Page 35 of His Trick

The game room had them all.

Every head I’d ripped from their bodies.

The trophies of control my father placed. Each and every one was a notch in his belt. When I was a stupid fucking teenager,I thought my father accepted me. Saw me for what I was and wanted to help me survive. He told me that the hunts and the trials were to better my mind and to sharpen and hone my natural skills.

But one night I found out the truth. The evidence was as thick as the blood coating my hands.

My father didn’t want me to rip apart animals anymore.

He wanted me to hunt people, to stalk, calculate, and eliminate his enemies. Jovial fat men donating to cancer foundations and pissing off my father were enough to unleash his favorite weapon—me.

I killed so many nameless faces for him.

I never questioned him.

I never asked him what they did.

I simply found and erased them, just as he asked. A lot of the people fought, some even got the upper hand on me.

My scrawny body was no match for a grown man, not as a teen.

It was from watching my mother’s and my father’s whores where I learned that getting to a target wasn’t always about brute strength. People weren’t bears or mountain lions. Sometimes you had to use more than just your hands.

I used my body, thousands of hands and mouths, using me the way I used them. Blissfully unaware and satiated until their necks opened up to me. I used a river of their life’s blood spilling to cleanse my body.

It was a ritual of sorts for so many years and so many kills. It wasn’t until I was eighteen that I finally saw my father for the snake he was. My tattoo was a reminder never to allow myself to be fooled again.

‘You can’t hate a monster for being a monster. You can only hate yourself.’

This house would never be a home. But for the time I was here, keeping the mask my family so proudly wore clean and visible, I would make this my stage.

And Shiloh?

He was already playing his part. Whether he liked it or not.

I started back toward the mansion, silent and steady, with my boots sinking into the earth as if I’d always belonged to it somehow.

The closer I got to my old home, the louder the night grew. Laughter spilled from the back porch, glass clinking, voices sharp with liquor, and confused from whatever drug they were snorting.

They were careless, all of them.

They always had been.

But money definitely made people stupid. It let them think no one was watching.

But I am.

I slipped through the side door, not bothering with the front like a guest would. Guests were noticed, greeted with bullshit hellos. But shadows weren’t.

Inside, the air smelled of cigar smoke and expensive perfume, both heavy and cloying. Music thudded faintly from a record player somewhere down the hall, my mother’s old gramophone playing her classical soundtracks.

It contrasted with the chaos outside. Even with the noise having died down, there were still stragglers clinging to some form of fun. I hummed the melody, trying to drown out the chatter.

People moved in clumps.

The masked boys were too loud for their own good, clunky and foolish, while the girls were now draped in silk and pearls like flashy ornaments.

None of them mattered. I kept moving. Mother and father could have their cheap, ball-style mockery. I wasn’t interested in entertaining these people any longer.