Chapter 7
I held my breath, my pulse hammering in my temples. “He had nothing to confess about me.”
“He told me,” Everett whispered, his lips grazing the corner of my mouth with an unbearable, tormenting slowness, “that you made him feel dirty. He told me that whenever you praised his paintings, you looked at his sickness like it was a performance staged entirely for your intellect. He said, *‘Everett, Landon wants me to die young so he can write the monograph that establishes his reputation.’*”
“That’s a lie!” The scream tore out of my throat, sharp and hysterical.
I shoved against his chest with both hands, throwing all my weight into the strike. The sudden violence of my movement caught him off balance; Everett staggered back half a step, his boot catching the edge of the displaced rug.
I didn't give him time to recover. With shaking fingers, I rammed the miniature silver key into the padlock on the leather journal.
The mechanism was stiff, crusted with salt air, but I forced it with a savage twist. A sharp *snap* echoed through the cavernous study as the brass shackle sprang free.
“Landon, stop,” Everett said, his voice suddenly losing its venom, shifting into something taut, commanding, and laced with genuine alarm. “Leave it alone.”
“No,” I panted, throwing the heavy leather cover open. “You wanted the truth, Everett. Let’s read the ledger. Let’s see what he wrote when neither of us was there to whisper in his ear.”
The thick parchment pages were covered in Julian’s unmistakable hand: wild, elegant, sloping black strokes done in fountain ink, interspersed with chaotic charcoal smudges and watercolor washes that bled across the margins.
Everett stepped forward, his hand shooting out not to strike me, but to grasp the opposite side of the open book, anchoring himself to the paper. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder under the yellow beam of the lantern, two men leaning over a dead man’s open heart like vultures fighting over the last scrap of meat.
Pages flipped beneath my trembling thumb.
*May 14th: The fog does not lift from the bluffs. I can hear the engines on the water.*
*July 2nd: Everett checked the medicine drawer again. He counted the blisters. He does not know I have hidden twelve under the lining of the trunk.*
*August 19th: Landon called from Bloomsbury. He talked about my colors. He asked if I was weeping when I laid down the vermilion. I told him yes. It made him so happy.*
My breath caught. The entry from August was a punch to the solar plexus. I tried to flip past it, my thumb slick with sweat, but Everett’s large hand clamped down over the top corner of the page, arresting the motion.
“Read that again, Vance,” Everett whispered, a cold, triumphant mockery creeping back into his tone. “Did you enjoy his tears? Did they make for good copy?”
“Turn the page,” I choked out, refusing to let him see the hairline fracture spreading through my ribcage. “Turn it!”
Everett gripped the edge of the leaf and turned it with a sharp, heavy flick.
The next double-page spread was different. The manic sketches and scattered diary entries vanished. In their place, centered on the stark cream page in heavy, dense black ink, was a title written in jagged, violent calligraphy that had bitten so hard into the paper it had torn the fibers:
***THE TWO DEVILS OF MY LIFE***
Beneath the title, the page was divided neatly into two distinct sections, numbered with Roman numerals.
*I.*
*II.*
Everett stared at the page, the breath hissing through his teeth. His hand relaxed on the corner of the journal, his knuckles resting against the grain of the paper.
“The two devils,” Everett murmured, his voice sounding hollowed out, echoing softly in the stormy silence of the room.
“Read it,” I demanded, the righteous fire flaring back up in my blood, hotter and more poisonous than before. I pointed a trembling finger at the first Roman numeral. “You wanted Julian’s truth, Everett. Read what he wrote about the man who kept him in this house.”
Everett swallowed. For the first time all day, I saw hesitation in the hard line of his jaw. He didn't want to look. The master of capital, the man who controlled empires with a signature, was suddenly terrified of forty words scrawled in an art notebook.
“Coward,” I sneered, leaning in close, letting my shoulder press against his arm. “Read it aloud. Or shall I do the honors for you?”
Everett’s jaw set like granite. With a sharp exhale, he pulled the journal an inch closer into the lantern light. His voice, when it came, was stripped of all arrogance—a deep, flat baritone that sounded like stones scraping together in the dark.
“*Entry One,*” Everett began, reading Julian’s precise, razor-sharp script:
*“The First Devil is made of iron, ledgers, and cold discipline. He does not beat me; he does something far more absolute. He buys the air around me until I can only inhale what he has paid for.*
*He monitors my pulse like a scientist watching a dying rat in a glass jar. He tracks my movements from room to room, locking the doors from the outside under the pretense of keeping out the cold. When I tell him I want to burn my paintings, he takes the matches from my hand with a smile that feels like a burial shroud.*
*He tells me he loves me, but he loves the ownership of me. He wants an obedient ghost to haunt his ancestral halls. He believes that by paying for my breath, he owns the right to decide when I am permitted to stop breathing. His care is a slow, methodical strangulation. Every time he touches my hair, I feel the iron bars clicking shut around my ribs. If I die in this house, it will be because his silence finally crushed the last chamber of my heart.”*
Everett stopped.
The silence that fell over the study was deafening, broken only by the violent lash of sleet against the high arched windows and the heavy, ragged sound of Everett’s breathing.
The color had drained entirely from Everett’s face. He stood frozen beneath the lamp, his skin the color of wet chalk, his aristocratic features slack with an agony so profound it bordered on mutilation. The fingers holding the parchment were shaking—not with rage, but with the visceral, shattering realization that every sacrifice he had made, every dollar spent, every sleepless night spent guarding Julian’s bedroom door had been cataloged by the dead boy as pure, unadulterated torment.
Julian had not viewed Everett as a protector. He had viewed him as an iron jailer who had systematically suffocated his soul.
A dark, intoxicating wave of vindication surged through my veins. It was intoxicating. It was cruel. I had been right. All those years of fighting Everett, all those bitter accusations thrown across hospital corridors—I was Julian’s true confidant, the only one who had seen through the gilded cage.
“Look at you,” I whispered, stepping into Everett’s personal space, savoring the ruined shock in his grey eyes. “Look at what you did to him, Everett. You built him a tomb and called it a home. You killed him. By inches. By dollars. Just like I said.”
