Chapter 8 The Game #3
“Always the victim, huh, Bev?” Lucas said, huffing out a disgusted laugh. “All Zane wanted was a mother that loved him. You spewed your hate and vitriol all over him, yet somehow he’s one of the sweetest, gentlest people we know. In spite of you.”
“In spite of? I’m the reason he’s like this. Me. He was pathetic. Weak. Always crying, always whining, just like his fath—”
As soon as the words escaped, she clamped her lips shut, turning her head to look out over the shadows of the empty garden. The silence after hung thick.
“My dad wasn’t whiny,” Zane said faintly. “My dad was barely ever home. He was a ghost in our house, doing everything he could to avoid my mom…and us.”
Lucas’s breath hitched, stumbling slightly away from Bev as the pieces began to fall into place. Could it really be that simple? “Is that it?” he asked, almost to the universe, before turning on Bev. “Is that why you’ve spent his whole life tormenting him?”
“What?” Jericho asked. “Did you pick up something?”
“Not psychically, no. It’s more a theory than anything. But it’ll be easy enough to confirm. It just means searching her cesspool of a brain.”
“Meaning?” Atticus asked.
“Meaning Bev couldn’t take her anger and rage out on the person she wanted to punish, so she used Zane as a surrogate for that person. Isn’t that right, Bev?”
“Is this like a Daddy issues thing?” Jericho asked.
Lucas shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t think so.” He squatted down in front of her, forcing her to look him in the eye. Her pupils blew wide, a flash of panic before the fury returned. “You got caught having an affair, didn’t you?”
“Wh-What?” Bev stammered. “You’re just making that up.”
“Like I said, it was a theory. But you just confirmed it. Let me guess. Your husband didn’t know, thought it was his, and when you said you wanted an abortion, he did something to manipulate you into keeping the baby?”
Bev pressed her lips together, chest heaving, her rage burning a hole through Lucas’s skin. Her breath hitched on a sob she refused to give sound to, the first real fracture in her control.
August spun the knife around on his index finger. “Clock’s ticking, Beverly.”
When she hesitated, Jericho said, “You’re gonna die either way. Be a decent person for once in your life. Unburden yourself.”
The word unburden landed like a dare. For a moment, she looked almost small, just a woman sitting in a garden that smelled like blood and roses, realizing there was no one left to lie to.
It was clear she was fighting some inner war, like the admission itself was a monstrous thing that she’d rather sacrifice her fingers than voice. Her fingernails clawed at the rope, knuckles whitening, as if the cords could strangle the confession back in.
When August stepped closer, she snarled, then, with a ragged inhale, spat, “Fine. Fine.” Her voice dropped into something smaller, brittle. “I was having an affair.”
Zane choked on a breath in Lucas’s ear. For a beat it felt like the entire garden held its breath. Crickets stopped; even the floodlight’s hum seemed to dull.
“With who?” Zane managed. “Who was he?”
Before any of them could press, Bev went on.
“When I found out I was pregnant, I was going to quietly have an abortion and move on with my life, but Irv found the test in the trash and confronted me.” She shook her head as if dislodging memory.
Her jaw clenched until the tendons stood out.
“I tried to say it was his, but we both knew it wasn’t.
We hadn’t touched each other since Gage was born.
He told me if I had an abortion he’d leave and take Gage with him. ”
The sentence landed like a blunt instrument.
“Why would he want you to keep a baby that wasn’t his?” Jericho asked, voice flat.
“He was punishing me for sleeping with…someone else.” Bev spat the words like they tasted sour.
Lucas’s gaze narrowed. “Who was it?”
“Why is that important?” she snapped, snapping back into the old feint, deflection.
“Because Zane deserves to know who his real father is,” Atticus said, sharp. “What if that man wanted to be part of his life? What if there are siblings out there?”
“He doesn’t,” she screeched, each syllable tearing at the night. She lurched forward as far as the ropes allowed. “Nobody wants him. Nobody ever wanted him, but I was forced to keep him. I’m the victim here.”
Rage flared up Lucas like gasoline. Who could do that to a child?
Who could weaponize the most intimate betrayals into a life of emotional exile?
He didn’t remember when he reached for the knife; his motion felt both animal and inevitable.
August’s arms were suddenly an iron brace, keeping the blade from smashing into Beverly’s face.
“You’re a fucking monster,” Lucas barked, voice raw, still struggling in August’s arms. “You. You’re evil. You deserve every ounce of pain you get tonight. Every single bit of it. We’ll all laugh while you burn, you heinous bitch.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she wailed, a practiced stab at indignation.
August plucked the knife from Lucas’s hand and let him go. The second his wrists were free, Lucas’s palm flew, a hard, clean slap across her cheek that echoed. She jerked to the side; the slap opened some black drawer in him.
Memory unfurled like film. Cold tile underfoot.
A child in footed pajamas. The kitchen light too bright.
A woman laughing on the phone while a small body sobbed.
He heard the old voice, the mantra Zane had been fed as a kid, the justification for cruelty: He cries to get his way.
If I go to him every time, he’ll never learn.
A kitchen timer ticking down. A little hand—Zane’s—hovering near a hot oven door.
The sudden hush that follows a slap. Bev and a man shouting at each other about someone named…
Liam. The man calling Bev a whore, a terrible mother, the bane of his existence.
Saying Gage dying was the punishment she deserved for betraying him.
“Who’s Liam?”
Bev’s eyes went wide, but then she shut down again, glowering at him as she made a show of clamping her lips together.
Lucas inhaled through his nose, let the air sit heavy, then released it slowly. “Take the rest of her fingers and her fucking tongue too. Every word out of her mouth is a lie.”
August shrugged. Jericho drew another blade from his own belt, both of them advancing with the lazy confidence of men who didn’t need to rush violence for it to be effective.
“Wait. Wait! I’ll—I’ll tell you who his father is if you just stop!” she screamed, eyes wild.
They both stopped.
“Is it this Liam person?” Atticus asked.
She gave a jerky nod.
“Go on then,” August said. “Speak while you still can.”
“It is…his name is Liam…Liam Scott. Irv’s brother.”
For a moment there was nothing, no sound but the high electric buzz of the floodlight and the soft drip of blood hitting gravel.
Then Zane whispered, “I didn’t even know my father had a brother. What the fuck?”
“It wasn’t about Zane,” Lucas said, calm, final. “It never has been. It was about you.”
Bev’s eyes glittered. “Everything is,” she snapped. Honest, at last.
August’s smile sharpened. “There it is.” He glanced toward Jericho, a silent acknowledgment. “Bonus point.”
The knife descended.
Atticus had the towel ready before the scream arrived. He fed her a sip of water, wiped her mouth, and tilted her chin so she had to look at Lucas again. “Last question,” he said, almost gentle. “Just for me.”
She blinked, glassy. “What?”
Atticus’s voice didn’t change. “Did you ever, at any time, try to get help? Therapy. Group. A twelve-step program for anything. Did you ever say I need to be different, and mean it?”
The garden went very quiet.
Bev worked her jaw, anger flickering, then faltering under something like confusion. “I…don’t need help,” she said, but the sentence fell apart, word by word, as if even her throat couldn’t stand to carry it.
Lucas didn’t need to touch her for that one. He did anyway, because it mattered. What he saw was nothing—long blank rooms where accountability should have lived, a mirror she’d never looked into with honesty.
“Lie,” he said, and for the first time his voice held pity, not for her, but for Zane who had learned time and again that her love came at the cost of his self-esteem, his self-worth, his dignity.
August didn’t hesitate but Atticus did.
“Enough,” he said softly the moment the blade lifted. He set his palm to her forehead, checking her temperature, then glanced at August. “She’s alive. For now.”
August rose, fluid, wiped the knife clean with a practical swipe, and slid it home.
He leaned close, his voice dropping so only Bev and the three men beside her could hear.
“You wanted to be seen, Beverly. Consider it done. Every monster in this family just looked you in the eye and found you lacking.”
“Bring her to me,” Felix said. “We’re in the shed. Avi and I want some alone time with her before we end it.”
Atticus’s gaze flicked to the woman. “I don’t think she has much fight left in her.”
“Don’t worry,” Felix said. “I don’t plan on physically hurting her. I just want to…play with her a bit.”
“Copy that,” Atticus said.
He looked to Jericho. “Care for a moonlight stroll through the garden to help me transport our prisoner to her final destination?”
“Sure, Freckles. Anything for you.”
If Lucas hadn’t watched Zane’s childhood unfold, piece by painful piece, watching Jericho hoist the old woman into a wheelbarrow might have been grotesquely funny. Instead he was still raw, the images of her cruelty not yet washed out of his mind.
Once they were alone, August wrapped his arms around him. “What was that about?”
“He endured so much at her hands. Beating him back then might have been kinder,” Lucas said.
“His only safe space was Gage, and the universe ripped that away from him too. How can anyone treat their children like that?” August didn’t say anything, only rubbed his back, firm and steady.
“I know we deal with monsters every day, but this was different. This was—”
“Zane?” August supplied.
Lucas nodded, chest tight.
“Zane has never been anything but kind. We call Noah the heart of the family, and he is. But if Noah is the heart, Zane is the soul. He gives the world the benefit of the doubt. He blames himself first and everyone else later. He’s the first to help, the first to volunteer.
No matter how much success he has, he attributes it to someone else—Thomas’s contacts, Felix’s celebrity, Asa’s money.
It’s just—” Lucas’s voice tightened. “It hurts.”
“You sure this isn’t dredging up your own ghosts? Your grandfather—” August’s words hit with the precision of a scalpel.
Maybe that was part of it. Maybe Lucas had more in common with Zane than he’d wanted to admit.
“Maybe,” he said, then let out a long, shaky breath.
August led him to the wrought-iron bench beneath the gazebo and pulled Lucas onto his knee. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked. “You don’t have to stay. You can go upstairs, hug our babies, or go talk to Cricket’s belly until she begs you to stop.”
“Is it weird that I need to see her die?” Lucas whispered, laying his temple against August’s.
“Maybe this is partly about me. My grandfather died of natural causes and I never got to tell him anything. I never got to say what I felt. Even though it would have fallen on deaf ears. At least Zane gets the final word tonight.”
“In that case,” August said, “how should we pass the time until they’re ready to end this hunt?”
Lucas cupped August’s cheek and turned his head, capturing his lips. The kiss was quick, then deeper. Moonlight glossed August’s lashes; the air around them smelling faintly of crushed lavender and the dampness in the air that told them rain would come before morning did.
“I could return the favor from earlier?” Lucas murmured when they broke, voice low.
August arched an eyebrow. “Right here?”
“We’ve never fooled around in the garden,” Lucas said.
“What if we get caught?” August teased, sounding more challenged than worried.
Lucas kissed him again, soft and bold. “Then we can scratch it off the list.”
“We have a list?” August asked, mock-scandalized.
Lucas tapped his temple. “It’s all right up here.”
“Your mind is a wild and untamed place,” August said, amusement curling his mouth.
Lucas slid to his knees between August’s legs, looking up at him.
The world narrowed to the rasp of his own breath, the steady thrum of August’s pulse under his fingers, and the small, private conspiracy of two people who had learned, in all the wrong ways, how to make comfort and cruelty coexist. “You have no idea, Professor.”
August’s laugh was warm against the night. “I can’t wait for you to show me, Mr. Blackwell. Do your worst.”