6. Xander #3
Valentina jumps back. The smile drops—replaced by something real, briefly, the flicker of genuine fear that comes when you poke an animal and the animal turns out to be bigger and angrier than you calculated.
Then the mask reassembles. The smile returns.
She walks away, back toward the house, the particular stride of a girl who has delivered her payload and is retreating to safe distance to watch the explosion.
I get out of the car. Walk inside. The marble foyer.
Veronica’s decorating—cold, expensive, the aesthetic of a woman who treats a home like a showroom.
I head for the stairs. My backpack is in my room.
My clothes are in my room. My pills are in my room.
I just need to get upstairs and pack a bag and get the fuck out of this house before—
“Xander.”
Lucian.
He’s in the kitchen doorway. Scotch in hand. Tie loosened. The particular posture of a man who has been waiting—not because he cares where I’ve been, but because confrontation is his hobby and I’m his favorite equipment.
Veronica is at the island behind him. Wine.
Phone. The decorative wife in her natural habitat—present but passive, the particular role she plays in this household, which is to look expensive and say nothing that matters.
Valentina has appeared on the staircase—phone in hand, new phone, because of course she has a backup.
She’s recording. She’s always recording.
“What the fuck is your problem?” Lucian’s voice fills the foyer. Not a question. An indictment. “Valentina’s phone. In pieces. On my driveway. Do you know how much that cost?”
“I’ll buy her a new one with the money I don’t have because you took everything Mom left me.”
The sentence lands wrong. I know it as soon as it leaves my mouth.
Lucian doesn’t respond to accusations—he responds to tone.
And the tone I just used—bitter, sharp, the voice of a son who is no longer afraid—is the tone that triggers him.
The tone that sounds too much like Adeena in the years before she went quiet.
His scotch sets down on the foyer table.
The click of the glass on marble. The particular sound that has preceded every beating I’ve ever received—the setting down of the drink, the freeing of the hands.
I’ve been hearing this sound since I was old enough to walk.
My body recognizes it before my brain does.
My shoulders tighten. My hands curl. The flinch I’ve spent eighteen years trying to suppress rises in my chest like bile.
“Your mother,” he says, “left you nothing. Because your mother had nothing. Because everything in this house—every wall, every floor, every piece of art your precious Adeena pretended to appreciate—belongs to me. It always has. She was a guest in my home, and she overstayed her welcome.”
“She was your wife.”
“She was a liability. An unstable, mentally ill liability who couldn’t stay on her medication, couldn’t maintain a household, and couldn’t raise a son who wasn’t a disappointment in every conceivable category.
” He steps forward. One step. The step that shrinks the distance and establishes dominance.
“And look at you. Proving her right. Proving me right. Coming home at all hours, smelling like a sewer, bleeding from God knows what. Throwing a teenage girl’s phone against a wall like a child throwing a tantrum. ”
“That teenage girl,” I say, my voice shaking, “is your stepdaughter. Who you brought into this house three months after your wife killed herself. Who sleeps in Mom’s reading room.
Who films me for fun and shows me pictures designed to make me snap.
You replaced Mom with a catalog wife and a surveillance daughter and you erased every trace of Adeena Anderson from this house like she never existed. ”
“Because she didn’t deserve to exist in it.”
The sentence hangs in the marble foyer like a bell that’s been struck. Veronica’s hand goes to her mouth. Not shock—performance. Valentina’s phone is steady. Recording.
“Say that again.” My voice has dropped to the register I use in the cage. Low. Flat. The voice of a boy who has decided that the next few minutes are going to cost something and has already paid in advance.
Lucian smiles. The smile. The one I inherited. The one I aim at Penny when I want to cause damage. Seeing it on his face—the original version, the source code—makes my stomach turn.
“Your mother was weak. She was sick. She was a burden on this family for twenty years, and the only useful thing she ever did was remove herself.” He steps closer.
Close enough that I can smell the scotch on his breath.
“And you are exactly like her. The same weakness. The same instability. The same pathetic, desperate need for people to love you. It’s disgusting, Xander. You are disgusting.”
He reaches for my arm. The grip. The one I’ve known my whole life.
I don’t let him get it.
My fist connects with his jaw. The sound is clean—bone on bone, the particular crack of a punch thrown by a boy who has been trained in a cage to deliver maximum force with minimum wind-up.
Lucian staggers back. His scotch glass falls from the table and shatters on the marble.
For one second—one beautiful, terrible second—Lucian Anderson is off balance, and his son is the one who put him there.
Then he comes back.
Not like a father. Like a fighter. His fist catches my jaw—a hook, dirty, the particular technique of a man who didn’t learn to fight in a gym but in boardrooms and back alleys and the particular combat zone of a marriage where the smaller person absorbs the blows.
I stumble. He follows. Grabs my shirt. Slams me against the foyer wall.
The imported Italian sconce behind my head cracks and falls.
I shove him off. We topple—both of us hitting the marble floor, rolling, grappling. His elbow catches my ribs. My knee finds his stomach. We are two bodies made of the same blood doing the thing that blood has always done in this house: hurting each other.
Veronica is screaming. High-pitched, theatrical, the scream of a woman who married money and did not sign up for this. She’s backing toward the kitchen, wine glass still in hand, phone in the other.
“I’m calling the police! Lucian! Stop! I’m calling the police!”
She calls. I hear her voice—breathless, panicked, performing fear for the dispatcher: “My stepson is attacking my husband! He’s out of control! Please hurry! Please!”
Valentina has descended the staircase. She’s still recording.
Her face has rearranged itself from the smirk to tears—calculated, perfect, the switch from provocateur to victim executed in real time.
She’s crying for the camera. Whimpering.
The performance of a girl who understands that documentation is power and tears are currency.
Lucian’s fist catches my eye. The already-bruised one—the one Penny hit days ago, still healing.
The pain is blinding. Stars. Black spots.
But I’ve been hit harder in the cage and I don’t stop.
I get on top of him. Pin his arms. My fists come down—once, twice, blood from his nose splattering the white marble, the same marble Veronica had imported from Tuscany because she wanted the foyer to feel “like a villa.”
“You don’t get to talk about her!” Each word punctuated with a fist. “You don’t get to say she was weak! You made her weak! You kept her locked up! You took her meds! You beat her until she had nothing left and then you called her a burden when she tried to escape the only way you left her!”
Sirens. Distant, then close. The rapid approach of a police response to an address in Edgewood, where the houses are worth millions and the 911 calls get priority.
The front door crashes open. Two officers. Three. Voices layered: “Police! Get on the ground! Hands where we can see them!”
Hands grab me. Pull me off Lucian. I fight them because the rage has its own engine and the engine doesn’t have an off switch. I throw an elbow. A cop grunts. More hands. They slam me to the marble—face first, the cold stone against my cheekbone, my arms wrenched behind my back.
Pepper spray. The burn hits my eyes like someone poured acid into them.
My nose fills with fire. My lungs reject the air.
I gasp, choke, thrash—blind now, the world reduced to pain and the sound of Veronica sobbing and Valentina’s strategic whimper and Lucian’s voice, calm now, measured, the businessman managing the narrative:
“Please, officers. I’m concerned for my son. He’s been unstable since his mother’s passing. We’ve tried to get him help—”
A jolt. My back. The taser. Electricity rips through my body—every muscle seizing, my spine arching off the marble, the particular agony of fifty thousand volts traveling through a body that was already in pain. I convulse. Stop fighting. Not by choice—by physics.
They pull me up. Handcuffs. My face against the hood of the cruiser, the cold metal numbing the cheek that’s already swelling shut. The rights being read—a voice reciting words I’ve heard in movies but never imagined hearing aimed at me:
“Xander Anderson, you are under arrest for the assault of Lucian Anderson. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
They push me into the back of the cruiser. The door closes. Through the window—through swollen, tear-blurred, pepper-sprayed eyes—I see them.
Lucian on the front steps. Veronica under his arm, dabbing her eyes with a tissue she materialized from nowhere.
Valentina beside them, phone finally lowered, her tear-streaked face arranged into the perfect portrait of a traumatized stepdaughter.
The three of them standing in the doorway of the house my mother died in, looking every inch the picture of a family victimized by a troubled boy.