A shadow in my face.
It leaps for me.
I open my mouth but don’t scream. Don’t raise the knife.
The form doesn’t land on me. Cosmo’s hand forcefully releases me and I stagger forward a few steps as I turn around, only to see the shadow of Cosmo’s head collide with the opposite wall at the exact moment the door is slammed shut.
Then Cosmo starts to scream.
One day, I will want to remember how this all began. I will read it in fondness, or I will weep over all I have lost.
One day, we will not be gods anymore. Because we are that, even if Stein cannot see it. He does not realize all we have. All we are. Wealthy, educated, cunning.
It will all slip through our fingers either by grave or by might.
I should document it while I can.
Start at the beginning, I suppose.
I met Stein in prep school.
He feared his father, even then.
Chapter 25
Sullen
Something clatters to the floor as Cosmo’s shrill cry bursts through my ears. I feel him wriggling beneath me a moment before light cascades around the room.
My room.
My throat is tight, thinking of the mess I left behind. Stein employed housekeepers to clean Haunt Muren, but neverhere.Any disgrace I made—never from my own doing, but usually because Stein had trouble thinking up more deplorable ways to shame me than watching me piss in a corner when I could not hold it anymore and the door to my bathroom was padlocked shut with a key only he possessed—I was forced to live with. I did what I could with household cleaners but if I was ever caught with them in hand, well, to say I know the taste of bleach just as well as formalin is an understatement.
Every possible warped hardwood of my floor from my own urine, each stain of blood along the white walls, my crumpled bedsheets—never touched with detergent—it all blares bright inside my mind as I close my eyes tight, my bare fingers digging into Cosmo’s neck as he grips my shoulders, attempting to push me off.
She will see it all.
Worse, she will seeme.
In my desperation, I jerk Cosmo forward only to slam him back against the wall, the resoundingthudnot enough to satisfy me.
I will break his skull.
I will ensure he does not speak or walk orcrawlever again.
He did this to me, a gun to my head, all as Sanford Rule watched.
The irony of it is I would usually not mind dying. A gun was never a good deterrent for me before. But thinking of Cosmo alone in this house with Karia… Some people, I am slowly finding, are worth staying alive for.
My entire body feels as if it is made of flames. The resounding ache along my shoulder blade from stabbing Stein’s guard has burnt to embers, too.
She is watching me.
She will loathe me.
She will regret ever letting herself touch me the way she did in Dreary.
No one has ever looked upon my naked body with anything but repulsion. Not Stein, nor his personal doctor. Not his guards, gathered around to laugh at his latest extractment of skin from the inside of my thigh. There is no one who has cast a kind eye on me since my mother died.
