Prologue

The house rose above the trees like a great mythical beast. A neo-gothic nightmare that lived in memories and dreams. Time withered and aged everything, but this place would live forever. I never thought I’d set foot inside this place again.

But he was dying.

I know you hate me. I know I do not deserve your forgiveness, Jude. But please, if you ever loved him – come. Let me say to you what I must, before it’s too late.

It’s been close to eight years, and I’m still dancing to his tune. But I’m not the boy I was then, weak and innocent as a newborn lamb. Together, they’d made me over into something crueller and less trusting. Whether that means I’m prepared for what lies in wait inside, I don’t know.

But I’d never been able to stay away, not then and not now. This house, like its inhabitants, called to me; it always had.

Something he knows only too well.

The rain falls in sheets, heavy and relentless as it pounds the windows and roof of the car. The flight from Gatwick had been delayed because of the storm, and it seems to have followed me over the channel. It makes dark, deep rivers of the gulleys at the side of the road and drowns out the radio station pumping out disco music from the hired car. I hadn’t bothered working out how to fix it.

I almost drive around to the back of the mansion to the private resident car park, but instead, I pull the rental car up past the front entrance and into the paved area reserved for visitors and turn off the engine.

There are a few lights on inside and around the front entrance, which should make it seem less imposing and threatening, but it doesn’t.

I’m not sure how long I sit there before there’s a knocking on the passenger-side window. I don’t hear it immediately because of the rain, but I startle at the sight of a hooded figure gesturing for me to roll down the window. I have to turn the engine on to do that, but then it’s down, and I think he’s trying to decide whether I might be insane or not by the way he’s looking at me.

“You Jude?” he asks.

“Um, yeah?”

He smiles a kind white smile that goes all the way to his eyes. He looks to be about my age, maybe a couple of years older, early thirties perhaps.

“He’s been expecting you for a month. And since no one else comes, I figured.”

“Right.”

It’s still raining pretty hard, but the guy doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“I’m Jasper. The nurse.”

“Right,” I say again. Of course, he has a pretty male nurse.

Jasper laughs a little and glances up at the sky.

“You coming in? I like the rain, but not this much.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m coming in.”

He doesn’t hang around as I take my time getting out of the car; instead, he bolts on long legs back into the shelter of the house.

With a deep breath, I grab my overnight bag and jacket and step out into the downpour.

Jasper’s waiting just inside the vestibule, and he closes and locks the huge door behind me as I step inside Deveraux house for the first time in almost a decade. I’d been back a couple of times since Oxford, but that seemed like a lifetime ago now, and nothing appeared to have changed in the years since. I knew he’d started some renovations to the upper floors, but that hadn’t carried on down here. Not a single thing is different to how it was then. There’s some comfort in that, I find. Some sort of morbid nostalgia that I assumed had died in me a long time ago. It unsettles me. Makes me feel like a stranger in a place I know almost intimately, a place that felt as much a part of me as the heart in my chest.

It occurs to me suddenly that I’d never once come in through this door. I’d always come in through the back entrance, the service entrance, every time.

Jasper, still smiling, takes my jacket and hangs it inside the boot room off the entrance foyer.

“Can I get you some tea or coffee…?” he asks, coming back. “Something to heat you up?”

I look at him. Tall, pretty, dark-haired. Just his type.

“You his nurse or his butler?” I ask. It comes out ruder than I mean it to.

Jasper only chuckles, completely unperturbed.

“I do a bit of everything around here.” He shrugs. “He’s pretty much beyond the point of doing anything on his own now.”

The thought slips into my brain before I can stop it: Good.

“Coffee. Black. Thanks.”

“Sure thing. Decaf or?”

“Or.”

He smiles again. “Got it. He’s in the music room.” That he doesn’t direct me to it, that he knows I know exactly where that is, makes me wonder. How much does he know about what happened here?

“Hey,” I call out when Jasper is halfway down the hall. I have to force the words past my throat. “How bad is he? I mean, is he sensible?”

“Oh, his mind is still sharp as a knife. He probably looks a bit different from when you last saw him, though.” Jasper’s mouth turns sad, the smile he’s been wearing since I rolled down the window melting away now.

Sharp as a knife. Yeah, that sounded about right.

But no, Gideon wasn’t the knife; Caspien had been that. Gideon, the hand that wielded it.

Me, the soft, yielding flesh.

I don’t move immediately toward the music room. I stand there in the great hallway, looking at the closed doors. The rooms behind them are alive with memories: The library, the arboretum, the staircase leading up to his bedroom. I’m certain if I strain my ears hard enough, I’ll hear his voice somewhere. Certain that if I inhale deeply, I’ll still be able to smell him. He lives and breathes in these walls still, and I can’t fucking bear it.

It’s why I shouldn’t have come.

I’m about to turn and run, drive back to the airport and await my flight back to London on Monday morning when I hear it:

“Are you out there, Jude?” Gideon’s voice is changed but still recognisable. Distinct and elegant, as though spoken from a dais above me. “Oh, do come in. I don’t have long left, and there’s an awful lot to talk about.”

I press my hand against the wall to steady myself, breathing deeply for a few moments. When I feel ready, I push off the wall and step inside.

The piano sits where it always has, where I’d first heard Cas play it, where I’d held and comforted him. And later, where I’d kissed and pleasured him, where I’d felt the sharp pieces of him break apart under me. Part of my mind cracks open, just a small opening and the memories pour out with all the strength it had taken to lock them up in there.

It’s taken me years to hear a piano played and not feel like my heart was being torn from my chest. Now, I watch his videos online to feel that very thing because something is better than nothing at all.

A violent cough wracks through the room, and I’m almost jolted from my body. I turn toward the noise.

One end of the huge space has been transformed into a grandiose kind of hospital room. A hospital bed with machines standing around it like an audience to the figure within. A couple of high-backed antique chairs at either side. Two tall, ornate chests bracketing the head of the bed. One is stacked with books and a table lamp; the other holds a bright bouquet of flowers. I wondered if they’d come from the arboretum. An enormous TV is set up at the foot of the bed so that it obscures the person lying in it.

It’s as though someone has come to die in a museum.

When I move closer and get my first look at him, all of the anger and rage I expected to feel…disappears, evaporating like rain on a hot pavement. A feeling completely unwelcome rushes at me instead pushing tears out from the corner of my eyes. I’m certain I’m about to break down, and I will not allow him to see that again. I turn my head and try to centre my breathing as I wipe at the tears threatening to overcome me.

He probably looks a bit different from when you last saw him.

Death sits on Gideon’s chest like Fuseli’s Nightmare. It clings to every inch of his skin, fighting him for every breath. And they are terrible, desperate breaths. Painful and raw. His once vibrant, healthy skin is now a palette of grey and blue. Dark eyes that had once gleamed with life are as dull as mud water.

He’d been handsome – an elegant, refined kind of handsome that people would describe with words like ‘dashing’ and ‘debonair’ – and now he was a rotten, dying thing. It humbles me in the way I’d been afraid it would. I want to scream and demand he get up and show me he was the same man he’d always been – capricious and cruel, the mastermind of all my misery.

“Hello, Jude,” he says.

“Gideon.”

“I didn’t think you’d come.”

“You knew I’d come.”

He coughs again and gestures with his hand for me to sit down. I sit.

“You look dreadful,” I tell him.

“You still don’t mince your words, I see.” Gideon grins, eyes gleaming again with cunning. Cas showed me a photo of him once as a child, aged seven or so, and he’d had that same look in his eyes even then.

I glance down at my hands, let the silence swell between us.

“I say, you turned out quite extraordinarily good-looking, didn’t you?” he says.

I lift my head to find him looking me over appraisingly.

“Cas always had a thing for your freckles, did you know that? And that dimple on the right side of your mouth. You have grown into them both quite marvellously.”

“Is this why you invited me here, Gideon? To flirt?”

He chuckles, but it transforms into a coughing fit.

“Are you in pain?” I ask when it passes.

In a roughened voice, he says: “I have been in pain for as long as I have been alive; this is just a different kind. More immediate, more ghastly to look at.”

“I’m sorry,” I mutter uselessly.

“Me too, my boy. I’m sorry too.” It’s weighty with meaning, his eyes horribly sincere, and it hits me with all the force of a punch to the gut. I’d never imagined I’d hear him say it, not really, not properly, and it feels awful now that he has. It sits there between us, ugly and loud.

I look at my hands again so I don’t have to look at his decaying face.

“They say I do not have long. A few weeks, perhaps.”

It was his pancreas; I knew that much. It had been too late by the time they found it.

Jasper enters carrying a tray with a mug of steaming hot coffee and a bowl of what appears to be soup. He hands me the coffee first before setting the soup tray on a tall trolley table that he wheels over so that it sits in front of Gideon. Lifting a cable, he presses a button and Gideon is raised into a more upright position so he can eat. Lastly, he switches on a light above the bed, flooding Gideon in harsh artificial light.

“Do I need to force you, or are you going to eat that?” Jasper asks Gideon bossily.

“I’ll eat it,” he placates, picking up his spoon.

Jasper looks at me. “Make sure he does, will you? He’s a nightmare.”

“A nightmare that pays you very well, so hush.”

“Money isn’t everything, Gideon, I’ve told you that.”

I watch as Jasper checks the drip hanging by the bed, the one beneath the blanket draped over Gideon, and serves him a concoction of tablets from a little plastic cup.

The familiarity between them feels almost intimate. Jasper gives me a small conspiratorial smile and then disappears from the room, leaving us alone again.

“He’s a godsend...” Gideon muses as he stirs his soup around.

I blow over the rim of my coffee.

“Locked away here with me while his friends travel the world, get married and have children. I’m certain he thinks I’m going to leave him everything.”

“Are you?” I lift my coffee to my mouth.

Gideon grins. “If he marries me, perhaps.”

“You’ve asked him?”

“A dozen or so times. He threatens to sue me for harassment in the workplace. But he never leaves.”

I laugh, and he guides a spoonful into his mouth.

I drink my coffee while Gideon eats his soup in neat little sips from his spoon. It’s a comfortable silence, easy almost, despite the years since we last did it.

When he’s finished, he sets the spoon in the bowl, moves it away from him, and settles back into his pillows.

“You’re not going to ask how he is?” Gideon says at last.

My breathing falters, my fingers tightening around the cup.

“If there was something wrong, you’d have told me the second I got here.” I take a deep gulp of coffee. “So I assume he is the same as he always is.”

Gideon sighs as though he’s trying for patience. As though I’m a misbehaving child.

“This is…not right, Jude,” he announces. “Shutting him out like this. When was the last time you spoke to him?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

“Have you met someone else? Is that why you won’t see him?”

I give him a look, one that says there has never and will never be anyone else. A look that tells him I don’t want to have this conversation.

I mean it, Cas, we’re not doing this again.

But this is what we do, Jude. It’s what we’ve always done.

Not anymore. It’s over. Don’t come to me again. Don’t call me again.

And he hadn’t. It’s as if something in my voice or my eyes that night told him that this time, I meant it.

“It was a lie, Gideon. He was a lie, as were you.” I give him a pointed look.

“No. You were the truest, most real, most untainted thing he ever had.”

“He made his bloody choice, Gideon!” I snap. “Over and over again, he made his choice, and it was never me.”

Gideon gives me a look like I might be the one dying.

“It was always you. He chose you in the only way he knew how.”

“By leaving me? By moving to another fucking continent and marrying him? That was Caspien choosing me? Christ, Gideon, you still lie so easily; it’s frightening.”

“He’s only ever loved you, Jude. Surely you know that.”

I look at him, incredulous. “He doesn’t know what love is; you made sure of that! We weren’t…that wasn’t love.” I sound certain as I fire it at him, but the truth is, I have no fucking clue how love worked or what it was.

Luke loved me, my parents had loved me, but romantic love was as unknowable to me as the universe. Love in that sense, love in that all-consuming, life-affirming, passionate, glorious sense, had come and gone with one person only, and he’d taken it with him when he left.

Sex and the fleeting kind of intimacy that came from it was something else altogether.

At uni, it had been easy with Finn. Being with him felt, sometimes, like being with Cas, which was why I’d ended it. Then there’d been Nathan. Nathan, who I could barely think about without feeling overcome with emotion so bittersweet that it ached. After uni, it had been celibacy, the occasional Grindr hook-up, and a lot of porn. There’d never been anything approximating the kind of love I’d nurtured for Cas.

Gideon nods, a grim kind of look on his face.

“I’ve had a room readied for you; you’re welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

“I can only stay the week,” I mutter, blood still hot. “I have to get back on Friday.” It’s a lie – mostly. I have an engagement party on Saturday that I’d RSVP’d for and no one would care if I missed it. I had nothing to get back to except an overpriced, cold basement flat in Bethnal Green, but I didn’t want Gideon to know that.

“Will you write something while you’re here?” Sparks of excitement flicker in his bleary eyes now.

“Unlikely. Been a bit blocked recently.” It had been fucking hell. Sat in the chilly spare room for the last month, pushing out words in stuttering constipated misery. Yes, I’d come to see Gideon after putting it off for so long, but I also hoped there might be some sliver of inspiration to be found in a corner somewhere here. Surely there was something more than ghosts and the echoes of heartache within these old walls?

“There really is quite a lot to talk about, but I wonder if you wouldn’t mind if we start it tomorrow?” Gideon says, already looking drowsy. “These tablets are wonderful for the pain, but they really do destroy my concentration.”

“That’s fine,” I say. “It’s late anyway.”

Gideon nods, a private little smile on his face as he looks at me. “I’m so glad you came, Jude, really I am. I feared I’d never see you again, that I’d never get the chance to tell you...” His eyes were closing over, lids heavy. “Jasper will show you to your room.”

“I know my way about, Gideon.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Of course, you do.”

A moment later, he was asleep, or something like it. I watch him for a couple of minutes before standing and wandering out of the room. I find Jasper in a chair just outside the music room, reading a book. He has the cover bent back, so I can’t see what it is.

“He’s asleep,” I tell him.

He stands and gives me a sort of searching look.

“You hungry?”

“Not really, no.”

Jasper shrugs.

“So, where am I sleeping?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll take you up.”

I feel like saying to him that I know this house as well as he does, maybe better, but I’m tired and can’t be bothered with the conversation it might invite, so I let him lead me up the stairs.

“You’re not what I imagined,” he says as we go. “When he talks about you – which is a lot – I imagined someone different.”

I’m unsure what to say to that, so I keep quiet and focus on where he is leading us. Though, it was bound to be only one of two places.

Jasper pushes open the door of Cas’s mother’s bedroom and walks inside. He’d already put my bags on the bed and closed the curtains. A small electric heater sits in the centre of the room, fighting against the chill. For a moment, I see the two of us on the floor, limbs entwined and mouths exploring. It could have been worse; Gideon could have given me Cas’s room. There was a time when he would have and perhaps the fact that he hasn’t means he has changed a little at least, though it will take a lot more to convince me.

“I switched it on after you arrived; it’ll heat up eventually,” says Jasper. “I’ve given you some extra blankets.”

“Thanks.”

“Bathroom’s just down the hall.”

“I know.”

“Any special dietary requirements?” He is smiling a little now, and I have the peculiar feeling that he might be flirting. “For breakfast? I normally make porridge for him; I do a mean bowl with cream and honey.”

The feeling fades. “Um, no. Porridge is fine, thanks.”

“You got it,” he says before striding out of the room and leaving me alone.

I plug my phone in to charge, though I have to pull out a side table and unplug the lamp to do it. Then, I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling.

He was really dying.

Some deep mistrusting part of me had thought that perhaps it was a ruse to get me here; to ensnare me back into the web I’d escaped eight years ago. But surely he knows, as well as I do, that I’d never really escaped. This place, him, Cas, all of it, live inside me. I am as much a part of the web as they were the creators of it. The way a plant or a tree can grow through solid stone if given time. There is still the possibility that he’s brought me here to torment me to the last but I’m prepared this time, in a way I hadn’t been then.

These walls and the two men inside had swallowed me whole once before, so when I emerged from the belly of the beast, I staggered into the world blinking and raw. This time, though, I have come armed. This time, I’ve come with sharp edges, blades, and a warrior’s hardened heart, and I’ll cut myself free without a moment’s hesitation.