spent decades simply living underground.
Regardless, we thought that was all. I still sent Sanford in to check.
He reported nothing.
But when I carried Karia through the haunted halls while Sanford explored other corners of the estate, I found out his fucking report was off.
“She is safe,” he says now, his voice thready and weak. “She is harmed, but she is not dying, and she is safe.”
Safe.
Safe.
No. That is how she made me feel. And all I have ever done is put her in danger. From myself, from my family, from Writhe itself now.
They will not let her live this down. Even if Mads Bentzen wanted to, you cannot look weak in front of a cult like ours.
I release Sanford all at once.
He slumps against the wall, his eyes falling closed.
Then I hit him.
Once, in the face, my fist colliding with his jaw, snapping his head to the side, blood spraying from his lips, his nose, maybe. I don’t know.
I don’t care.
I think I will kill him too.
Yet as I start to hit him again, there is the creak of a floorboard at my back and I think it is her, leaving the bed I told her not to in a guest room where I was never assaulted here. But before I can turn, a hand comes over my mouth.
Then a voice hisses, “Where is she, you sick fuck?”