CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
LUCIEN STOOD IN THE UMbrOUS edge of Elliott’s room.
Rembrandt depths of darkness stretched across his features as he emerged between the jackets and the oars.
The silvery moon poured a deathly illuminance through the linen curtains of the open window.
Lucien bore his eyes down on Elliott in the caliginous dark in cold hatred.
Elliott bottled a scream, convincing himself it was an apparition, of course it was, as it had been month after month. Then, against all sense and reason, Lucien spoke to him. “You fled.”
“That’s not possible–” Elliott scampered backwards, sending pillows and t-shirts to the polished, teak floors of his dorm. Absolute terror choked him. “You can’t be real–”
It wasn’t until Lucien stepped further into the moon-lit dormitory that Elliott saw the depressions and corrugation of his lineament. The refinement of his impersonal, trimmed suit. The aged maturation in his tenor. “The news photographs depicted your return.”
Claude Montclair ran his analytical gaze over Elliott. His lips curled with distaste.
“You are not my son’s killer.”
Killer. The word leapt out at Elliott like a minatory creature, clawing through him with rapacious talons of guilt and condemnation. Killer. Killer. Killer.
“No one–kill him–” Elliott tried to lie, but the words wouldn’t come right. No one killed him. He sacrificed himself. Against his will, his eyes began to water. “I’m sorry–God, I am so sorry–”
“You are protecting a murderer.” Claude entered closer; he treaded over unfinished portraits, and he crushed sprightly green leaves from the open window beneath his pit viper-leather soles.
If he believed Elliott could have bolstered the strength to sprint past him and try to telephone the police from the main hall, he wasn’t deterred.
The law enforcement could be paid. “I attended the hibernal ceremony. I read every article in its entirety. However, what truly happened was not recorded in the newspapers. Was it?”
“–I didn’t mean for it–to happen that way–” Elliott blustered between sobs that racked his body in convulsions. “No one was supposed to die—but me.” All I wanted was for him to slit my throat.
Claude was disinterested in Elliott’s recount of the ritual. He didn’t care that Elliott couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t process his trauma, he couldn’t heal from Lucien on top of him. Strangling him with brute force.
Claude, instead, listened to the silence with his reserved, quiet breaths and Elliott’s rapid, airless breaths. Then, his resonant tenor rose into the dark.
“I was a senior elector twenty-five years before my son. I understand the resentment seeded within the prestige of its position. The envy it induces from the rest of the electors.” He unfolded something out of Elliott’s sight. An election paper. “Callum Han voted for the execution of my son.”
“Callum?–No–” Elliott fought to spill out the words between the tides of fright. “No. He didn’t. I told him to vote for him. It’s my fault.”
Claude was unconvinced, peering down at Elliott as though he were inconsequential.
“Callum Han voted for my son’s execution.
Then, he later ‘discovered’ my son’s desecrated body torched in fire.
He immolated my son for his position. Han is the rector’s new protégé, eclipsing my son’s entire life with his own.
That is what happened, do not lie to me. ”
“No. It’s all my fault. You don’t understand.” Elliott cried out. He felt trapped in a nightmare. “Callum didn’t do anything. He didn’t know anything. I swear–”
Claude Montclair gripped Elliott’s hair in one clenched hand.
In one thrust, he could’ve slit Elliott’s throat, however, Elliott was insignificant to him.
He didn’t want the scapegoat, he was tired of speaking with half-qualified law enforcement, he wanted the executioners that took his son from him.
He forced Elliott to gaze at the electoral paper with Callum’s signature and Lucien Montclair’s name written in his script.
“Lucien spoke to the electors about the cult.” Claude examined his reaction as the words registered within Elliott.
“There were rumors of a political cult. My son informed my wife that the son of High Commissioner Wilde was a part of the cult, and then he was killed. She’s convinced James Wilde had him killed.
However, I attained verified evidence of the real murderer.
The cult colluded with Callum Han in the death of my son.
Callum Han has been named the senior elector in his death.
He has been bestowed my son’s position as the rector’s protégé after he followed through on his assassination.
That is why you have been allowed to return under the false narrative that he was willing. You are obscuring the real culprit.”
Abruptly, there was a commotion at Elliott’s door. A body lurched forward in violent movement.
Callum Han was tied at the wrists, bound by thick hemp rope, bleeding from his head beneath buck antlers. As though he were the honorarium for the winter solstice.
His eyes were livid.
His corneas were stakes of wrath aimed at Claude Montclair.
Ill-acclimated to the dark, Claude was withered and furious, his eyes strained from the hours, weeks, and months reading over every report, examining every young man’s lineage involved, ferociously researching the conclusions of what might’ve happened to his son in papers, journals, record books.
He squinted with poor eye sight at the figure hurling itself at him.
Callum rammed Claude’s forehead with his own. Their faces collided. Blood spurted from Claude’s hammered nose.
Callum bulled into Claude with the fury of a man forcibly put in bondage. Bound in his sleep. Elliott rushed in between them.
“Wait!–Stop–This is my fault–”
Callum shoved Elliott back. “Stay out of the way, Elliott. He came to kill me.”
Callum was restricted with his hands, profusely bleeding down his throat, his blood retted through his Ralph Lauren pajama shirt and his boxers. His bare feet trampled the papers and summer shorts on the ground. He searched for weapons in Elliott’s room–but Elliott had none.
Not even a baseball bat.
“Why don’t you have anything to defend yourself with in your room?” Callum demanded. Elliott couldn’t even trust himself with a pair of keys. But he couldn’t bring himself to mention that.
Futilely, Elliott tried to stand his ground between the men.
“Enough. There’s no need for any of this. I am the one at fault.”
Claude lunged at him, and though Callum didn’t have a murderer’s instinct, he had a young man’s fighting strength. He shouldered him into the hard walls.
“Meurtrier.” Claude battered him with his calloused fists. He missed half of his punches without his spectacles, one of his fists struck a lighting fixture, but he managed to overwhelm the younger man.
“I never killed your son!” Callum shouted with a vein pulsing in his forehead.
A bruise was forming where he’d thrust his head against Claude’s head.
He exchanged blows with the beast on top of him.
“I found his body. He’s lucky I even went out into the snowstorm to look for him!
–Honnêtement, il valait mieux qu’il soit mort! ”
“Ferme ta gueule!” Consumed with anger, Claude’s hands went for Callum’s throat, and Elliott snapped. A memory electrocuted him.
A synapse in his brain triggered him.
Elliott clasped the hefty íkaros statue in his sweaty grip and he struck Claude over the temple. Before Claude could end Callum’s life in strangulation.
As Claude groped the walls, in and out of consciousness, Elliott freed Callum, quickly untying him.
Callum immediately tied Claude, tethering his wrists, fastening the knots as tightly as he could.
Elliott hadn’t hit him hard enough to pierce the cranium or kill him.
He’d struck him with the sculpted wings, cracking it apart.
In a few moments, Claude would be back on his feet, riled than ever before.
Callum ordered Elliott not to telephone the paramedics.
“Don’t call the paramedics?”
“Don’t telephone the police either,” Callum commanded.
“Don’t alert anyone. That’s what he wants.
He wants us to sue him for criminal charges in court.
His lawyers will treat the lawsuit as a homicide trial instead.
Take photographs of everything. If his family wants a media circus, we’ll give them the scandal of the year, if they come after us again. ”
Callum’s mother was the mayor of New Haven.
“Why did he even think it was me that killed him?” Callum panted, hard, for air.
He’d been ambushed and roped with the expectation that Claude would return with Elliott to bear witness to the death of his son’s murderer.
He expected to be told exactly what transpired with his son, lest Elliott be next.
Elliott tried to feed air into his panicking lungs. “The vote.”
Callum’s eyes fell on the paper and he cursed underneath his breath.
“I never thought anyone would see my vote. It was supposed to be locked.”
That meant someone unlocked the private election votes.
Someone had sabotaged them.
The truth spilled out of Elliott. “I really thought you voted for me.”
“You thought I voted for you over Lucien?” Callum grasped Claude beneath the arms while he was still unconscious, tasking Elliott with grasping his ankles and, together, they hauled him out like yard trash to his luxury vehicle.
“I wanted to be the senior elector. I deserved it more than Lucien–I speak six languages, I am the superior student, and I fraternized better with the rest of the electors. What would voting for you achieve for me?”
“You and Valeria didn’t vote for me then?”
The aversion crossed Callum’s expression.
“Valeria was a victim of the old rector; she saw remnants of him inside of Lucien.” Callum hadn’t deliberated with her in the isolated voting chamber, but he was confident Valeria kept her word.
“She didn’t want him to rise to federal power. She voted first.”
Elliott’s heart sunk for her. Elliott grunted in effort, lifting Claude down the steps of Winterthur Hall. “You mentioned I was ‘too late’ when I struck a deal with Lucien.”
Dumping Claude inside the trunk, Callum bent over to catch his breath. “You came to the electoral chamber an hour after the votes were signed and deposited. You couldn’t have possibly been able to sway any votes anymore. It was finished.”
Sickened with the knowledge he devoured a putrid, rotted boar’s corpse, choking its grist and flesh down his throat, for nothing other than Lucien’s vindictive nature, Elliott nearly collapsed. “You already knew I was the honorarium by then?” Callum didn’t warn him?
Callum shook his head, straightening himself on his feet. “No. Not even Lucien knew until the ceremony commenced. No one is meant to know who voted for whom. That vitiates the sanctity of the trust of electors.”
For good measure, Callum smothered his own blood on Elliott, snapping a few photos with a camera. It was a miracle Elliott wasn’t hurt.
“Thank you for helping me, Callum.”
“Don’t mention it.”
After a quick phone call with his mother, where she sharply sent a private security detail to the College, only then did Callum take the keys of the Jaguar and throw it into the millpond.