by L. C. Davis
“Alright, sweetie,” she called, clearly in her own little world. At least having a distraction would make her easier to live with. Admittedly, it hadn't been nearly as bad as I'd thought. So far.
“Oh, and one more thing,” she said.
I turned around, worried that she was going to confess another exploit. “Yes?”
“Making a mistake isn't a violation of trust,” she said in a rare moment of sincerity. “It's when you try to cover it up that the trust gets broken. If you're that worried about it, just tell Victor the truth. If he's worth the worrying, he'll understand.”
“Thanks,” I said, momentarily stunned by her poignancy. “I think I will.”
She smiled and gave a small wave before heading back down the stairs. I took a deep breath and made my way towards Victor's office. Hopefully Sarah was right. Hopefully this wouldn't be another in the endless string of times I had let Victor down.
23
I arrived to knock at Victor's door just as Maverick was coming out of his office. He ran into me but I managed to steady him. “Easy there,” I said, worried that his haste was caused by something that had happened in their meeting. I couldn't imagine Victor intentionally doing or saying anything to upset Maverick, but he could be cold at times and Maverick was the very definition of a sensitive soul.
When he looked up at me, there was a light in his eyes that I hadn't seen since the first time we'd met. His smile chased away my fears and he squeezed me tight with far more abandon than I would have expected for a human who just found out his friend was a vampire and a werewolf. “Hey! I was just going to come looking for you. Victor just gave me some great news.”
“Really?” I smiled. Whatever the news was, I was just happy to see him so happy. “About the curfew being lifted, you mean?”
“No! Well, yeah,” he said. “It's related. You remember how we were all locked in right after my master was killed, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” I said, taken off guard equally by the topic and by the nonchalant way he spoke of it. Especially since Brendan was the one who had killed Mr. Hall. There was also part of me that was saddened to hear my friend still refer to his abuser with such an undeserved title as master. Not that two months was nearly enough time to sort out the complex dynamics at play in their relationship, but somehow I had thought Steven's death and the passage of time would lessen his devotion a little.
“Between that and his family's objections, I wasn't able to attend the funeral or anything. Victor pulled some strings and arranged for me to have a small service and go visit his grave now that we're all allowed outside,” he said, his enthusiasm and tone mirroring that of a child discussing his Christmas plans.
“That's wonderful,” I said, trying to hide my hesitation while inwardly wondering what the hell Victor was thinking. It was a good thing I had vowed to stop questioning his judgment, because this would have been my undoing. “But I didn't think you were allowed out without supervision.”
“Oh, he offered to put up a mind block like yours,” said Maverick. “I agreed. I was kind of worried about it, but he was so gentle I didn't even feel a thing.”
“Yeah, Victor is very good at what he does,” I murmured. “That was nice of you to agree to it so readily.”
“It's the least I could do after you've all been so wonderful to me,” he said, smiling as he clasped my hand. “I see why you love it here so much. It's like a big family.”
“Yeah,” I said, covering his hand in mine. “A family you're part of now if you want to be, Mav.” A family that won't use you and treat you like garbage.
His smile glowed. Then something else occurred to him. “You'll be there, won't you? For the service, I mean.”
“Of course,” I said, startled that he felt like he had to ask.
“Well, I know you didn't like him so I just thought...” He trailed off, losing his enthusiasm for a moment. “Thank you. It would mean a lot to have you there. Victor is coming and he said your dad would probably want to come, too.” He glanced towards the stairs. “I'll let you go, I have to find Brendan.”
“He's probably still out with the others celebrating, but I know he was planning on seeing if you wanted to go out later,” I said carefully.
“Oh, darn. I wanted to invite him, but I'll just have to wait until later. Bye, Remus!” he waved, already halfway down the hall.
“Bye, Mav.” I waved back, mystified. Barely recovered from the macabre interaction, I knocked on Victor's office door and waited for permission before I entered.
“Aren't you supposed to be with Sebastian?” was his immediate response.
“Hi to you, too,” I muttered, walking over to his desk.
He gave me an apologetic smile and motioned for me to sit down. “What can I do for you, Remus?”
“For starters, you could try not talking to me like I'm just another member of the pack,” I pleaded.
“On Sebastian's days, you are just another member of the pack,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “What's troubling you?”
I sighed, realizing that any further argument was futile. “I ran into Mav on the way in and he told me about the funeral.”
“And you think I'm acting irresponsibly by enabling his unhealthy attachment to his abusive former master,” he said, summarizing the thoughts swirling around in my head.
“No,” I lied. “I wasn't thinking that exactly.”
He gave me a weary look. “I may not have finished my Ph.D., but I do have some knowledge of the way people work. Maverick's psyche has been a concern of mine ever since we took him into the house. Your father feels the same way. Considering the fact that taking him to a regular psychologist isn't an option—not that he would consent even if it was—I have every intention of asking his permission to work one-on-one with him to sort out some of his issues.”
He folded his reading glasses and tucked them into the pocket of his shirt. “Before we can begin any of that I have to earn his trust and he needs to have a sense of closure about Steven's death. That awful night aside, he never even got the chance to see the body and I don't think he's fully processed that Steven isn't with us anymore. Every culture around the world has burial rites for a reason, you know. Grief is a journey, but sometimes people get stuck at the front door.”
“Oh,” I murmured, feeling like an idiot for judging without knowing his reasons. I had always considered myself a smart person, at least in an academic sense, but I often found myself questioning that around Victor—especially now that he was treating me like one of the pack. No wonder they were all so intimidated by him. “I guess you're right. I'm sorry.”
“Never apologize for worrying about a friend's wellbeing. Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No,” I said, squirming awkwardly. I felt like I was a student sitting in my professor's office after being called out for asking a bullshit question in class. The scenario wasn't as fun as all the fantasies implied. “Oh, wait. Um, yeah,” I said, recalling my conversation with Sarah. “I do have something to, uh, confess, I guess.”
“A confession?” The word had triggered something and I had his undivided attention all of a sudden. He seemed almost hopeful. “Go ahead.”
“Um, it's about the mind block that keeps me from leaving,” I said, testing the waters.
Instant disappointment. “Oh. What, you'd like me to remove it?”
“No, It's not that. Sarah already removed it or at least knocked it loose when she was in my head. Today, Brendan and the other guys were going out to celebrate and they asked if I wanted to watch them shift.” The words just tumbled out once I started explaining. “I went without even thinking. It wasn't until I was back at the Lodge that I realized what had happened and confronted Sarah about it.”
I took a deep breath once I had finished. It was so freeing to have the words off my chest rather than strangling me with guilt. I could still turn it off if I really wanted to, but after living so long without the emotion I had
started to see it as a guiding star. Whether Victor was angry at me or not had ceased to matter. At least he knew the truth.
“I see,” he said after a moment of silence. “Thank you for telling me.”
“You're not angry?” I asked in disbelief.
He frowned. “Of course not. I'm a bit perturbed with Sarah, but I can't say I'm surprised. I'm mostly upset with myself for not checking.”
I glanced at the door. “Sebastian is probably going to want to go out soon. If you don't have time to put the block back, I can tell him we need to wait.”
“Don't be silly, it hardly takes any time at all.” He hesitated. “Anyway, your telling me is proof that you've changed a lot these past couple of months. You could have kept it to yourself, but you didn't. That shows that I can trust you.”
My heart swelled with his praise. “Thank you, Victor.”
He grew somber again and leaned back. “Unfortunately, I can't trust you to follow through with our other agreement.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, perplexed. “I've been doing everything you said. I haven't missed a date with Sebastian, and you and I are still sleeping in separate rooms.”
“Yes, you're following the instructions to the letter and missing the point of the exercise entirely,” he muttered, looking away.
“What do you want from me?” I asked in frustration. “It's like you won't be satisfied until I fall in love with him.”
“Because you're already in love with him, goddammit!” he yelled, slamming his fist on the desk. The impact made me jump and upset a small pendulum that sat next to a stack of dark green file folders on his desk. He raked a hand through his slicked black hair and took a moment to collect himself. “I thought once your wolf was free, you'd stop repressing your feelings for him, but it's clear that isn't the case. Ever since you bit him, you've been fighting them harder than ever.”
I groaned in exasperation. “What do you want me to say, Victor? I've done everything you asked. I can't change the way I feel.”
“No,” he murmured, getting a dangerous look in his eye. “But I can.”
“Victor,” I said warily, rising from my chair. “Don't even go there.”
He stood and approached me like an animal cornering its prey, his eyes filled with self-defeating intent. “I'm sorry, but you've left me with no choice. You're too loyal,” he said with a dry laugh. “I had hoped that bringing out your wolf side would be enough, but obviously I'm still inside your head somehow. I've tampered with your brain too much. Just like Sarah was able to manipulate you without using her power, I'm manipulating your feelings without even realizing it.”
I stepped back all the while he spoke and he kept moving closer. I probably could have outrun him, but taking that first step would have meant acknowledging that, for the first time since we had met, I was truly afraid of him. Fear had never been an emotion Victor was capable of eliciting from me, even when my common sense screamed that he was dangerous. Even when he had been forced by Sarah to attack me in his beastform, it wasn't Victor himself I had feared.
That was all out the window as he stalked me, intent on taking away the very free will he was trying to protect in his own twisted way. “Victor,” I choked out, “you're scaring me.”
He stopped moving suddenly and reached out to stroke my hair. “I'm sorry, love, but time is running out. It's for the best. For all of us.”
I shook my head vehemently. “There's nothing good about this, whatever it is you're planning on doing.” I knew exactly what he was planning on but I couldn't bring myself to say it out loud and didn't want to give him any ideas in case I was wrong.
His mouth set into a line, hovering in the no-man's land between a smile and a frown, neither one more than the other. “We both know you'll die before you admit the truth, and I'm not willing to let that happen. I've got to know for sure.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked. My stomach felt like it was full of lead.
“I'm not going to brainwash you, just set everything back to zero like it was before.”
“No,” I cried, horrified. Here I had been thinking he was just going to force me to acknowledge some nonexistent feelings for Sebastian when his true intentions were so much worse. “I don't want to forget anything, not again,” I pleaded. He couldn't do this to me. He wouldn't. “Everything is finally back the way it should be. I'm finally whole.”
“Not yet, love,” he said with the most abhorrent gentleness. “But you will be soon, you'll see.” He reached out again and this time I fled for the door. His outstretched hand turned in the air and the lock flipped over before I even reached the door. I jiggled the handle desperately but the lock held fast.
When I turned around, he was walking towards me calmly. I pressed myself against the door and struggled to slow my fluttering pulse as I looked around the room for escape. The window was too far to reach and even if I did somehow manage to escape, I would only be prolonging the inevitable. Once Victor set his mind on something, no matter how horrible that something was, he got it.
It briefly occurred to me that maybe that was why he was doing this. Maybe he thought his will had been strong enough to conquer my own and that removing all traces of it was the only way I would truly be free to choose.
“I'm sorry, pup. I didn't want this to be a traumatic experience,” he murmured. “I was planning on waiting until tomorrow night, but it's just as well that I don't have time to talk myself out of this.”
“Please don't do this,” I begged for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I don't want to forget you.”
“You won't forget me,” he murmured. “Just all the unnecessary little interferences of mind control that might be clouding your judgment. You'll forget all the additional visits I made to you after Sebastian and I both appeared to you. You'll have the same chronology of events, with the exception of your romantic entanglements with the both of us. Consider it a blank slate for your heart.”
“As far as you'll know, Sebastian and I marked you at the same time by accident,” he continued. “We're both courting you in competition for your hand in marriage as the alpha's son. Free of the guilt and baggage I've saddled on it, your heart will be free to make its choice.”
“And the others?” I challenged. “We live in a house full of wolves and you can't brainwash all of them. How are you going to keep up your sick little charade?”
“You're going to subconsciously avoid saying or asking anything that could cause problems, and if you do, your mind will be gently guided in a different direction.”
“You say it so casually,” I said through gritted teeth. “As if you're not the one stripping away my free will in the first place. This is exactly what Jeff did to me.”
“This is different,” he said, exasperation seeping into his voice. “I'm doing this to preserve your free will in the big picture. I can't stand the thought of waking up next to you every day only to wonder whether I forced you into a life with me when you were really destined for my brother.”
“You're doing it again, can't you see that?” I cried. “You're doing exactly what Ulric said, handing everything over to Sebastian by default, only this time it's not a model airplane, it's me—a person with thoughts and feelings and the right to choose. You're so afraid you'll lose something that you're too much of a coward to fight for it!”
He clenched his jaw, which was the only evidence that my words had affected him at all. “As I've said before, you will simply be free to choose without any extraneous variables in the way.”
“Listen to yourself, Victor,” I said with a laugh that caught in my throat. “This isn't an experiment. Life, choices, love, none of it happens in a vacuum. You can't strip it out of reality and put it under a microscope until everything is the way you want it. It doesn't matter who showed up in a vision first, it only matters that I love you,” I told him, pressing my hand against his cheek. “I chose you.”
His hand covered mine and he leaned into my touch wit
h closed eyes and a deep sigh. “I believe part of you did, my love.”
For a moment I dared to hope that I had gotten through to him. When he opened his eyes again, that hope was dashed on the cold gray stone within them. “This won't hurt at all. You'll be feeling like your old self by the time Sebastian comes to pick you up.”
I opened my mouth to scream for Ulric or anyone else who might have been within earshot, but his hand closed around my mouth before I could make a sound. I scolded myself for not crying for help sooner, but the truth was that I had been holding out hope until the very last moment that Victor wasn't capable of doing something so terrible—at least not to me. Ulric or any of the others might have rescued me if I had called for help, but it would have meant them knowing what he was capable of.
As he gagged me with his silk pocket scarf and cuffed my hands behind my back, I learned the most difficult lesson life had yet to teach me. The person you loved the most was also the person capable of causing you the most pain.
“This is a bit more complex than a simple push,” he murmured, slipping out his pocket watch. He dropped the silver chain and dangled the piece in front of my face. Initials I couldn't quite make out on the one side alternated in my vision with the ivy engraving on the front as the watch swung.
“I'm going to have to go a bit old school, I'm afraid. Do us both a favor and follow the swing with your eyes,” he said, tilting my chin up. “Resisting won't do anything but prolong the misery.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks and soaked into the scarf as I struggled to keep my eyes on him, not the watch. If he was going to commit this treachery, he was going to have to look me in the eyes while he did it.
It wasn't long before indignation gave way to instinct and I found my attention drawn to the solid silver piece. Its swing was mesmerizing, calling up memories of the pendulum in the library and the way Sebastian had been so transfixed by its movement. Suddenly I understood. It was so steady, so reliable, so fluid...
“That's it,” Victor said, his voice low and coaxing. “Just relax. Keep following the watch. The anger is slipping away and you're starting to feel calm and relaxed.”
