“Are you sure you’re okay?” Aaron reaches over to rub the back of my neck, one hand still steering the SUV. “I’m just waiting for you to lose it.”

“He’ll be okay.” Roarke leans between the seats, ass in the backseat. “Stop coddling Ez– just give him a minute for his mind to play catchup. You know how it is. Once he watches the rewound tape, he’ll be caught up to speed.”

“He’s been even for months– this came out of nowhere.” Aaron sounds nervous with concern for me. After our kidnapping, all it takes is for Aaron’s voice to break to draw me from my mind, but that’s not happening tonight for some reason.

“There was a big to-do last night in Grant’s room. Levi gave him Faith as a Christmas present, and Regina and Kat walked in on them.”

“Oh, my God!” Aaron exclaims, but the words are meaningless to me. “What did Regina do? What did Faith do? Does Grant still have a cock?”

“Acting like wounded animals, Regina and Faith attacked Kat instead of just running off to lick their wounds.” Palms cup my shoulders from behind, Roarke rhythmically giving me a massage. “Grant defended Kat with Levi running interference. It was a messy shit-show.”

“That explains why Kat was acting strange– they all were, actually.”

“There isn’t anything Katya doesn’t know now. She spent half the night smoking weed in the solarium, bitching about how worthless men are, Faith wholeheartedly in agreeance, with Levi acting as a buffer. Then Kat spent the whole day talking with Priscilla.”

“Priscilla Whittenhower?” Aaron’s voice pitches high with confusion. “Why?”

“Don’t you worry about the why,” comes out vaguely threatening from behind me, directed at Aaron.

Roarke growls into my ear, fingernails biting into my skin, like he wants to snap my neck and be done with me. He’s physically capable of it, loyalty’s the only thing stopping him. I have no idea why this conversation is upsetting him as much as it is, while it’s just flowing over me in a mass of confusion and mixed emotions.

As my enforcers chatter around me, I’m wavering in a fog of self-creation. My mind’s way of protecting oneself from the guilt and shame. I know I’ve done something I will regret this evening as surely as I know to breathe. My body is sexually sated, while my mind screams in torment. I realize both halves of the whole betrayed me on a primal level.

Both wanted what I had never planned to give, and the guilt is suffocating.

It’s a form of rape– a rape of oneself. When one half, or both halves, take dominion over my body to do as they will, it is the highest violation.

Already sensing something major was on the cusp of happening within my personal life, my mind fractured. One half took care of me while the other half laid in wait. Working in conjunction, they betrayed me.

I betrayed myself.

I never planned on going through with my scheme with Whitt and Dalton. It was always a means to an end– an end where the boys lived a happily ever after, far removed from the fear, guilt, shame, and remorse over their sexuality. I simply wanted them to know they were better than they were behaving, to know they were worth more than waffling in self-doubt.

I never planned on being with them– fucking them –being fucked by them.

With a desperation borderlining on madness, I hunger with a desire so fierce that I’m on the edge of starvation.

I must see Cortez.

I must get to the Christmas party, because no doubt Cortez knows of my nightly activities, and no doubt he will surely leave me now. He gave me an ultimatum, then poured his heart out by telling me he was gay, and I repaid him by fucking two of our friends.

I’m a monster who deserves no love or respect.

I’m always on the edge of madness, while Cortez is always on the edge of flight. More so now than ever. I can feel it roiling in my blood. Cort’s behavior is not his norm– something is driving him away. He freely gives me unlimited access to his body, but his emotions are closed off, when it has always been the other way around.

I never feared losing Cortez, even when he denied me his body. His emotions were always an open book. Even when screaming I hate you , Cortez’s face was filled with love. Even when professing love, Cortez’s face was filled with hurt. One constant, the love was ever-present.

Lately, Cortez has been suppressing the love while reveling in the lust. Fear has me forcing Aaron to drive faster.

This is what I despise. I hate that I have to ask myself what I did, as if having a conversation about a separate entity. But it was ME who did it. The discombobulating sensation is more than I can bare. If I didn’t have people counting on me, I would’ve ended my confused existence by now.

My skin flushes pink, a mix of lust and embarrassment as I enter Misery Castle’s opulence. As if waiting for the perfect opportunity to ruin me, my halves spill the past few hours into my mind just as we arrive at the entrance to the ballroom. They divulge the hedonism I engaged in this evening with Whitt and Dalton. Gleefully flashing sights, sounds, tastes, and scents into my mind. A kaleidoscope of lust-filled passions.

This is how it’s always been, with Ezra gloating, bloated, fat and sated over this evening’s events. Ezra loves to be naughty and never tells me what I did until well after Cortez has received the punishment. In this instance, the punishment and the crime fall upon myself, so he – me –shows me what I’ve done.

Rosy pink flesh, striated with lean muscles, glistens with sweat. Pale, translucent skin filled with good health thrusts deep within me. A fingertip trails down a tattoo, its owner proudly professing that one of the Kings decorating the decadent landscape of his side represents me. Green eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, blue eyes flick like images being shot with the rapid flash of a camera shutter– an unearthly color and a color so deep every sea envies the shade.

The sights put the pink high in my cheeks. But the melodious sounds– a composition of lust played by the greatest orchestras in the world fill my mind, causing my skin to tighten and burn with embarrassed arousal. The keen of two very satisfied young men in their early twenties without a lick of hair on them, boys who were almost untried. Innocent yet jaded by my knowledge. Ezra, I , had drank them deep, consumed them, and turned them into men.

My alters worked in communion with one another on the pair of young men. Ezra for the pleasure of flesh, and Master Ez for the pleasure of the cerebral fuck.

I’m not proud that I partook, but proud of the way Whitt and Dalton owned their true nature, reveled in the pleasure of being one’s true self. Never again will they deny their need for one another– they will never take the wrong path and fall off course.

The last thing I remember this evening– I , me , Ez –as I refuse to think of myself as Ezra or Master Ez. The last thing I remember as a whole being, not figments being flashed by a spiteful child or apologetic images being poured into my memories like glacial waters by an ethical tyrant.

The last thing I remember is Katya.

Our full-to-bursting household had just finished the Misery Castle Christmas dinner from Hell. All of us knowing, but not truly knowing what was to come upon midnight. We were ants. Predatory. Anticipatory. A skittish Cortez wanted more time with the children, and the second he was out of earshot, Katya demanded my entire attention… and then I draw a blank, save the flashes from my separate halves.

I see Katya through a blurry haze from Ezra’s memories. This is the perplexing facet of my being. I focus on what I fail to remember, the dark void of utter blankness, and one or the other always mentally answers my unasked question. They pour difficult truths within my fractured mind. But what they show is never truth, as it’s filtered by their intentions, their protections. Their perceptions.

This is the mind of madness.

As I near Whittenhower Estate’s Grand Ballroom, my eyes instantly seek and find Cortez waiting for me– gaze connecting with my twin gaze. I relax. I blush. I feel guilt. I feel love. I toss Cortez a wary smile, heart ceasing to thud as he blushes and smiles in return.

Cortez isn’t mad at me, but he most definitely knows what I’ve done against my will. Pupils dilated, eclipsing the storm raging within, Cortez flashes me a heated look. A look I welcome. A look that beads my body with sweat and causes my cock to pulse like nothing ever could. I know in an instant that Cortez is not fleeing me, because he’s already imagining re-marking his territory with his body, with his lust, with his love.

I gladly await the exquisite torture.

The hallway outside of the ballroom is devoid of anyone but my immediate family, somehow we managed to be the first to arrive. Gwen is patiently waiting just inside the doors at a table hosting a single chair. Gwen is our greeter– the hostess of the evening. The keeper of Dominion history.

But none of that matters, because I’m captured within a tightly wound familial web. My son and daughter. Brother and sister. Eyes nearly the same but not quite the same shade. The male version is steely, just as Cort’s and mine, a gift passed down from a set of Hunter twins to their sons. The feminine version is softer yet colder, bluer– a trait passed down from a Holden to her son. My children are like Ezra and Master Ez within me, halves of my whole. Side-by-side, my child half– the Holden, represented by Ava– stands by my stronger half– the Hunter, represented by Zane.

Witnessing Zane and Ava united for the very first time, they manage to heal me, change me, unite me.

Cortez pumps the very blood through my veins, for he is my beating heart– his life sustaining my own. For if he breathes, I refuse to die. But that has never been enough to keep me even, balanced. Whole. My children, my halves, they integrate me.

Integrated.

Gasping for breath, I slump against the wall, legs threatening to give out on me. Mind foggy, I experience nothing but my son and daughter and Cortez’s gaze holding mine. Even enraged with me over what’s happening with her mother, a delicate hand fills mine. A soothing presence steps near, then a younger version of my own hand slowly slides into mine.

I hold my eldest children’s hands, while the twins tug on my pant legs, all the while holding my partner’s gaze, and I am whole.

Integrated.

Heart pumping wildly out of control, breath sawing between my parted lips, eyes bulging in wondrous fear, my world view tilts on its axis, returning me to the state of existence I haven’t experienced in almost twenty years. I am finally myself.

Dr. Ezra Holden-Zeitler.

Young Ezra Holden converges with Ezra Hunter, as they were always the two parts of the whole. There was never a Master Ez, because he was created when I learned my paternity– my true identity as Ezra Hunter. I gladly took on another identity to escape the past and the future, that of Ezra Zeitler, because I couldn’t be either, not Ezra Holden as I was born, nor Ezra Hunter as I was destined.

A gasp rushes out my filled lungs, pulled from the mental inundation I undergo. The transformation. The completion. Memories don’t pour into me in a frigid wash. The images aren’t snide snippets of gloating. It’s a lifetime of memories without unwarranted protection, twisted intention, or altered perception.

I just know EVERYTHING in an instant, from one heartbeat to the next, one breath to the next.

Ezra and Master Ez no longer exist.

Ezra was the boy who refused to be a Hunter, to the point he broke. Master Ez was the man who held me back from ending that boy’s life, because I couldn’t handle the truth of how I came into being, of who I was to Cortez.

Ezra and Master Ez are no more, because they are more together than apart.

There is only me– a whole entity.

Dr. Ezra Holden-Zeitler.

Integrated.