by L.J. Shen
I parked at the fringe of the neighborhood, where the houses kissed the woods, took out what Hunter had gotten for me, and walked the rest of the way to Harry’s house. Rather than open the door with the key I’d gotten my hands on, I jabbed my elbow through one of the windows, making it look like burglary. I stepped through the shards of glass, a replica of Tutankhamun’s Death Mask on my face and shoulders—the mask my friends had brought from the US—gloves on my hands, and my weapon dangling from my fingertips.
Harry was standing in the hallway, surrounded by three suitcases.
“Christ!” he yelped, immediately backing himself against the wall.
He was such easy prey. If I hadn’t been so young, so impressionable, and such a fuck-up, maybe all of this could have been prevented when I was a kid.
Maybe I could be with Lenora now the way I wanted to.
Maybe I’d have a future that wasn’t all bleak.
“Vaughn?” he asked. “Is that you? How did you get your hands on that mask? This is… Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“God’s not going to save you.” I tsked, well aware of how creepy I looked with the mask.
This was one for the fucking books. If nothing else, the great Harry Fairhurst, creator of the most human-like eyes in the history of art, was going to go out in style.
“What is in your hand?” he gasped, wincing visibly. “God, I don’t want to die. Vaughn, I was young. I did some horrible things, but I…I…stopped. You know I did. You saw me with Dominic Maple. I haven’t done those other things in nearly five years.”
I lifted the khopesh—an Egyptian sickle-sword—examining it from all angles. I’d forged it myself in my cellar afterhours. It took me weeks to get it just right. It was small and sharp. I looked down, examining it through the slits my mask provided, feeling hot and sweaty under it.
“Let’s talk about the heartless prince,” I said with a calm I couldn’t really feel. Not killing him wasn’t an option. This was what I’d been waiting for since I was eight. But it wasn’t as climactic as I’d thought it would be.
He was sweating and shaking, his back against the wall, but seeing his fear didn’t bring me as much pleasure as seeing Len’s face when she opened the door for me.
Harry pissed his pants just then. He couldn’t even cover it, because one of his hands was stretched up, begging me not to hurt him, while the other was still in a cast and a sling. Also my doing.
“I just said some things. I didn’t mean them…” he started.
“Remember our conversation that day?” I strode to him purposefully, ignoring his words. “Because I do, very damn well. According to one researcher, the death mask was originally intended for someone else, not the young prince. The artistic accuracy and skill is so precise, people find it hard to believe it was made in such a rush.” I took another step, watching him collapse on the floor, against the wall. “They think it was intended for his stepmother, Queen Neferneferuaten. So really, it was someone else who should have died and put on a mask.”
I carefully removed the mask from my face, waiting for the sick pleasure to kick in.
But it wasn’t there.
I went through the motions, cradling the mask against my waist. My hair stuck to my forehead, and when I looked down and saw Harry weeping, all I wanted to do was kick his face, turn around, and go straight back to Lenora.
It was frustrating as shit, because there was nothing I craved more than to be present in this moment, which I had planned for over a decade.
I put the mask on his face, and he was so scared, he didn’t even try to struggle. With his face covered, he squeezed his eyes shut, sobbing, in hysterics.
“Please. I know you’re not a murderer. Please, Vaughn, please.”
I stared at him, clutching my weapon, turned off by the idea of slitting his throat and letting him bleed dry. I was going to make it look like burglary. I did have the perfect alibi.
“Lenora will loathe you,” he spat, trying another tactic.
“Lenora knows,” I corrected. “She understands me.”
He laughed humorlessly, shaking to the core. “That doesn’t mean she’d ever look at you the same way. You think she’d want to be touched by a murderer? Kissed by a cold-blooded killer? You think she’s going to marry one? Have his children? Do you think my sweet, beautiful niece is able to fall in love with the man who killed her uncle?”
When I remained silent, debating whether this question was even relevant, he took it as a sign of my weakness, regaining some of his confidence.
“We can make this all go away. I sucked your cock and came into your hand. Big fucking deal. I didn’t sodomize you. You didn’t fuck me. Other boys had it a lot worse, Vaughn, so stop being such a bitch about it. Let me go, and I promise to stay in Brunei for the remainder of my life. I have the means to sustain myself there.”
“You’ll just harass other boys.”
That was part of why I wanted to kill him. Not only because of all the things he did to me, but because of the prospect he might do them to others. He’d said he hadn’t touched an unwilling victim in five years. I had no reason to take his word for it.
“Can’t.” He shook his head in the mask violently, probably making himself dizzy. “Not in Brunei. I won’t even be able to have a relationship. It’s strict over there. They would kill me if they find out I’m gay.”
“You’re not gay; you’re a pedophile.”
“That’s illegal there all the same.” He didn’t try to deny it.
I knew it was stupid to stand here and listen to him. If he didn’t follow through with his promises, I was going to be in deep shit for attempted murder, no matter how solid my alibi was.
Besides, I wanted him dead.
I did.
I just didn’t want Lenora to be secretly appalled by me, and I didn’t understand why I cared so much. I knew she would understand, but I could already feel her disappointment everywhere. It scorched my skin.
It seemed like I couldn’t will my heart to stop wanting her any more than I could will it to stop beating. They had a word for what I was feeling, but I didn’t want to say it. Think it. Consider it.
Love. I was in love with Lenora Astalis. Had been from the goddamn get-go.
I’d offered her a brownie because I wanted to talk to her.
I’d followed her back to her room at Carlisle after she’d entered the darkroom because I wanted to thrust myself into her life with a dirty pact. A bargain. A silent contract.
I bullied her because I loved her.
I loved her because she was the only girl who looked at me and didn’t see money or status or violence or a heartless prince.
She saw me.
I took a step back. Harry saw it. I hated myself for choosing love over hate. I hated myself for fucking myself over, for not going through with it because of a pussy.
But she wasn’t just a pussy, was she?
“That’s it, lad. That’s it. Do the right thing.”
As he said it, the front door opened and closed behind me. I turned around, my eyes widening in horror when I saw who stood on the other side.
My father walked in, his face a blank mask of death.
“Vaughn, go back to Berkshire and call my PA on your way home. Tell her to get someone to come fix that window. Today,” he enunciated, his voice steadfast.
I jerked my chin up. “I don’t want you to interfe—” I started.
He plucked the weapon from my hand and pressed it to the base of my neck, exactly on my vein. “I don’t care what you want. Go.”
I did the thing I should have done when I was eight.
When I was ten.
When I was thirteen.
For the first time in my life, I let my father take care of me. Deal with my bullshit. Help me.
I closed the door behind me, shaking my head.
Family is destiny.
“You told my son he wouldn’t get the girl if he got revenge. Well, lucky me, I already got the girl.
I get to have both.”
I ate the distance between me and Harry Fairhurst in two steps, deliberately stepping on his fingertips. He arched his back, yelping. An injured animal. I removed the mask from his face so he could have a front-row seat to what I was about to do to him.
“Baron,” he whimpered, his face red, swollen, and blotchy with hysteria. “Thank God you’re here. Vaughn clearly needed a voice of reason.”
Nice try, motherfucker.
I crouched down, digging my heel into the fingers of his healthy hand and meeting his gaze. I heard them crack under my shiny loafers. As soon as he saw what was behind my eyes, his face turned from panicked to ashen. I wasn’t here to strike a deal or to relieve him of his destiny.
I was here to collect a debt.
Vengeance.
My son’s pride. My son’s life.
And it’s been long overdue.
“You can’t…you don’t know…p-people will…”
“Find out?” I finished the sentence for him sardonically, flicking his chin up and forcing him to hold my gaze. “Fat chance, considering you’re currently in the midst of committing suicide.”
“But I’m not…”
I grabbed him by his blond hair, cut expensively and touched up to disguise any grays, dragging him to his dining table and sitting him down. His skull and forehead were bright red. I plucked a grocery list notepad and a pen from next to the fridge and placed them on the table, grabbing the seat opposite him. My son’s dagger burned a hole in my hand.
“Start writing.”
Ten minutes later, his suicide letter was done. The handwriting was legit, and he got a nice incentive to play along, seeing as I gave him a deal he couldn’t refuse.
“Write the letter and go peacefully, swallowing a bunch of pills. Don’t write the letter and I slit your wrists in your bathtub and watch you bleed. Either way, you’ll be dead before dinnertime, and it will look like suicide. The awful, messy way or the peaceful way? Up to you.”
He chose the pills.
When he was done writing, he looked up from the notepad expectantly. His eyes were red, hollow, soulless. I tried not to think about what they’d seen when he was alone with my son. I tried not to think about a lot of things in that moment. My wife—my beautiful wife that I loved more than life itself, who gave meaning to my existence—liked Harry’s work, and I’d let him into my life. Into my house.
If she ever found out, she was going to kill him herself. Then fling herself off of a rooftop. I knew Emilia LeBlanc-Spencer better than she knew herself.
There was only one person she loved more than me.
Our son.
“Medicine cabinet?” I angled an eyebrow. I wasn’t prone to big speeches. I wanted to get it over with. I heard a truck parking outside the house, the sound of the vehicle automatically locking, and knew it was the glazier who’d come to fix the window. We had to slip away from the first floor quickly. Luckily, Fairhurst was too far gone inside his own head to notice potential help could be on the way.
“U-upstairs,” he stuttered. He smelled of piss and desperation.
Thank fuck. “Let’s rock n’ roll.”
The glazier walked in through the half-open door exactly a second after we went up the stairs. We slid into Harry’s en suite, and I locked the door behind us. Emptying the cabinet’s shelves, I grabbed everything at hand—paracetamols, aspirin, nefopam, ketamine (wasn’t sure what business that had being there, but I couldn’t complain. This shit could kill a horse with a bit of enthusiasm and the wrong quantities), and the usual variety of Xanax, Ativan, and other benzo drugs.
I emptied the pills across his gray marble counter and nodded toward them. “Any last words?”
“I…” he started.
“Kidding. I don’t give a fuck.”
“No, you don’t understand. I don’t have any water.” He side-eyed me with a pouty frown, the piss stain on his pants drying and stinking up the entire bathroom. I heard the guy downstairs whistling to himself, working quickly, and knew he had no idea we were upstairs. His invoice had no doubt already been paid by my PA. As far as he was concerned, he was all alone.
“You have a fucking sink in front of you,” I retorted.
“I do not drink tap water.”
“You’re about to die, you idiot.” I grabbed the back of his head and smashed it against the mirror above the sink, turning the tap on in the process. Blood trickled down his forehead when his head bobbed back up. The mirror in front of him was shattered.
“That’s seven years of bad luck. Your death couldn’t come at a timelier moment,” I chirped.
I began shoving pills into his mouth. I didn’t have time for this. I wanted to call my son and see that he was okay, talk to my wife and assure her everything was fine.
After his mouth was full of pills, I pushed his head under the water, forcing him to gulp down or choke up. I repeated the action three times, until I was sure he’d swallowed enough drugs to kill a Game of Thrones dragon. His bloodstream would soon be more contaminated than Chernobyl circa 1986.
When it was done and dealt with, Harry sat on the edge of his massive bathtub, clutching the edges to the point of white knuckles. I leaned against the sink, watching him die impatiently.
“So this is how it ends?” He looked around him, quietly stunned.
I crossed my arms. Expecting small talk from me after what he’d done was a fucking stretch.
“Ever wondered what it feels like?” He scrubbed his cheek absentmindedly. I don’t think he noticed his hand trembling. “Death, I mean?”
“No,” I answered. “I lived through it during my teenage years and most of my twenties. I know exactly what it feels like.”
“Do you believe in the afterlife?”
“No more than I believe in unicorns.” I stopped to think about it. “Actually, unicorns could potentially exist. Some dumb, millennial scientist is bound to fuck with a horse’s DNA and manage to get it to grow a horn and a pink, fluffy tail. Of course, you won’t be here to witness it. I’d send a picture, but sadly, USPS doesn’t deliver to hell.”
“I always thought…”
“Shh,” I pressed my index to my lips. “Your thoughts don’t interest me. You’re a pedophile. At least have the dignity to die silently.”
He was quiet for exactly two minutes, then spent the next ten minutes compulsively blabbing about his dark childhood—with his drunken father and MIA mother. I spent the next ten minutes flicking dirt from under my fingernails and checking the time on my BVLGARI. When the minute hand on my watch signaled it had been twenty minutes since the asshole gulped down a pharmacy, and I heard the truck downstairs disappearing in the distance, the glazier with it, I picked up Vaughn’s dagger.
“What are you doing?” Harry looked up from the floor, blinking. He looked so broken, a part of him was already dead. He’d accepted it. It surprised and frustrated me that it hadn’t happened yet.
“Turns out, the pills aren’t quite fast enough for my taste,” I said roughly, picking him up by his neck.
“You promised me you wouldn’t let me bleed out. We had a deal.”
I propped him back on the edge of the bathtub, grabbed his wrist, and cut a deep gash. He shifted his gaze from his wrist to his other arm—the one with the cast—mouth agape, eyes flaring with alarm.
I’d cut a gash that would drain his body of blood. And he couldn’t even try to stop it because my son had broken his other arm.
Poetic. Precise. Perfect.
“I did? Well, I don’t negotiate with child molesters, much less those who hurt my child. Have a nice death.” I gave his chest a shove, watching him collapse into his bathtub, jerking and convulsing like a fish out of water.
I seized his shaving razor through a towel to avoid leaving fingerprints, took out the blade and threw it into the bath, not bothering to close the door after me.
I felt heavier than when I’d walked in.
That’s how I knew I’d done righ
t by my son.
Some hours later, I parked in front of the cottage I’d rented downtown near Carlisle Castle. Vaughn wasn’t answering his phone, and I was ready to burn the world down. I’d shoulder a million deaths to protect him and Emilia. All I asked—all I fucking asked—was to know they were both okay at any given time.
I walked into the cottage, dropping the keys onto the rustic kitchen island that bled into the open-space interior, and spotted my wife sitting on the couch, cross-armed, fire in her peacock blue eyes.
She stood up and stormed toward me. I opened my mouth, my expression automatically easing at her sight.
“Sweetheart. I was going to—”
The slap came out of nowhere. It wasn’t the first time Emilia had slapped me. But this time, I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve it. Upon closer inspection, I could see she had tears in her eyes, dark circles beneath them, but the rest of her was as pale as a ghost.
“Baby…” My mouth fell open when she dropped to her knees, burying her face in her hands. I lowered myself to the floor as my mind caught up with her actions. The word no carved itself into every cell in my brain.
She couldn’t know.
I’d tossed the magazine, and she hadn’t been in touch with Harry lately.
“How could I be so stupid?” she wailed.
She knew.
“And how could you hide the magazine from me? What did you think was going to happen? God, I did this. I did this to my own son. How could he even look at me?” She sniffled. “I put a painting of his sad eyes in front of his room. I’m a monster.”
“You’re not a monster.” I scooped her into my arms on the floor, kissing her forehead, threading my fingers through her hair. “You’re the farthest thing from a monster. You heal monsters. You set their hearts on fire and make the bad shit perish. Vaughn loves you very much. I do, too. This is why we couldn’t tell you. And I only recently learned myself.”
“Is he okay?” Her question came out muffled.
