Chapter 33 - Poppy
The estate looks different at night.
During the day, it's imposing—all that stone and history bearing down like a weight. But in the darkness, with only a few windows glowing against the black, it looks almost vulnerable. Like a creature holding its breath, waiting to see if it will be abandoned.
I know the feeling.
I park in front of the main entrance and sit for a moment, my hands still on the wheel. The drive from my mother's apartment took forty-five minutes. I spent every one of them thinking about what I would say when I got here, and I still don't have the words.
I know what he is. I know what he did. I know that the man waiting inside that house killed my biological father—killed him brutally, deliberately, when he was barely more than a child himself.
And I know that I'm going back to him anyway.
My mother would say I'm repeating her mistakes.
Walking into the arms of a dangerous man, letting myself be consumed by something I can't control.
Maybe she's right. Maybe this is some twisted inheritance, a pattern encoded in my DNA—the daughters of monsters drawn inexorably to monsters of their own.
But Gabriel isn't Dwayne. I have to believe that, or none of this makes sense.
I get out of the car. The night air is cold, sharp with the promise of winter. I wrap my coat tighter and walk toward the door.
It opens before I reach it.
He's standing in the entrance, backlit by the warm glow of the foyer. He's wearing the same clothes from earlier—dark shirt, dark trousers—but something about him seems different. Stripped down. Like he's shed some layer of armor I didn't even know he was wearing.
"Poppy." My name in his mouth, soft as a prayer.
"I came back."
"I see that."
We stand there, separated by ten feet of stone steps and twenty-five years of tangled history. I don't know who's supposed to move first. I don't know if there are rules for a moment like this.
"Can I come in?" I finally ask.
He steps aside without a word.
***
We end up in the study—his domain, the room where I first saw him kill a man. It feels appropriate somehow, returning to the place where everything started. The scene of the original crime.
Gabriel pours two glasses of whiskey, but doesn't drink his. He just holds it, standing by the fireplace, watching me with those unreadable eyes.
"You went to your mother," he says. Not a question.
"Yes. She told me everything. About Dwayne, about how they met, about why she ran." I take a breath. "Dwayne used to talk about families like yours—powerful people, untouchable people. She's been afraid of that world her entire life."
"And now her daughter is in the middle of it."
I don't respond to that. Not yet. There's too much else to say first.
"Tell me about Dwayne."
The name lands between us like a stone in still water. I watch the ripples spread across his composure—the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his hands curl into fists before deliberately relaxing.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. Not the facts—I have those. Zach was very thorough." I move closer, drawn by something I can't name. "I want to know what it was like. How it started. How it ended. I want to understand what he did to you, and what it turned you into."
Gabriel is silent for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is flat, detached—the voice of someone describing events that happened to a stranger.
"I was fourteen when I started at St. Augustine's.
My father sent me there because it was prestigious, connected, a pipeline to the right universities and the right social circles.
He didn't know about the Brotherhood's involvement with the school.
Or maybe he did, and he didn't care." A pause. "I prefer to believe he didn't know."
"And Dwayne?"
"He was my English teacher. Young, charismatic, beloved by students and faculty alike.
He had a gift for identifying the vulnerable ones—the boys who were isolated, insecure, desperate for approval.
" His mouth twists. "I was all three. My mother had just died.
My father was distant, consumed by business and Brotherhood politics.
My brothers were strangers to me. I was lonely in a way I didn't have words for. "
I think of the boy he must have been—grieving, abandoned, ripe for exploitation. My heart cracks along old fault lines.
"He started with attention. Praise. Making me feel special, seen, valued.
And then, once I was dependent on his approval, the cruelty began.
Small at first—cutting remarks, public humiliations, impossible standards.
Then worse. He knew exactly how to break someone down, how to make you feel worthless and desperate for his approval at the same time.
" He looks at me then, and for the first time, I see the child he was beneath the man he became.
"How did it end?"
"I found his journal." The words come harder now, dragged up from somewhere deep.
"He wrote about all of us—his 'special students.
' Detailed accounts of what he did, what he planned to do, how he selected his victims. Reading it was like.
.. like seeing myself from the outside for the first time.
Seeing how carefully he'd manipulated me, how little any of it had to do with who I actually was. "
"You confronted him."
"I killed him." No hesitation, no softening. "I killed him while he begged for his life. I was sixteen years old, and I watched the light leave his eyes, and I felt nothing. No guilt, no horror, no regret. Just... silence. The first peace I'd known in two years."
I should be horrified. Part of me is—the part that was raised to believe in law, in justice, in letting the proper authorities handle things. But another part of me, the part that spent the drive here thinking about my mother's wasted decades of fear, feels something else entirely.
Relief. Gratitude. A fierce, primal satisfaction that the man who hurt Gabriel—who would have hurt me, if he'd had the chance—is gone from this world.
"The Brotherhood helped cover it up," Gabriel continues.
"Dwayne was one of theirs, but he'd become a liability—too reckless, too many risks.
They were looking for an excuse to be rid of him, and I provided one.
In exchange for their silence, I became.
.. useful to them. My first kill at sixteen, my second at eighteen, and so on. They turned me into what I am today."
"A monster."
"Yes." He doesn't flinch from the word. "I've killed many people, Poppy.
Some deserved it. Some were simply in the way.
I don't lose sleep over any of them, and I won't pretend otherwise.
" He crosses to where I'm standing, close enough to touch but not touching.
"I am exactly what you think I am. The question is whether you can live with that. "
I look up at him—this man who has terrified me and protected me, who has controlled me and consumed me, who carries the blood of my father on his hands.
"Dwayne Thomas was not my father," I say slowly. "He was a monster who happened to contribute genetic material to my existence. My mother spent twenty-five years running from him, hiding from him, letting fear of him shape every moment of her life. I won't do the same."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I don't mourn him. I'm saying that if you hadn't killed him, he would have kept hurting children—maybe even me, eventually, if he'd ever found us.
I'm saying that the boy you were did something terrible and necessary, and I'm not going to punish you for surviving the only way you knew how. "
Gabriel's composure finally cracks. I see it happen—the careful blankness giving way to something raw, desperate, almost frightened. He reaches for me, then stops himself, hand hovering in the air between us.
"I don't deserve your forgiveness."
"Maybe not. But I'm not offering forgiveness.
" I close the distance myself, taking his face in my hands, forcing him to meet my eyes.
"I'm offering a choice. My choice. To stay, to build something with you.
Not because you've manipulated me into it, or because I'm too afraid to leave, but because I want to.
Because despite everything—maybe because of everything—I see you. The real you. And I'm not running."
"Poppy—"
"I need you to understand something." I hold his gaze, willing him to hear me. "I'm not your victim. I'm not your possession. I'm not a broken thing for you to fix or a prize for you to win. If I stay, I stay as your equal. Your partner. Can you accept that?"
For a long moment, he doesn't answer. I watch emotions flicker across his face—disbelief, hope, fear, longing—more feeling than I've ever seen him show.
"Yes," he breathes. "Whatever you need. Whatever you want. I'll try—I'll learn—"
He kisses me then, soft and desperate, his hands cupping my face like I'm something precious. I sink into him, letting myself feel the relief of surrender—not to him, but to my own decision. My own choice.
When we finally break apart, we're both trembling.
"There's something else," I say. "Something I need to tell you."
He tenses slightly, bracing for another blow. "What is it?"
I step back, putting a few feet of distance between us. I need to see his face for this—need to watch his reaction without the distraction of his touch.
"When I came here tonight, I didn't know if I was staying or leaving.
I didn't know what I would decide until I was already through the door.
" I take a breath, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
"But there's a reason I had to decide. A reason I couldn't just.. . walk away and never look back."
Gabriel's eyes narrow, his body going still with predatory focus. "Tell me."
"I'm pregnant."
The words fall into the silence like stones into deep water.