30.

THIRTY

Rafael

Dominic and I stop outside the containment room door. He knows not to touch me. He knows not to say anything.

I don’t know what I’m thinking.

I don’t know what I’m feeling.

I jump when the door opens, but it’s just Dante. He glances between me and Dominic. Like Dominic, he knows not to speak.

For a while, the three of just stand there in the chilly underground hallway with the bare lightbulbs nearly blinding us.

Then I try to speak. “I’m …”

When I trail off, Dominic says, “We’ll wait as long as you want. We can keep him here for days, even months. He’s on your timeline now.”

With those words, I’m able to take a deep breath. With those words, I’m able to decide. “No. I want it over.”

“What do you want your part to be in it?”

I blink. I hadn’t actually considered that. I think that’s what actually stalled me here, the fact that, deep down, I knew I didn’t want to do this, not myself. But I need to see it happen.

“I want to watch,” I say. “I want the two of you to do it.”

They both nod. They both want to do this, but even if they didn’t want to, I know that they would anyway.

Dominic says, “We should blindfold and gag him. I don’t want him talking to or looking at Rafael.”

“I already did it,” Dante replies.

“Oh. Good.”

I’m as surprised as Dominic. I didn’t really expect Dante to think about something like that, to care. Not about me.

Fuck, I am way too emotional right now.

I walk off down the passageway. I just need a second. They wait.

When I turn and come back, I nod. Dominic opens the door and walks in and waits, clearly unsurprised when I freeze in the doorway. Dante waits behind me.

I don’t know what I expected, but the man hanging in the restraints, wearing only black pants, is not it. He could be anyone. With the blindfold on, I can’t see his face completely, but he’s plain. Unremarkable. He’s probably around sixty. His body shows it, a little soft in the middle. He has a bullet wound in his side. His nose is broken.

It seems absurd to me, looking at him now, that I thought I loved him. Or that I thought he loved me. That it’s mattered to me so much all this time.

My eyes go to Dominic, and I see his love. Fierce. Brutal. Demanding. And so fucking real. It rolls off him in waves. I feel it.

I follow him into the room. Dante comes in behind me and closes the door.

I bypass the chair and sit instead on an empty table. It’s a surgical table or, here, a torture table. I draw up my legs and sit cross legged while Dominic and Dante walk past the Collector and go to the rack of tools.

I take a strange pleasure in watching their discussion of how they want to start. They don’t argue. Neither pushes to be in charge. They’re totally aligned.

When they turn back, each with a skinning knife, Dominic stops dead at the sight of my slight smile. His lips tug in answer, and I can see his relief. He was worried about me. He sees that I’m okay, that I’m ready, and goes to join Dante.

They don’t hit the Collector. They don’t shout at him. They simply treat him as meat and begin to cut off his skin. He thrashes, of course, screams around the gag. They hold him still, fingers digging into exposed muscle, and keep working.

It’s so ugly that anyone but the three of us would gag. Even Noah couldn’t handle something like this.

Bit by bit, they make him not human. Because he’s not. He might look like an ordinary man, but he actually isn’t. They simultaneously reveal that fact and take away any power he’s ever had.

His voice fades from my head as my focus shifts from him to Dominic and Dante. They work so beautifully together, even though their intensity feels totally different.

Dante looks detached. I know he’s not. He’s cool and steely and precise, but he’s feeling a lot, and his work is easing the pressure inside him.

I’m happy to see that. I know he needs this. The Collector might not have a direct connection to him, but he represents something for all of us.

Dante and I have been doing this together for a long time, finding a sort of release by destroying representations of the past.

Noah taught us how to do this. He taught to save us.

Dante almost killed his father. He would’ve killed someone else eventually. His rage is … immense. He needs this outlet. So he can stay calm. So he can function.

I never had his control. I was only fifteen when I killed the therapist that Noah thought could help me. That’s the only kill I’ve made that I feel bad about. I didn’t mean to kill her.

Noah understood that. And he understood from that, that I could never live a normal life. I would end up dead or in prison.

So he saved me and Dante the only way he could. By teaching us to seek deliberate, controlled release.

Dominic wasn’t as lucky as me and Dante. He didn’t have Noah, who tore up his own soul to save us. He had his father, who was maybe the worst abuser of all.

Dominic’s father sent him to the Island. I cannot imagine how that fact sits inside him. And when Dominic’s father brought him back, though the assaults on Dominic’s body might have changed in nature, I’m sure they didn’t end. And Dominic never escaped, not until his father died.

Really, though, not even then—because people can set locks and traps and chains inside you. Then can keep speaking forever if you don’t find a way to silence them.

I know Dominic still hears his father’s voice. I can see sometimes, how he’s listening to it.

But I think he’s learning to speak over it, to drown it out. I think he’s starting to realize, little by little, that he’s free.

I see it now as he strips away the Collector’s skin like he’s stripping away the past.

Dominic has killed plenty of people, tortured plenty of people, but I think this is different. This is personal, indulgent even. This is for him—and for me.

I’m glad I chose to watch instead of work. But then, I’ve always been a bit of voyeur, and there’s no one I’d rather watch than Dominic.

He’s covered in blood. His arms gleam red. His clothes are splattered. There’s a smear on his cheek.

He’s been checking on me periodically throughout the whole process, but when he looks at me now, something is different. Maybe in him. Maybe in me.

He smiles. Not a little tug of his lips but a real smile. God, he is beautiful.

I smile back.

He shifts to the side, boots sticky in the pool of blood. He opens his body, inviting me. I slide off the table.

Dominic’s eyes drift to my groin. I’m hard. I have been for while. He is too. So is Dante.

No one is upset about it. No one wants to do anything about it. We all just accept how our bodies react. It’s okay.

At my movement, Dante looks up. He doesn’t smile. I don’t think he smiles for anyone but Tristan. But he does step aside.

There’s a rope around the Collector’s neck, tugging upward to keep his head from drooping forward. I pull off the blindfold and tug out the gag. He’s still alive but just barely. He’s well beyond seeing me, well beyond speaking to me.

“Do you want us to remove his face?” Dominic asks.

They’re the first words that have been spoken since we stepped in here.

I shake my head.

Dominic studies me but not like he’s worried. He’s just trying to figure out what I want. He goes to the table of tools and gets a gun.

I smile, realizing as it touches my hand that it’s what I want. I usually prefer knives, but right now I want the heavy, final thud of a bullet. Somehow, Dominic knew that.

The gun is a perfect, satisfying weight in my hand. I raise it, aiming at the face that’s still human over the body that’s not. It seems fitting.

I pull the trigger.

***

Rocco is waiting outside the room when we emerge barefoot and bare chested, having left our bloody shoes and shirts with the body. I almost feel bad about the mess he has to clean up, but he only nods to Dominic and goes inside the cell.

We make our way through the hidden door into the cellar then up through the pantry and into the kitchen.

Noah is waiting there. He doesn’t react to the blood all over Dominic and Dante. It’s me his gaze catches on, my skin clean except for the light splatter on my face—and the bloody handprints that Dominic has left on me. My side. My chest. My neck and jaw.

I love how he’s marked me.

Noah’s eyes jump to Dante. “Tristan is here.”

Dante’s initial reaction is one of surprise, of relief, of need. It’s in the way his lips part and his body rocks forward. It’s in his eyes.

Then he visibly reels himself in, stiffens, goes cold.

“I don’t want him to see me like this,” he says.

“I can see you like this,” Tristan answers, appearing in the doorway.

Dante’s breath catches as their eyes lock. There’s the briefest flash of uncertainty. Tristan is well aware of what Dante does, has even watched him work before, but he’s definitely outside of this world that Dante, Dominic, and I inhabit.

But he walks into like he accepts it, like he accepts Dante. His hand reaches out as he approaches. As Dante moves toward him, meets him, and takes his hand, I see for the first time that they are, in fact, right together. Really right.

The opening in Dante’s eyes is subtle, but it’s there. The easing in his body, however, is far more obvious as he walks out with Tristan.

I glance at Dominic, who’s watching me closely. At first, I think he’s still worried about me and Dante, but then I realize that he’s watching me simply because he wants to. Like I watched him earlier.

I want to be with him. I need to be with him. But I also need to talk to Noah.

Dominic’s eyes flick to Noah like he knows this. He says, “I’ll be upstairs.”

I snag his hand as he starts to walk off. I don’t want him to leave like that, like he has no place here. He turns at the grip on his hand, coming back to me. I release his hand and grab him around the waist.

His arms go around me in turn, marking me with more blood. His forehead comes to rest against mine. He stays there briefly, then he pulls away. I let him go this time. I turn to face Noah.

“Do you understand now?” I ask, weirdly anxious. Before when we discussed Dominic, I was defiant, angry. Now, I guess, I want his approval. I want Dominic to have it.

I had two fathers before Noah. My biological father. Then the Collector, in his twisted way.

But it’s Noah who matters in his jeans and flannel, with his shaggy hair and careworn face.

He says, “I understood the second he walked into Lush to deal with Moretti. I could see then, and I can see now, that he loves you. I can see that you love him too.”

My throat tightens, but I make myself say what I need to say, to tell him the truth. “I also love you, Noah.”

He sucks in a breath, startled by words I have never said to him.

Saying them to Dominic unstuck them inside me. They’d been lodged deep, shoved down, twisted around by the man now getting cut into pieces in the containment room.

With Dominic, I’ve been able to feel those words again, unmistakably true. That’s why I can say them to Noah. That’s why I recognize them as real.

Noah says, “I love you too, Rafael.”

The thing is, I want to accept those words right now. I want to believe them, that they’re really for me. I know that Noah has proven them a thousand times.

But the thing is, every time he says them, every time he proves them, I feel like it’s not about me.

Noah’s eyebrows draw together. I think, maybe for the first time, he sees that those words don’t reach me. I want them to. I try to let me. I just can’t.

“Why don’t you believe me?” he asks.

“Because …” I start trembling, terrified to say what I’ve thought for so long, terrified to replace myself with the name that is never spoken. “Because I know you’re really saying that to Chance, not me.”

Noah lets out a whuff of air and curls forward like I hit him in the gut. Fuck, it’s true. I was right.

“And I’m a shitty substitute,” I say.

Noah yanks upright and looks at me with more anger than I’ve maybe ever seen on his face.

“Goddamn it, Rafael, you are the biggest pain in the ass I have ever known. Chance is dead and has been for fifteen years. I will never get over that—”

“I know that, Noah. And you look at me and you see what happened to him and you try—”

“Rafael, don’t tell me what I see or feel. I don’t see Chance when I look at you. I see you . I see that I got so fucking lucky to have another son.”

“But you look away. You say you’re sorry, and you look away. Because you’re not saying it to me. You’re saying it to—

“Goddamn it, Rafael!” Noah sweeps a toaster off the counter and sends it crashing to the floor. “I look away because it’s hard for me to see what happened to you—”

“What happened to Chance .”

“What happened to you !”

“But you kept sending me back to my aunt. You only kept because I wouldn’t stop. I gave you no choice.”

Noah scrubs at his weary face. He drags his hands down and drops them.

“Let me tell you the truth, Rafael, so you understand. Every time you showed up at my door? My heart fucking exploded. I sent you back because I thought it was the right thing to do. Legally, it was, but more than that, I knew I was mess. More than anything, it was that I knew how fucking badly I wanted you to stay. I knew it clouded my judgment, made me grasp at you, so I didn’t trust myself.

“Every time I sent you back, I was devasted. I wanted to die. Then you would come back again and I would feel alive. I would feel like there was a point in being alive. And when I said you could stay, it felt like the most selfish thing I’d ever done—because you saved my life . I would be dead without you. I would’ve eaten a bullet, I can fucking guarantee you. If anyone’s been a shitty substitute, Rafael, it’s me. I’ve always known that, and when I say that I’m sorry, that’s what I mean.”

Tears spill from my eyes. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for, Noah, and you’re not a shitty substitute. You saved my life too—and nobody could have done it but you. Nobody could have accepted me and what I needed but you . Anyone else would have tried to change me, and when they couldn’t change me, they would’ve tried to contain me. With drugs. With prison. You set me free, even though I’m violent and chaotic and always will be.”

“That’s because I love you, Rafael—and fuck the rest of the world.”

I smile as this time, for the first time, I really hear him.