“I wish I could blame the alcohol. But that wasn’t it. She liked being cruel. She was calculating about it. Methodical.” Thomas was suddenly looking him dead in the eye. “You know what that does to a child, right? We’ve seen it again and again. That attachment disorder. It warps children somehow. I was no exception.”
Aiden’s heartbeat tripped. He didn’t know if the sudden heat flooding his system was over Thomas’s mother’s cruelty or because Thomas seemed to be implying he was warped somehow. Had Thomas actually killed his parents? Had he actually committed the crime this random stranger accused him of? Aiden couldn’t blame him for snapping at his parents, but his siblings? It couldn’t be. Thomas would never kill children, even if he was a child himself. He just couldn’t. Was that why this was so hard for him? Had Aiden spent the last two decades in love with a true psychopath?
He shook the thought away. “What about your father? Why didn’t he step in?”
Thomas shrugged in a way that was so unlike him that it spooked Aiden, ignoring his question to say, almost to himself, “Maybe because it worked? I did whatever they wanted, made as few mistakes as possible, became their perfect child. I just hated myself. I hated them, too. I wish they would have just hit me. That was quick. Efficient even.”
Thomas jerked to his feet then and, for a split second, Aiden thought he was going to leave, but he just started pacing the kitchen island as Aiden had earlier.
“It got worse as I got older. When I didn’t need hugs or affection, my parents had to get more creative with their punishments.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Aiden ground out before he could stop himself.
“It means they had to deprive me of my own right to exist. I didn’t think there was anything worse than my own parents looking through me, but I was wrong. Do you know what it’s like to have a household staff of thirty treat you like a ghost? To not even be able to acknowledge your existence? To ignore you completely, even if you’re crying? Even if you’re bleeding? It’s maddening. It makes you feel crazy. And my parents knew it.”
Thomas stopped pacing, once more looking at Aiden. “I’m not telling you all of this for sympathy. I am not trying to get you to excuse their deaths. I know other people had it worse. I need you to know that.”
Aiden blinked in surprise. How often had someone said that to Thomas? That others had it worse? Aiden knew what it was like to be ignored, forgotten in his own home, but to have the entire world treat you as if you didn’t exist? To ignore you when you’re standing right in front of them? That would be a special kind of hell…especially for a child.
Thomas leaned against the counter, crossing his legs at the ankles and his arms over his chest, like he was trying to close himself off, to distance himself from his past. “If they had treated us all the same, maybe it would have been bearable. We could have been—I don’t know—allies? But when the twins came along…they doted on them. Loved them. Cared for them. Denied them nothing.” Thomas shook his head. “It just didn’t make any logical sense to me.”
Aiden’s heart squeezed as he imagined Thomas as a child, trying to rationalize his own abuse while his siblings got everything. There was no rational explanation for something like that, but children didn’t know that. But Thomas’s parents had known it. They’d exploited it. It was sick and twisted and punishable by death based on Thomas’s code alone.
“I thought my acceptance to the international boarding school would be my escape, but it was just a brand new form of torment. There were kids of all ages, but those who were my age were in eighth grade. I was already taking advanced college-level classes. My peers were much older. And unlike my old school, everybody was the child of someone with money, power, and status, so I’d lost my only advantage.
“Like August, I was thirteen taking classes with eighteen to nineteen-year-olds who resented the fuck out of me. But unlike August, I very much cared about the opinions of others. The school work was easy. The social aspect was a nightmare. I wasn’t bullied, but I was, once again, ignored.” Thomas resumed his pacing. “Except for Shane.”
“Your cousin.”
“For all intents and purposes, yes. But not by blood. His mother married my uncle on my mother’s side when Shane was fourteen. We never even spoke until I started school there. He was already attending. His mom was an heiress in her own right. He was fifteen when I got there but already a star. Junior varsity team captain. Straight A student. Bleached his hair blond and wore it just long enough to annoy the teachers.” Thomas gave a grimace that might have been his attempt at a smile. “I thought he was so cool.”
A hornet’s nest kicked up in Aiden’s stomach at the way Thomas spoke of this boy. This dead boy. Shane. His cousin. But they weren’t cousins. They weren’t blood-related and something about the look on Thomas’s face made Aiden want to punch something.
“So, you and Shane were…friends?” he asked, voice strained.
Thomas gave a rough laugh. “I thought so. But looking back, it was more…hero worship on my part. At least, at first. Shane McAvoy, soccer star, wanted to be friends with the school freak. Should have been my first clue something was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Mm,” Thomas said. “What fifteen-year-old wants to forsake his cool friends to hang out with a nerdy thirteen-year-old who has no friends? At least without having hidden ulterior motives.”
Aiden sat forward. “And what were Shane’s ulterior motives?”
Thomas didn’t answer, just stared out the window like he was caught up in a memory.
“Tommy, what were Shane’s ulterior motives?” Aiden asked, the name slipping out for the second time that morning.
Thomas blinked at him. “Can we be done for today?” He gave him a tight smile. “There’s a reason therapy sessions only last an hour. I’m…I’m going to go shower.”
He didn’t give Aiden a chance to confirm or refuse, just turned and left the room. Aiden listened as he took the stairs at a run, then as his heavy footsteps moved about the upstairs. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, rehashing everything Thomas said to him before his curiosity got the better of him and he headed to the study.
Once he sat at the desk, he opened his laptop and rewatched the video Thomas had received, freezing it on Shane’s corpse. There was no face. But by process of elimination, it had to be him. All the others had remained intact, but it was clear Shane’s skull had been obliterated, likely with a bullet. That made him the anomaly.
All the others had died of strangulation. Up close and personal. But not Shane. Shane, who’d possibly had ulterior motives. At first glance, a bullet seemed impersonal, efficient. But this wasn’t just a bullet. This was a shotgun blast. There was nothing left. Whoever had done this to the kid had wanted to make them disappear in every conceivable way. Just him.
Why? Did Thomas know? Had Thomas done it? Had he pressed a shotgun barrel to his forehead and pulled the trigger?
Aiden closed out the video and opened his browser window, suddenly desperate to know what Shane had looked like before someone had tried to erase him from existence. It took a moment to find Shane’s mother, but once he did, he found his date of birth easily enough.
