Chapter 2
Landon pulled his arm free, but he didn't turn back toward the parking lot. He looked through the sheeting rain at the long, dark chassis of Everett’s car.
He didn’t want to go. Every instinct screamed at him that stepping into Everett’s orbit inside that cavernous cliffside house was a trap. But Julian’s unfinished work was there. Julian’s private diaries—the ones he had whispered about during their frantic calls from hospital rooms and hotel lobbies—were locked in the desk at Blackwood Ridge.
Julian had promised Landon that those papers held the complete truth of his torment. If Landon abandoned them, Everett would burn them. Everett would erase every trace of his own tyranny, sanitizing Julian’s memory into a portrait of quiet, compliant obedience.
*I have to protect him,* Landon told himself, swallowing the bitter bile rising in his throat. *Even now. Especially now.*
“Drive,” Landon spat, stepping down the wet flagstones toward the car. “And pray the brakes fail on the cliffside, Everett. It would save the world a monstrous amount of misery.”
A dark, dangerous smirk touched Everett’s lips as he followed, holding a black umbrella overhead, deliberately tilting it so that its perimeter shielded both of them, drawing them into an infuriatingly small, shared bubble of warmth against the storm.
“If we go over the cliff, Vance,” Everett whispered, his breath hot against Landon’s rain-splattered cheek, “we go over together.”
* * *
The drive to Blackwood Ridge was forty minutes of weaponized silence.
The Bentley tore through the winding coastal highway, wipers slurring against the glass as the gale off the ocean tore yellowing leaves from the twisted cypress trees. Landon sat rigid in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, refusing to look at the powerful hands gripping the leather-wrapped steering wheel.
Everett drove with the same ruthless precision he applied to everything else: fast, controlled, refusing to yield an inch of tarmac to the oncoming gusts. The heater hummed, circulating air thick with the leather of the seats and the lingering trace of Everett’s cologne. It was too warm, too close. Landon felt an itch under his collar, an acute physical awareness of the man sitting six inches away.
They had hated each other from the moment they met at Julian’s first solo exhibition in Chelsea six years ago.
Landon had arrived as Julian’s defender—the sensitive, sharp-eyed critic who celebrated Julian’s fragile, emotional vulnerability on canvas. Everett had arrived as the patron—the cold, venture-capital heir with bottomless pockets and an iron grip, who had bought the entire gallery display in a single stroke and immediately taken control of Julian’s schedule, his medical care, his very life.
To Landon, Everett was an emotional parasite, feeding on Julian’s brilliance while slowly draining his spirit.
To Everett, Landon had always been a disruptive pest, a romanticizing interloper who fed Julian’s manic delusions and encouraged his self-destructive flights from reality.
Yet, despite the hatred, there had always been this sick, unspoken gravity between them.
Whenever Julian had fallen apart—a panic attack in an Italian pensione, an overdose of sedatives in a London flat—it was Landon and Everett who converged at the bedside. They would circle each other like wolves over a wounded lamb, trading vicious accusations while their shoulders brushed in narrow hospital corridors, their eyes locking with an intensity that had nothing to do with Julian and everything to do with the violent, suppressed current running between themselves.
Landon shifted in his seat, breaking the silence. “The solicitors won’t be there until two. What are we doing until then?”
“The solicitors aren’t coming,” Everett said coolly, not taking his eyes off the rain-slicked road.
Landon turned sharply, his heart jolting against his ribs. “What?”
“They delivered the secondary keys to my office yesterday,” Everett said, his voice maddeningly level. “There is no legal team arriving, Landon. Just you. And me.”
“You lied to me to get me in this car.” Landon reached for the door handle, panic and fury flaring in equal measure.
Everett didn’t flinch, but his left hand shot across the center console, clamping over Landon’s wrist with brutal speed, pinning his arm down against the leather armrest. The sudden physical impact sent a shockwave through Landon’s chest. Everett didn’t take his eyes off the road, but the veins in his forearm stood out beneath his starched white cuff.
“Try opening that door at seventy miles an hour, Vance, and you’ll leave Julian’s papers entirely in my hands,” Everett said, his tone dropping an octave, terrifyingly quiet. “Sit still.”
Landon struggled against the hold, his breath coming in shallow, ragged bursts. Everett’s grip was warm, unrelenting, the calloused pad of his thumb pressing hard against the fragile tendon of Landon’s wrist. “You abducted me, you psychotic bastard!”
“I brought you to the only place where the truth matters,” Everett countered. He tightened his grip for one more agonizing second, then shoved Landon’s arm back into his lap and returned both hands to the wheel. “You’ve spent three years poisoning Julian’s mind against me. Whispering in his ear that I was his jailer. Telling him to run. Telling him to leave the only sanctuary that kept him alive.”
“Sanctuary?” Landon laughed, high and incredulous. “You kept him sedated, Everett! You hired private guards to watch his cottage! When he wanted to paint abroad, you froze his accounts!”
“Because every time he crossed a border with you, he ended up in a ditch or a psych ward!” Everett’s voice cracked like a whip, the first real crack in his composure. His knuckles turned bone-white against the wheel. “You romanticized his madness! You told him his suffering was art! You let him starve himself half to death in Rome because you thought his agony made his brushwork ‘poetic’!”
“I loved him!” Landon screamed back, the grief that had been locked behind his ribs finally tearing through his throat. “I listened to him! He called me on the night he collapsed, Everett! He didn't call you! He called me from that freezing studio, crying so hard he couldn't form words! And do you know what he said before he dropped the phone? He said, *‘Everett is going to lock the doors forever this time.’* That was your sanctuary, Everett. A cage!”
The car swerved violently as Everett braked, the tires skidding on wet pine needles before catching grip and lurching into a wide, gravel driveway.
Ahead of them, rising through the sea mist like a black monolith, sat Blackwood Ridge.
The manor was a jagged Victorian estate of dark slate and granite, perched dangerously close to the crumbling verge of the cliffs. The ocean roared below, throwing white plumes of spray against the base of the rock. No lights burned in any of the tall, narrow windows. It looked cold, uninhabited, and profoundly desolate.
Everett cut the engine. The sudden silence inside the car was deafening, filled only with the rhythmic drumming of rain against the roof and the sound of their ragged breathing.
Everett didn’t move to get out. He sat with his hands resting on the wheel, his broad chest rising and falling heavily. When he finally turned to Landon, the silver in his eyes looked bleached, stripped bare of all social pretense.
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