Kit had been scared for his life before. When he was around twelve, he’d fallen foul of a few older kids who’d threatened him with a knife for his meagre lunch money. Another time, a few years ago, he’d gone to a party up an embankment, drunk far too much vodka, and ended up almost being flattened on the train tracks when he’d staggered the wrong way home. And then there were the half-dozen occasions where he believed his dad would hit him too hard, or make good on his threats to finish him off with a smashed beer bottle. Not like Kit would have even been the first kid on the estate to die at a parent’s hands.
On every single one of those occasions, Kit had feared for his life. But none of them compared to now, sitting in the car going fuck-knew-where with this unhinged man who controlled not only Kit’s body, but his mind without even lifting a finger.
The man hummed. Kit risked a glance over at him. One of the man’s sharp—toosharp—canines poked out of his mouth and rested on his plump lower lip. Kit looked away again, out of the window, the lights a blur through his tear-stained eyelashes.
The humming turned to something close to singing, the man making the tune sound both beautiful and haunting all at the same time.
“Do you know this song?” the man asked, breaking off mid-hum and jarring Kit as he contemplated throwing himself out of the moving car.
Kit shook his head, not daring to speak.
“I suppose you wouldn’t. It’s Chopin. Opus nine, number two,” the man added, as if Kit would know the difference. Still, he resented the implication that classical music lay beyond his knowledge. Kit was far from cultured, but he wasn’t wilfully uneducated like many of his peers. Music at his school, however,involved thirty pupils all blowing on recorders, creating a symphony of tuneless toots that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a nursery school.
“I’ll just have to teach you,” the man continued. “It is such a treat to mould young minds.”
Kit swallowed bile. “Are you going to tell me your name?”
“Lawrence Weston. You should call me Sir, however.”
“Sir?” Kit repeated, incredulous.Sirwas for teachers when you were getting told off, for the shopkeepers when you were trying to get away with lifting something, or for the policemen when they came poking around the estate.Sirwas not for strange men who bundled you into cars and drove off like they owned you.
“Yes,” Lawrence said. “Manners are important, Christopher. You should always use the correct honorific when addressing your betters.”
“It’s Kit. Not Christopher.” He didn’t bother arguing about Lawrence being his better. That would be pointless to take issue with, but Kit’s name was important to him.
“I like Christopher better. It’s more traditional.”
“But that’s not my name.”
“Yes, it is.”
Lawrence didn’t seem open to further discussion on the matter, but Kit wasn’t finished. “You can’t just decide what to call me.”
“I think you’ll find, Christopher, that I can do what I like.”
Kit took a ragged breath as he tried to stop himself from retorting. People had tried over the years to temper his biting tongue, but he wasn’t in the habit of letting others control him. “If you’re deciding what I’m going to call you,Sir, then it’s polite to let me decide my own name.”
Lawrence’s gaze was assessing. “Give me your hand.”
Kit’s hand moved as if of its own accord, stretching over to Lawrence in the driver’s seat. Lawrence took hold of his index finger and bent it backwards, the snap of bone shocking in the silence.
Lawrence’s next command had Kit’s scream dying in his throat. “No noise now. I don’t want to deal with hysterics.”
Kit took his hand back, cradling his broken finger to his chest. Even the slightest movement sent spikes of pain up through his arm. Whatever Lawrence was, he’d snapped Kit’s finger as easily as a toothpick.
“I can hear your heart beating rather fast,” Lawrence observed.
Kit decided not to focus on how Lawrence could hear such a thing. “It hurts,” he gritted out.
“I’d imagine so.”
Kit had many things that he wanted to call Lawrence. Instead, he closed his eyes and willed his panic to recede.
They drove for an indeterminate amount of time. Kit’s finger throbbed, and he whimpered as he attempted to move it into its correct position.
Hours later, if the paling sky was anything to judge by, Lawrence pulled up to a large house at the end of a winding country road. “Come,” he said.
Kit made it out of the car on wobbly legs, trembling all over, and not because of the chill in the early-morning air. He’d been awake for so long that his eyes itched with tiredness, and his stomach gurgled with hunger. His shoes crunched on the gravel underfoot before Lawrence led him up the stairs to the front door.
