Maybe this man will be on the pyre too.
He studies me, and I, him. In the pale morning light streaming in from down the hall, curving under the gauzy partition, he looks older than he ever has to me. Or maybe I am seeing him for what he really is: Weak. Not in stature, but mind.
He bowed to his megalomaniacal son.
He started this all.
I will not forgive him.
“You can try, Princess. But I confessed upfront I was fascinated with Gates. The ways he created the possibility in my mind that I could do all this,” he gestures vaguely, “forever.”
“That’s not enough for me. You had a hard-on for a serial killer, fine. You are the reason Stein Rule is—was,” I amend with relish, “a psychopath. Cool.” I lift my fingers, brushing it all off. “But I want more details. You said you readThe Scientist.We all have weird kinks, so that’s understandable. You say your grandfather bought the original hotel from Gates’s descendants, but what else? I wanteverything.”
He is quiet for a moment as he stares at me. I wonder if the news I just indirectly delivered of his son’s death affects him at all. Does he care? Or is it unsurprising? Did he ever have any fondness for Stein? For Sullen, when he snaked his way into helping us down in those tunnels? Or was it all always a game?
That is what I want to find out. My monster deserves the truth, if he ever wants to hear it.
Now I watch as Sanford calculates his next trick.
“I foundThe Scientistin a stack of my father’s books. He left them in piles, haphazard.” He shrugs. “I was fifteen. My father loved to beat my mother, and almost as much, he enjoyed ignoring me. Most days, he acted as if I did not exist. Sometimes, if I was lucky,” he says the last word bitterly, “he would throw out an impossible question. Some bit of worldly trivia my schooling never gave me an answer to, and he knew it.” His eyes meet mine. Deep brown. Scattered amber. The same as Sullen, yet nothing like him, either. He folds his hands in his lap, squeezing his opposite wrists with each. “Gates wrote in a lofty language. He wrote like my father spoke, really. That alone endeared him to me. As much as I grew to loathe my father, I wanted his attention.” His eyes seem to shine. “I wanted to make him proud of me.”
Pathetic.But I don’t speak.
“I thought if I memorized his vocabulary, I could speak in a love language my father understood. But turns out, he did not care for Gates ashisfather had. It was no matter, because I began to. I don’t expect you to share mykink,as you said, but he believed the body could be changed at will. For someone who was small at the time, helpless against my mother’s beatings, this appealed to me.”
“Did Gates say if he ever achieved immortality?” I let the condescension drip from my tone, because the man is dead.
Sanford smiles at me as if he hates me. “You are not here to be a disciple of Gates. You are here because you want to know what made my son follow this path. The origin story, as it were, of all the family trauma.”
“No.” I grin at him, and Idohate him. “I am here for Sullen.” My voice almost breaks on his name.
Almost.
A flicker of emotion twitches in Sanford’s face. It feels as if I have been training my whole life to read feelings, because Sullen cannot speak of his grief, and Writhe hides murder behind a smile. I am an excellent interpreter.
It is not guilt Sanford feels. He is not sorry.
Agitated, I think, that all of Sullen’s trauma comes back to this moment, andIlove Sullen so fiercely, I will murder Sanford for it. He recognizes his own death’s arrival now, doesn’t he?
“Did you or did you not know what Stein was doing to Sullen?” The calmness in my words is alien to me. “You say you could not escape from beneath the hotel. That you were trapped after you tried to warn Mercy. But you know too many things you shouldn’t. You know,” I shrug in a gesture of mock innocence, “for a prisoner.”
He stares at me but doesn’t speak.
“Because you never were trapped, were you?” Anger burns bright in my chest and the calm recedes. “There was a part ofyou, was there not, which thoughtyoucould still be the one to achieve immortality? To own Writhe, claw your way back to being the leader? That maybe through Stein’swork,”my lip curls, “on Sullen, you could benefit, too. So you waited.”
“Stein is the one who put his hands on the boy?—”
“Only because you were the worst kind of coward.” I cut him off. “You let him do the dirty work.” I do not know how I keep my voice level, but I manage it, just barely.
I am not sure either of us are breathing as our gazes stay locked.
“You are much more clever than I ever gave you credit for.” He smiles, but it is mocking. “Blonde and sobeautiful.”His eyes drop over my frame. “How he ever got you, I do not know. I certainly never factored you in, before. Although it’s good you came along, because without you, the experiments could never be complete.”
I want to tear him apart.
He meets my gaze again. “What did my son do to you in the basement of this house?” He is trying to goad me. “I hoped to participate. It’s true, that I wanted to lure everyone here, but maybe I could still try it out?”
Once, this tactic would have worked, but I am forever changed. He helped make me that way. “Did you give Alivia and Maude what they need? Whatweneed?” I know the answer.
