Chapter 6
“Because he knew you’d burn it,” I shot back, taking half a step toward the desk. “He knew the moment he was gone, you’d sweep his legacy clean, turning his despair into some romanticized tragic flaw to preserve the Calderwood-Cross prestige.”
Before I could bring the key to the tumbler, Everett moved.
He crossed the two paces separating us before I could draw breath, his heavy hand slamming down onto the leather cover, pinning the journal—and my hands—flat against the polished rosewood desk. The impact rattled the brass lantern.
His body followed immediately, pressing me hard against the edge of the desk until the carved mahogany lip dug painfully into the small of my back. He was so close I could smell the bitter espresso on his tongue, the cold sea salt dried against his skin, the intoxicating, terrifying heat radiating through his damp shirt.
“You want to open it, Landon?” Everett rasped, his face dropping until his mouth was an inch from my temple, his breath stirring the damp strands of my hair. “Then open it right here. Between the two of us. You don’t get to retreat to your little London flat and edit out the parts that don’t fit your martyr complex.”
“Let go of me,” I panted, trying to wrench my wrists free, but his grip was like an iron band. “You have no right to read his private thoughts!”
“I have every right!” Everett snarled, the aristocratic control he wore like armor fracturing into jagged shards. His other hand came up, gripping my shoulder, his fingers digging into the muscle with enough force to bruise. “I kept the roof over his head! I cleaned his vomit off the sheets when his kidneys began to fail from the lithium! I sat by his bed for three days in Zurich while he screamed that the ceiling was raining blood! Where were you, Landon? Writing essays about the ‘haunting melancholy’ of his blue period?”
“I was the one he cried to!” I screamed, shoving my chest against his, refusing to shrink back even as the breath was crushed from my lungs. “He didn't want your money, Everett! He wanted your silence! He wanted you to stop standing over him like an executioner counting his pulse!”
“You think you were his salvation?” Everett’s voice dropped into a dark, guttural whisper that made my blood run cold. “Let’s test that theory, Vance. Let’s trade what he told us in the dark. You first. Tell me what he confessed to you about me. Tell me the worst of it. Let’s see if your little memory box can out-bleed mine.”
The challenge hung between us like a drawn blade.
I stared into his slate-grey eyes, feeling the reckless, feverish pulse hammering at the base of my throat. If he wanted war, I would give him an annihilation. I had five years of Julian’s midnight tears stored behind my teeth, every whisper a bullet I had saved for the day Everett Cross tried to claim sainthood.
“He told me about the studio in Munich,” I whispered, leaning in until my lips almost brushed his jaw, weaponizing every syllable. “Two years ago. He locked himself in the attic because you took his passport away. He told me he sat on the bare floorboards in the dark, carving your initials into the heel of his shoe just so he could feel what it was like to grind you into the dirt with every step he took.”
Everett’s hand tightened on my shoulder, his knuckles whitening, but his expression didn't flinch. His eyes merely narrowed, reflecting the orange flicker of the storm lamp.
“He carved my initials?” Everett murmured, his voice deadly quiet. “Did he tell you why I took the passport, Landon? Did he tell you that forty-eight hours earlier, he had wired fifty thousand pounds to a dealer in the red-light district for a brick of pharmaceutical morphine? Did he tell you he had a plane ticket to Tangier booked under a dead boy’s name, intending to bleed out in a desert hotel before the winter was through?”
My chest hitched. The air left me in a staggered gasp. “He… he said he was traveling to Morocco for the light. For the desert landscapes.”
“He was traveling to die, you idiot!” Everett hissed, his fingers tightening until my shoulder burned with pain. “And who fed that impulse? Who sent him the postcards of Tangier with Rimbaud’s poetry scrawled on the back? *‘Go where the sun strips the skin from the bone, Julian. Don’t let him keep you in the fog.’* That was your handwriting, Vance! I found the postcard tucked into his passport!”
“I was trying to give him hope!” I shouted, the desk digging brutally into my spine as I fought his weight. “He was dying here! Look at this house! Look at these grey walls! It’s a mausoleum! You built a fortress on a cliff and expected a flower to bloom on granite!”
“He wasn't a flower, he was a fire!” Everett countered, his chest heaving against mine, our breath mingling in the cold air like steam. “And you kept pouring kerosene on him because you loved the way the flames looked when they reflected in your eyes!”
“He hated you!” I spat, my voice cracking with a raw, agonizing intensity. “He told me in Venice that every time you touched his shoulder, he felt like he was being weighed down with river stones! He said your touch felt like an autopsy while he was still breathing!”
The strike landed.
I saw it in the sudden, microscopic flinch at the corner of Everett’s mouth. The silver in his eyes dulled, a profound, sickening shadow passing across his face. For a fleeting second, the tyrant was gone, replaced by a man staring into the black water of his own private hell.
“Is that what he said?” Everett whispered. His voice was barely audible over the roaring surf below the cliffs.
“Yes,” I lied, twisting the knife. Julian had said something softer, something far more complicated—*‘Everett holds me like he’s terrified I’ll turn to dust, and it makes me want to crumble just to spite him’*—but in this room, locked in combat with the man who had owned Julian’s world, I wanted blood. I wanted Everett to feel the suffocating weight he had inflicted on the boy we both claimed to revere.
Everett didn’t drop his head. Slowly, with an agonizing deliberateness, he leaned down until his forehead rested against mine.
The heat of his skin was blistering. I could feel the trembling tension in his neck, the violent restraint that kept his large, lethal frame from breaking me in half. The proximity was madness. It was sick, intoxicating, poisoned by an attraction that had fermented beneath six years of mutual contempt.
“You want to talk about Venice?” Everett murmured against my lips, his voice a ragged, velvet rasp that sent a shiver straight down my tailbone. “April of last year. Julian called me from the Danieli at four in the morning. He was sobbing so hard he choked on his own spit. Do you know what he told me, Landon? Do you know what he confessed about the saintly, selfless Landon Vance?”
