I don’t know why I whispered encouraging thoughts into Megan’s ear before Charles took her to the stables. You can run all you like, but no one can hide from death. Not even death himself. The sedatives I forced Megan to take already weakened our game, let alone the four additional hunters my father invited onto his playground.

This is so unlike him. He has never invited outsiders to the stables before. I know he is on the verge of psychosis; I am seeing the same signs in him I witnessed in myself during the hours leading to my mental breakdown yesterday. But this. . . this isn’t him at all.

He hunts for the thrill, for the adrenaline associated with it. Tonight’s game isn’t filled with palpable excitement. It is laden with hate, inspired by death. He’s not hunting Megan because his thirst for blood is the strongest it’s ever been. He is killing for glory instead of need.

I understand his quest. I too have killed for reasons other than an insatiable appetite. I am not judging him. I am merely confused. The man who raised me was a brilliant, cunning man. He taught me that no one is more revered or important than me. That I was not greatness waiting to happen, I was already great.

That is not the man standing across from me now.

This man is unhinged. Hyper-sensitized. If I didn’t know any better, I may even say medicated. He’s not strategizing his game plan for the most direct maneuver. He is wishing for the game to be over before it truly begins. I’ve only ever seen him unhinged once before. It was when. . .

“You fell in love with your pet.”

I intended to say my comment inside my head, but the words slipped from my lips before I could stop them. I’m glad. If I was having any doubts about my theory, my father’s wide eyes and unspoken rebuttal soon take care of them. He’s not hunting Megan to forewarn his captive what will happen to her if she doesn’t obey his every command. He is doing it to prove he is still in the game, that he is still capable of ruling his sanction with eminence.

He’s hunting Megan to prove a point.

“Don’t be absurd. My pet will follow this routine. I’m just preparing her for the carnage.”

Lies, nothing but lies spill from his lips.

“You know that isn’t the way I operate anymore. I didn’t just teach your mother; she taught me as well—most importantly, that people like us can never fall in love.”

He pours two servings of whiskey into dusty glasses before handing one to me. His hand rattles so fiercely, brown liquid spills over the rim and onto the floor. I ignore his nerves. He always gets extra agitated in the lead up to a hunt.

“She was never going to understand us, Dexter. That’s why I had to do what I did. I didn’t want her to die. But she was hurting you, so I had no choice.”

He tosses down a mouthful of whiskey before suggesting I do the same. The last thing I want is to haze my mind with alcohol, but I need something to take the edge off the pain rocketing through my lower back. I have to be on my game tonight. I am the youngest and fittest here, but I am competing against a man who has hunted for longer than I’ve been born.

Megan left over an hour ago, but I know my father can still smell her scent lingering in the air. How do I know this? I can smell her as well. She’s not just imbedded in my skin; she’s underneath it. Never to be removed.

When I place my empty glass of whiskey on the counter, my father nudges his head to the bottle, asking if I want another. I shake my head, amplifying the immediate buzz the whiskey caused in my veins.

“Are you not going to finish yours?” My words slur like I’ve drunk a gallon of whiskey instead of a measly glass. I wiggle my tongue around my mouth, loosening its uncooperativeness.

When I take a step toward the bar for a glass a water, the room spins around me. The pain zinging my back no longer exists when my hands dart out to steady myself. I accidentally bump my glass off the counter, exposing a gritty substance coating the bottom of it.

Suspicion runs rife through my veins. “You drugged me?” My voice resembles a snake’s hiss in the seconds leading to his venomous strike. “You drugged your own fucking son?!”

My father steadies my wobbly legs by leaning me into his chest. He whispers words too low for my thumping ears to hear as he guides me to a mangy chair in the middle of the room. I watch him through kaleidoscope vision when he returns to the group of men standing at the side of his den, gawking at me with concern.

“It’s okay,” he assures them, his voice brimming with concern. “This is all a part of the detoxification process.”

When a man with a receding hairline asks if they should stay to help with my rehabilitation, my father assures him he has everything under control. He plays the part of a devoted father well. Even I’m convinced he is on a mission to rid me of evil.

After seeing out the men I thought were hunters, but now realize are guests, my father returns to the dark nook in his detached workshop at the back of his family manor. The manic glint his eyes held earlier has vanished, replaced with the gleam of a man in the midst of his prime.

“What did I tell you, son? What was the number one rule you swore you’d never break again after your arrest?” He flips a chair around to face him before straddling it backwards. “You were not to fall in love—ever again! It’s a trick, a ploy, another way of medicating us! Women do not love us. They want to contain us. Control us. They want to stop us from being the men we were born to be! I thought your arrest would have proven that to you!”

He scoots his chair closer, bringing his face to within an inch of mine. “That’s why I’m doing this. It was not my intention, but I’ve seen the signs you’re refusing to acknowledge. I was already suspicious of the indecisiveness in your tone when I asked if she was pure. You couldn’t stand the thought of her with another man; you didn’t even want to consider it.”

He tsks loudly. “That wasn’t your only downfall. You got sloppy. You left your hand wide open for the world to see. Your eagerness to put Ashlee in her place left me no doubt of what I needed to do. Then I saw how you looked at her when you thought I wasn’t watching.”

He sounds disgusted, like his throat is burning with the same bile scorching mine. “You did the same thing with Shelley. That’s why I had to send her away.”

My eyes widen in shock. I knew she didn’t leave of her own accord.

“Don’t act surprised, son. We don’t share the same blood, but I am still your father. It is my job to protect you from the vile, ill-informed people who think they know better than me. I hated seeing you locked away, but I had no other choice.”

He locks his eyes with mine, ensuring I can see the honesty in them. He didn’t protect me. He had me prosecuted.

“Megan will never love you. She will never conform to our ways. Our uniqueness makes us unlovable.” When I try to rebut, he pushes his finger to my lips. “Lies will only deepen the cuts I place in her thighs.”

Usually, the idea of Megan’s luscious thighs streaked with blood arouses me, but coming from my father’s mouth, it doesn’t have the same effect. It fills me with rage and reddens my cheeks.

“You killed Joseph for her.”

Because my father’s statement is honest, I don’t attempt a denial. I did kill Joseph for Megan, and I will do the same thing to any man who dares to touch her.

“That’s what I thought,” my father murmurs, reading me with an ability he’s always had. “She’ll ruin you like your mother ruined me. That’s why I summoned you here instead of the stables. I am going to do what you should have done the night you escaped Meadow Fields.”

He saunters to a dark corner of the room, his steps arrogant and slow. “I am going to disfigure Megan, fuck her, smear her with my cum, then kill her. And just like your beady little eyes couldn’t stay off me when I governed your mother, you’re going to watch me do it.”

Violence roars through me when he yanks a tarp off a square contraption at his right. Megan is curled in a ball in the bottom of a cage. She appears to be sleeping peacefully on a knitted blanket.

A roar unlike anything I’ve ever felt rolls up my chest when my father pokes her with a stick. He jabs the pointy end into her milky white skin, scratching the little freckle high on her thigh.

“Look at the contrasting colors between her skin and her blood. She will bleed beautifully.”

My back arches off the couch. My endeavor to get to Megan fills me with inhuman strength, but I barely budge an inch. I am paralyzed from the chest down. My father finds my attempt to stuff his words down his throat with my fists amusing. It brightens his eyes with a sadistic edge and furls his lips.

“Oh, dear lord, you’ve got the same murderous look in your eyes your mother had when I held you under the water the day you were born.” His eyes flicker as if he is recalling fond memories as they drink in the scar on my left brow. “The thought of losing you had her toeing the line for years. She never once went against me.”

I suck in a sharp breath, struggling to stay ahead of the debilitating confusion bombarding me. “My mother disobeyed you every chance she got. That’s why you killed her. She wouldn’t conform. She hurt me, brutally and without sorrow. She maimed me as if I were an animal. That’s why I’m fucked in the head, because she filled my brain with lies and twisted my beliefs.”

My eyes snap to my father when his deep laughter rattles through my chest. It only takes glancing into his evil eyes for the briefest second for clarity to form. It arrives as clear and direct as it did yesterday.

This is just a game to him. I am not his son. I am a token on the chessboard he’s been playing the past fifty-plus years. I am a mere pawn for him to fuck with.

It is a pity he underestimated how well he trained me.

I am not the puppeteer.

I am the master—a god!

“Now, Megan!”

My father’s neck doesn’t even snap halfway around before Megan’s blade jumps across his throat in the exact pattern we rehearsed multiple times last night. The scent of her fruity hair hits my senses when she weaves down low to nick the femoral artery in his left thigh.

He immediately buckles to his knees.

The vision of his eyes darkening with death thickens my cock. Those are the exact pair of eyes that tormented my dreams for years, but if it weren’t for the hum of a lullaby, I would have never understood why.

The lady crawling onto my lap to nuzzle into my chest broke through the fog. She shattered the wall my father built around my brain without a word escaping from her lips. She made me see things clearly.

My mom didn’t abuse me. She loved me. That is why my father killed her. He was jealous of the immediate bond she had with me. She saw past the blackness in my heart and loved me even with my flaws.

My father wanted her to do the same for him, but he went about achieving it the wrong way. He took something angelic and tried to tarnish it. When that didn’t work, he took away the one thing she loved and made it an exact replica of him: me.

I was born this way, but I am also a consequence of my father’s obsession. A pawn to be used and abused. He kept me caged because he couldn’t fully clip my mother’s wings. He could have killed me once his game with my mother expired, but that would have concluded his game in an unsatisfactory manner.

You don’t win a game of chess by removing only the pawns from the board. You go after the king. You go against a man as powerful as you.

I was not my father’s son.

I was his challenger.

And now, thanks to Megan, I am his successor.

As one game ends, another one starts. There is just one difference this time around. I don’t need to cage Megan to force her to love me. I merely need to set her free. I don’t mean in the literal sense. I am referring to the dark veins woven around her heart, about letting her express herself without fear of prosecution. I’m going to awaken her hunger for blood so rampantly, the only thoughts she will conjure of Nick will be ones that involve his death.

A good soul can cure the evilness in anyone, but only a black soul can utterly consume them.