Chapter 8
Everett didn't speak. He stared down at the open page, his throat working convulsively, his knuckles white against the desk. For the first time in the six years I had known him, Everett Cross had nothing to say. He was broken, pinned beneath the weight of Julian’s damning ink.
“Now,” I said, my voice dripping with venomous triumph as I reached down and took the leather journal from his slackening grip, pulling the volume entirely into my own hands beneath the lamp. “Let’s read what he wrote about the outside world. Let’s read the second part, Everett. Let’s see how he described the only person who tried to tear your iron bars apart.”
I smirked, adjusting the heavy volume so the amber glow washed directly over the Roman numeral *II*.
I cleared my throat, ready to project Julian’s poetic release, ready to deliver the final coup de grâce that would bring Everett Cross to his knees on this wet oak floor.
I looked down at the first line of the second entry.
My breath stopped.
The smile on my lips froze, turning into a grotesque, paralyzed grimace. The air in the room suddenly turned to ice, rushing out of my lungs as if I had been dropped into the freezing Atlantic surf below the cliffs.
Beneath the heading *The Second Devil*, the ink was dark, furious, and bleeding into the paper.
The entry began with a single sentence, written inside quotation marks, followed by Julian’s jagged handwriting:
*“‘If you truly loved me, you would burn his house to the ground.’”*
The words stared back at me from the page.
My vision tunneled. The room seemed to tilt on its axis, the bookshelves twisting into grotesque shadows.
Those were not poetic musings. Those were not the abstract cries of an artist.
That was the exact phrase.
The exact, venomous whisper I had hissed into Julian’s ear in the rain outside the Chelsea gallery three months ago, clutching his lapels while he wept, demanding that he choose between my devotion and Everett’s sanctuary. I had stood in the dark alleyway behind the exhibition, my knuckles white on his coat, forcing that ultimatum down his throat until he was hyperventilating: *If you truly loved me, you would burn his house to the ground.*
My voice died entirely in my throat. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe.
Slowly, like a condemned man turning toward the gallows, I lifted my eyes from the journal.
Across the narrow width of the desk, Everett had stopped trembling. The shattered, pale shock on his face was gone, replaced by a terrible, razor-sharp stillness.
His head was tilted slightly, his slate-grey eyes burning with a sudden, predatory calculation as he watched the blood drain from my face. He recognized the words. He had heard them before.
Everett stepped forward into the pool of amber light, his gaze locking onto mine with the terrifying precision of a trap snapping shut.
