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Because I’ve seen her eyes.

Strong but fragile.

Paranoid and curious.

Hostile but desperately lonely.

Something inside of Verity Sinclaire is horrifyingly likeus, and the longer she looks, the more she’s going to see the truth. We grew up in East End—three lost boys, motherless, haunted by the ghost of Father’s dead son. Kept in line by his obsession with perfection, lineage, and creation. As with everything, we each have our roles.

Wicker, with his attractiveness and ability to charm, was always too valuable to scar–physically, at least. Pace’s calculated intelligence, his endurance for isolation and affinity for torture, made him Father’s perfect tool.

But me?

I’m just a mechanic of working parts, and someone has to take the punishments we’re due. Someone who can pay the debts. Someone who knows how to hurt but hide it.

Someone who can be ugly.

It takesme twice the time, but I manage to get to the dungeon the next day. When I enter the observation room, my brothers look at me in surprise.

“I saw the text,” I explain.

“We just wanted to keep you in the loop,” Wick says, brows knitted as he assesses me. Without asking, he takes the hair tie from my wrist and steps behind me to pull my hair back. “You didn’t need to come down.”

But we all know that I did. There’s no rest or days off when you’re an Ashby, and definitely not when you’re a Prince. Father was gracious enough to call us in on a Saturday—giving me a day to recover.

“Oakfield wants to talk,” Pace says, but even though he nods at the man behind the glass, I can see the tight worry in his eyes.

My mouth tugs up into a cruel grin. “I bet he does.”

He’s back in the chair, wrists strapped to the armrests, a trickle of blood coming down his cheek. There’s a process to torture–a lot of people don’t get that. Pace is always first. He’s so accustomed to the physical element that sometimes it’s like he leaves the room entirely, leaving nothing behind but his muscles and malice. Burning. Hitting. Cutting. He’s an expert at bodily demolition, which is one of the reasons he’s so good on the ice.

Wicker is second. After all that pain and humiliation, sometimes all it takes is one gentle word–one trick of kindness–and people will break like fine china. Even when they don’t, my brother has a way of talking information out of them.

I’m always the last resort.

If a mark finds themself on my table, they’ve landed themselves in some serious shit. It’s the kind of thing a person just doesn’t come back from. I’ve taken fingers. Toes. Hands. Feet. Arms, if they hold out long enough. Once, a guy’s foreskin. Sometimes, if they give up the goods soon enough, I make an attempt at reattachment. Other times, I send the souvenir home with them, nestled on a bed of ice.

Then there’s more passive torture. Starvation, sleep deprivation, gaslighting. The gaunt, hollow curve of Bruce’s cheeks and the dark rings under his eyes indicate that phase is in effect. The physical stuff is well and good, but the best way to torture someone is psychological. Using their mind against them. That part is harder to see, and with a sociopath like Oakfield, it’s almost impossible to tell if we’ve gotten under his skin.

“Yeah.” Wick rolls his eyes. “He says he has something we may be interested in.”

Nodding, I say, “Then I guess we should find out what the man wants to share.” Pace swings open the door and I step aside—too quickly. I wince from the jolt of pain down my back and add, “This better be worth it.”

Wicker frowns. “Lex, seriously, we can—”

“It’s fine.” I crack my knuckles. “I have a few questions myself.”

In the long hours I laid in bed, willing my skin to knit back together, I kept thinking of that mark on Verity’s back; an O with a line slashed through it. It’s the same brand that landed this bastard down in our cell with a death sentence from a second King.

When I saw it on Verity that night in the med room, I’d felt a visceral disgust. It’s such a West End thing, the way they voluntarily mar their flesh, and even if I’d never touched Scratch a day in my life, I still would have struggled to get hard after seeing it there.

It’s different now that we know its purpose.

“Wick,” I say, keeping my eyes trained on Bruce, “let me take the lead.”

He hesitates, but says, “You got it.”

I’m careful to control my gait when I walk in, stiff but sure, hiding the wince from the pull of my shirt fabric against my shoulder blades. Up close, Oakfield looks even worse than from afar. His skin is pale and peeling. Nails bitten to the quick. All traces of golden boy have been diminished from being locked down here for two weeks.