I do not move. I am sitting on the edge of the plush white linen sofa, my back ramrod straight, my bare feet planted firmly against the cold stone floor. The oversized black dress shirt I am wearing feels like a shroud made of lead. My heart is not beating; it is executing a violent, erratic thrashing against my ribs, a trapped bird desperately trying to break through bone and flesh to escape the horrifying reality of this room.
My mother.
Evelyn Vance died in a horrific, single-car accident when I was fourteen years old. The police report stated that her brakes failed on a steep, winding mountain road during a torrential downpourin upstate New York. I remember the funeral. I remember the paralyzing, numbing grief. I remember the heavy, dark rain.
And now, with a sickening, violent lurch of my memory, I remember a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette standing at the very edge of the cemetery, completely hidden in the shadows of the ancient oak trees, watching me weep over her grave.
"Sybil."
Thayer’s voice is a low, demonic vibration that completely shatters the silence. It lacks the gentle, worshipful velvet he had bathed me in just hours ago. It is the cold, absolute roar of a predator whose ultimate secret has just been dragged into the light.
I do not look at him. I stare blankly at the ruined plastic and sparking wires of the console.
"What did he mean?" I whisper. The sound is a fragile, broken reed, completely devoid of moisture. It barely scrapes past the tight, agonizing knot in my throat.
I hear the heavy, slow slide of his bare feet against the stone. He is walking toward me. The immense, burning heat of his massive body precedes him, a terrifying gravitational pull that makes the tiny hairs on my arms stand straight up.
"Look at me," he commands.
"No," I gasp, my hands flying up to grip my own knees, my knuckles turning bone-white. The nausea is a violent, churning wave in my stomach. "Tell me what Castiglione meant, Thayer. Right now."
He stops exactly two feet in front of me. I can see the heavy, dark outline of his massive torso in the shadows, the stark whitebandages wrapping his chest, the ruined, bloody state of his left shoulder.
"Your mother was going to take you away from me," Thayer states.
The words are entirely flat. They contain absolutely no remorse, no hesitation, no guilt. It is a clinical, sociopathic statement of fact.
The air completely evacuates my lungs. The world tilts violently on its axis, sending a rush of dark, fuzzy static to the edges of my vision.
"Take me away?" I choke out, violently shaking my head, completely unable to process the sheer depravity of his confession. "I was fourteen years old! I didn't even know you existed! How could she take me away from you?"
"She found the surveillance files," Thayer murmurs, dropping to his knees on the stone floor directly in front of me. He ignores the agonizing groan of his torn shoulder. He reaches out, his massive, calloused hands gripping my trembling thighs, pinning my legs in place. "Arthur was a careless, arrogant fool, but Evelyn was observant. She caught one of my men rotating out of a watch post near your private school. She hired a private investigator. She found out that the Don of the Thorne Syndicate was obsessively tracking her daughter."
My breath comes in short, jagged, hyperventilating gasps. I stare down into his pale, glacial gray eyes. They are entirely black in the darkness, burning with a psychotic, uncompromising intensity.
"She confronted Arthur," Thayer continues, his thumbs digging brutally into my flesh. "She threatened to go to the FBI. She had entirely secretly enrolled you in a highly secure, anonymousboarding school in Switzerland. She bought plane tickets. She was going to put you on a flight the very next morning, and she was going to bury my name in a federal indictment to ensure I could never follow you."
"She was protecting me," I sob, hot, scalding tears finally breaching my lashes to pour down my cheeks. "She was my mother, Thayer. She was trying to save me from a stalker."
"She was trying to steal what belonged to me," Thayer snarls, the volume of his voice violently escalating, entirely filling the cavernous villa. He leans forward, his hot, feverish breath washing over my face. "I had already claimed you, Sybil. The moment I saw you at the top of those stairs, your fate was entirely sealed to mine. I was not going to let a desperate housewife put an ocean between us."
"So you killed her," I whisper, the devastating, absolute truth tasting like battery acid on my tongue. "You cut the brake lines of her car."
"I ordered the hit," he corrects smoothly, completely unapologetic. "And I stood at her grave and watched you cry, and I swore to myself that I would spend the rest of my life ensuring that no one would ever be able to hurt you or take you away from me again."
The cognitive dissonance completely fractures my mind into a million jagged, bleeding pieces.
He didn't just save me from my father. He orchestrated the complete destruction of my entire family. He murdered the only person who truly loved me, simply because she recognized the monster lurking in the shadows. My entire life, my grief, my isolation—it was all a meticulously designed, terrifyingly flawless terrarium built by a psychopath.
A visceral, uncontrollable surge of pure, unadulterated revulsion rips entirely through my nervous system.
"Don't touch me!" I scream.
The sound is a raw, feral shriek of absolute agony. I throw my hands forward, slamming my palms violently against his uninjured right shoulder.
The sudden, aggressive physical rejection completely catches him off guard. He is exhausted, burning with fever, and bleeding. The shove knocks him backward, breaking his iron grip on my thighs.
I do not wait for him to recover.
