Chapter 32
Karia
“You think this is some kind of playtime?” I grip the tumbler tighter, my fingers pressing around the dented grooves and edges of the glass as I stare at the side of Cosmo’s face.
The sun is setting, blanketing the rolling hills of Haunt Muren’s vast lands in shadow, turning the green grass a darkened purple and the warm temperature cold. But the whiskey in my veins—the rest in my cup—has me heated, and it’s not the only thing.
After spending the morning watching Maude and Co. eat in silence around the dining room table, the tension heavier than a weighted blanket doused in ash, I needed real, true sleep.
I curled up in the same bed I slept in with Sullen, alone, but when I blinked my eyes open sometime in my drowsiness, I saw his hulking figure in a chair by the cracked door, as if he was my own personal guard dog.
It helped me sleep more.
Safe.
He is that, but right now, he’s inside after refusing Cosmo’s constant, irritating invitation to come sit around the firepit he lit and dragged black Adirondack chairs to.
“Do you see the troops coming? They’re not here yet, might as well enjoy it.” Cosmo grins at me before he removes the joint from behind his ear. I have no idea where he got it from—probably Fleet—but he pushes his hand into the pocket of his sweats and pulls out a red lighter.
“You shouldn’t be smoking around me.” I pretend to be annoyed as he lights up.
“Why? You’ll want to give in?” There’s a sensual caress to his words and I once would have felt it, low in my belly, when I was trading Sullen for Cosmo because I thought I could never have my monster.
But now he’s mine, isn’t he? Mine. Maybe not fully. Perhaps he is not there yet, and still I hold onto the hope that after everything, he will be. He’ll see how much I love him.
I don’t think of him inside with Maude, or I might murder her, and we have enough death coming.
“Besides,” Cosmo says softly, his lime eyes drifting to the tumbler in my hand. “You probably shouldn’t be drinking either and yet…”
I hold his gaze as he looks up at me, and I take a drink, just to spite him.
He smiles. Dimples pop in his face, then he holds the joint out to me.
For a second, I think to refuse. Sullen would want me to.
But what do I want?
And besides, Sullen is inside with fucking Maude.
I take the joint.
And for a moment under the stars, we pass the weed back and forth in silence, as if it was a normal night.
As if maybe later I’ll nearly pass out, and Cosmo will fuck me so hard I feel it in my teeth, and I’ll pretend to tell him to stop, and everything will be typical between us. Sad, and pathetic, but typical.
But that’s not my life now.
For Sullen, I don’t want it to ever be my life again.
Everything has changed.
It’s why I am out here alone with Cosmo in the first place. To continue our conversation from this morning, before Sullen found us in the kitchen together, and last night, when I was too tired to hear more horror.
And so after I exhale smoke through my nose and offer the stub to Cosmo, which he takes, I stare into the dying embers of the firepit and I say, “Finish telling me everything.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see him toss the joint.
I shift on the Adirondack chair but don’t meet his gaze.
The normalcy we shared there for the span of a moment has vanished. Tension pulls between us, and I remember that for Sullen, a part of me hates this man.
“Cosmo.” I speak his name sharply. He needs to know his time is nearly up, and he either confesses, or I will refuse to have his back, ever again. Our friendship is frayed, at best.
“The doctor,” he says in answer. “Klein.”
What did your dad do to you?
He was a doctor.
My fingers tighten around the glass. I don’t react, otherwise. I just say, “What about him?” This is where I stopped him last night.
He is quiet for another moment. His arms are on either side of the chair, and he is perfectly still, but even with my gaze averted, only taking him in from my periphery, I know he is close to trembling with whatever secret he has hidden in his angry heart.
“I didn’t want it to be true.” His voice nearly breaks. “I asked Maude for research on Burbank Gates, to discuss at the Emporium. I personally traced Stein’s movements to Haunt Muren and with that theft I did for Mads, I asked whatever questions I could.”
I swallow hard. The lump still feels stuck in my throat, and I am grateful, for one single moment, that Sullen is in there, and he does not have to hear.
“I kept making excuses. It was all coincidence, I told myself. And I convinced myself it didn’t matter anyway. Plenty of sons walking around without fathers, right? What does it matter if they add me to the statistic?” He snorts, performing nonchalance he doesn’t feel.
“My mother took me to Manhattan after her one night stand with him, but it didn’t work.
Expensive, and she didn’t have money for it for long.
My tuition at your school,” I feel his eyes on me but don’t look up, “I never knew how she paid for it, working clerical jobs like she did. But we came here one summer.”
I lift my eyes then, to meet his.
He is staring at the hills around Haunt Muren, bathed in only night and stars. “For work, she said. She had to get something. Child support, I think it was now. I was twelve?” He frowns. “Eleven? I don’t know and I don’t want to fucking remember.”
I can’t stop staring at his cheekbones, his eyes, his posture, so rigid.
“There was a plague mask in the entranceway, haphazard on a bench. I couldn’t forget that. Mom told me to wait in the sitting room, but I’ve always been a little shit.” At this, he looks at me, and puts on that performer’s smile.
I don’t return it.
“I peeked through a door.” The smile is gone.
He is still staring at me, but it is as if he is not seeing me.
“Mom wasn’t in there. She was looking for him or dealing with someone else, I don’t know.
But there was a crack in the door, someone in a chair, someone standing over him.
A dentist’s chair that held a little boy.
I told myself it was a doctor’s visit.” He breathes a broken laugh.
“I had to make it make sense, inside my head.”
The hairs along the back of my neck stand on end.
“Since I saw Sullen in the hotel, since I saw his scars… I’ve had to tell myself I didn’t recognize them from that chair.
” His voice is rough. “I told myself he was a freak and that he did it to himself. He wasn’t worth my attention.
My pity. Nor yours.” He jerks his chin at me and I can hear it, how he talked himself out of basic human empathy, the way we all do in this world of mine.
“I told myself I couldn’t know him.” He takes a breath.
“But I did. I do.” The words are twisted in his mouth, like he hates speaking them out loud.
“Are you saying that Klein is…” I trail off, unable to ask.
He’s a doctor, he said.
“Yes.” The same roughness in his tone. “Speaking to Sanford, pressing him for more on Klein, I think he is.”
The last of the fire pops and smoke curls between us.
“But Karia, I’m not…” He stops, and swallows. I can hear it as I close my eyes, like when I open them again, none of this will be real. None of this will be true.
I am dreaming. This tangled web is only a nightmare.
“I’m not asking for pity. I’m telling you because you deserve to know, given everything I’ve put you through. You should know it’s why I taunted Sullen and wanted to hurt him, even this morning. The guilt…” He trails off.
I open my eyes, and we are staring at one another.
“But I’m not like him. I don’t want to be like that.” His father, I know he means.
He breathes in. “When I stripped Sullen, I needed to know if what I saw before, here, with my mother, if he was the same. Everything I said about him doing it to himself, it was denial.”
I clench my teeth. I want to throw my glass at his head for what he did to Sullen, but it makes more sense now. His anger. How he trapped him.
I swallow hard.
“Before you murder me, there’s something else.”
I wait. It feels as if there is not much more I can take.
“They know we’re here now. Von sent me a courtesy text. Maybe they’ve known all along.” He shrugs. “I think they were waiting for a specific day.”
My blood runs cold. I don’t even let myself think of Von. Instead, I’m remembering the prognosticator Stein went to see, in order to find the best date for Sullen to die.
“I was able to get Maude and the others to come because even though they aren’t familiar with Writhe beyond them busting up the dinner party, she knows enough about powerful men fucking everyone in the system to want to help where she can. And I think she has a crush on me.” He grins. “And Sullen.”
I feel as if I will burst into flames. He must see it in my face, because he grows more serious.
“Stein is coming soon and he’ll bring Klein with him.” He says his father’s name like the man is nothing, and he isn’t, is he? Not to him.
Not to anyone at Haunt Muren.
I need more whiskey. It’s the only thought I have as I stare down at my empty glass. That, and the plague mask blurring in my brain.
“Karia.” He whispers my name like a plea.
And I look up, at Cosmo de Actis, who came all this way and did terrible things because he answered when Sanford called and because he has been carrying memories of that door he saw through when he was a child disobeying his mother.
But Sullen should have never been in that fucking chair.
I think of him, inside. The gloves on his hands. The way I confessed I’d lick his piss from the floor, and Cosmo knows, and I want to suddenly burst out laughing because I don’t care.
I don’t care.
Stein Rule never thought the princess of Writhe would debase herself for his son, did he? No one did. But I will. I am. I will spite his hatred with so much love, Stein, Klein, and his fucking army will drown in it.
How will Sullen feel when I tell him they are coming?
I hope he feels like I do.
Fucking. Ready.
I stand up, and I don’t look away from Cosmo. “Come inside.” It’s a command. There is not time for anymore games now. No more apologies, either, or confessions. Not out here. Not alone.
“Karia—” Cosmo starts again.
But I cut him off.
“Come inside.” My tone is harder. “The rest of this, we’re doing with him.” Sullen. My monster boy. The one I’d clean up piss with my tongue for.