Page 2 of Cruel When He Smiles

I look out toward the pool, the glass fogging faintly from the temperature difference. Somewhere in the mansion, there’s laughter, both forced and polite. They’ll all be gone by morning.

Everything inside me that should feel broken, doesn’t. Everything they think I lost and should’ve devastated me, left nothing behind. I didn’t lose a mother; I lost a manipulator. I didn’t lose a father; I lost an abuser.

I didn’t lose anything worth mourning, and now I’m free.

Free in the way monsters are.

Free in the way no one knows yet.

“You read it all?” he asks, referring to the notes they left behind before they died.

I nod once.

“And you still wanted the tattoo?”

My fingers flex again. “I wanted the reminder.”

That makes him smile. Not a big one, not the smug grin he usually tosses at the world. This one is darker. “You always were good at weaponizing your pain.”

I turn toward him then, finally meeting his eyes. “You taught me how.”

He lifts a shoulder like it’s nothing. I move closer, the sting in my spine already familiar as I sit on the couch across from him, elbows on my knees, hands clasped loosely. We’re silent for a while. There’s nothing left to say about the funeral; nothing left to say about them. They’re dead. Boxed. Buried.

He sits up, his legs stretching out, his forearms resting on his thighs, mimicking me. His lighter’s still in his hand, but he stops flicking it. “We don’t get to love, little brother. Not people like us.”

My eyes flick up to him again when he gets to his feet and crouches down in front of me. He taps his chest and then mine.

“Love is for the ones who feel without twisting it. You and me?” He taps again. “We don’t feel that way. We claim. We obsess. We possess. That’s what our father gave us, and whether you like it or not, it’s in our fucking blood.”

“You think we’re broken,” I say after a long pause.

“No,” he says, eyes still on mine. “I think we were built different. On purpose.Withpurpose. Our fathers taught us how to survive this world, even if it meant becoming the monsters they were too cowardly to own.”

Now,that, I agree with.

We weren’t born to be loved. His mother is a socialite who smiles on magazine covers and throws champagne at anyone who threatens her image. His father is a senator with blood on his shoes and a vault of favors locked behind polished teeth. My parents were a judge with a temper and a fist, and a psychologist wife who thought experiments on the human mind were best conducted on her son.

We’re not just fucked up, we’re bred that way, and there’s a strange peace in knowing that.

When I get to my feet again and catch my reflection in the mirror, I don’t see a boy in mourning. I see the man I’m becoming, and he looks nothing like either of my fathers. He looks worse because he’s not pretending to be good.

He’s not pretending at all.

Nate

19 Years Old

Present Time

Liam Callahan is full of shit, and everyone around here eats it up like it’s gospel.

Campus sweetheart, student government president, captain of the soccer team—every title, every handshake, every empty grin he gives the world merely adds to the lie. He’s got that All-American, trust-me-with-your-daughter look, the kind that makes professors fawn and girls lean in when he talks.

I know better. There’s something wrong with him.

It’s in the way he smiles too perfectly. How his eyes don’t quite match the expression on his face. The way people fall over themselves to explain away anything he does because he couldn’t possibly be at fault.

I don’t get that luxury.