ALEXANDER
Dashiell was asleep when I left, one hand resting in the empty space where my arm had been while his brown hair spread across my pillow. I stayed beside him long enough to watch the steady rise of his chest before bending to kiss his temple, careful not to wake him when he shifted beneath the blankets and sank deeper into sleep.
There were things I would do for Dashiell that he never needed to see.
*****
Nathaniel Brooks was already waiting when I arrived, restrained to a chair in the middle of the room with a dark covering over his head and mud streaking his expensive shoes. His breathing carried through the silence while I removed my coat, sat opposite him and waited.
"Hello?"
He tested the restraints, then pulled harder when nobody answered. "Who the fuck are you?"
Silence worked faster than conversation. Within minutes, his movements had become frantic enough to scrape the chair across the floor.
"This isn't fucking funny."
I had spent the afternoon learning exactly what kind of man was sitting in front of me. At thirty, Nathaniel had built himself an expensive, respectable life and filled the internet with photographs of friends, holidays and dinners that suggested he expected it to continue indefinitely.
His school records told a different story.
Dashiell had not been the only person Nathaniel enjoyed hurting. Complaints had vanished into disciplinary files, one student had transferred halfway through the year, and a younger boy had been gang-raped by Nathaniel and a group of his friends before adults at the school reduced what happened to an incident between boys and buried the accusation.
Nathaniel had spent more than a decade behaving as though that made it disappear.
I pulled the covering from his head.
He blinked against the light until his eyes found the mask covering my face, then looked around the unfamiliar room as confusion gave way to panic.
"What the fuck is this?"
I placed his phone on the table between us and opened the file beside my chair.
"Do you want money? I have money. Whatever someone paid you, I'll double it."
I ignored him and read the names from the first page.
"Nathaniel Brooks. Grant Holloway. Miles Bennett."
The fourth name drained what little color remained in his face.
"Stop."
I continued with the date of the complaint and the administrator who had made sure it disappeared from the disciplinary record.
Nathaniel pulled against the restraints hard enough to drag the chair backward. "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
I turned the page containing the original statement and the names of the students interviewed afterward.
"You know exactly what I'm talking about."
His eyes dropped to the file. "You have the wrong person."
"You wouldn't be this afraid if I did."
He swallowed. "What do you want?"
"I want you to confess."
A nervous laugh escaped him. "To what?"
"Everything you've spent years pretending never happened."
"Go fuck yourself."
I reached beside my chair and brought the hammer into view.
The laugh died.
Nathaniel stared at it before looking back at me. "Oh, come on. You're fucking insane. What, you're going to torture me because I gave an interview?"
He had not finished the sentence when the hammer crashed through the front of his shoe.
Leather split around the impact as his flesh collapsed beneath it and bone splintered with a wet crunch. Nathaniel's scream tore through the room while his entire body jackknifed against the restraints, sending the chair skidding sideways as blood flooded through the ruined shoe and spread beneath his foot.
He tried instinctively to drag it away, grinding the broken bones together and ripping another scream from himself.
"Fuck—fuck—Jesus Christ—"
His face had gone gray. Tears ran freely as he bent forward as far as the restraints allowed, gagging between ragged breaths while staring at the blood pouring through what remained of his shoe.
"My foot—fuck, my fucking foot—"
I rested the hammer across my knee and waited.
When Nathaniel finally looked at me again, hatred had joined the terror in his face.
"You fucking—" His voice cracked. "Psychopath."
I picked up his phone but left the camera off.
"You're going to tell the truth this time."
"Fuck you."
My fingers curled around the handle resting across my knee, and Nathaniel jerked against the chair.
"Wait! Fuck, just wait." His eyes moved between the phone and the weapon. "What do you want me to say?"
"What actually happened."
"I told the reporter what happened."
I raised the hammer a few inches.
"No, wait! Some of it wasn't true."
I lowered it while Nathaniel fought to steady his breathing.
"I knew Dashiell. We went to school together. I didn't like him."
"That much was obvious."
"He was fucking weird."
My grip changed, and Nathaniel corrected himself before I had to move.
"He was different, all right? He kept to himself. People fucked with him."
"You were one of them."
"I wasn't the only one."
"I didn't ask about anyone else."
Nathaniel looked down at the blood spreading beneath his chair. "Yes. I fucked with him."
There was no reason to record my questions. Whatever appeared online would contain only Nathaniel's voice, and before I made him confess publicly, I wanted to know who had put him in front of the reporter.
"Who contacted you about the article?"
"I don't know. I swear."
"How did they reach you?"
"Email first, then phone. They already knew I went to school with Dashiell and said there was going to be a story about him and the hospital."
"What did they want?"
"Stories that made him look bad."
"Did they tell you what to say?"
"Not exactly. They asked whether he'd always had trouble with people, whether teachers made allowances for him, shit like that."
"So you understood what kind of answers they wanted."
Nathaniel hesitated before nodding. "Yeah."
"How much did they pay you?"
The amount he gave me was pathetic. That was all it had taken for him to sell Dashiell's humiliation to strangers and drag old cruelty back into public view for his own benefit.
"Who paid you?"
"I don't know her."
The pronoun gave me more than the answer itself.
"You spoke to a woman?"
"A few times."
"Did she give you a name?"
"No."
"Did you meet her?"
"No."
"Calliope Langford?"
Nathaniel frowned through the pain. "Who the fuck is that?"
The confusion looked genuine.
I had enough.
I positioned his phone so the camera would capture only Nathaniel and the chair.
His eyes widened. "You want me to put this online?"
"You're going to tell everyone you lied, why you lied and what you were paid to do."
"No fucking chance."
My hand moved toward the hammer.
"Okay! Fuck—okay!"
I switched on the camera and stepped out of frame.
Nathaniel stared into the lens for a moment before introducing himself. His voice shook as he admitted that he had lied about Dashiell Harper-Astor, twisted events from school to fit the story he had been approached to tell and accepted money in return. He admitted receiving old photographs before publication and being pushed toward answers designed to damage Dashiell's reputation.
Twice his voice faltered, and twice his eyes moved beyond the camera toward me before he forced himself to continue.
When he finished, I stopped the recording.
"That's enough."
I opened the second file before he could mistake the silence for mercy, and the relief vanished from his face the moment he recognized the first page.
"No. Fuck no. That has nothing to do with Dashiell."
"It has everything to do with you."
"That was years ago."
"So was everything you sold to the reporter."
Nathaniel claimed he could not remember, blamed alcohol when that failed and eventually tried hiding behind how young they had been. I kept questioning him until he gave me the names, admitted what he had done and identified the adults who helped make the accusation disappear.
Then I turned the camera back on.
Nathaniel introduced himself again and confessed while I remained outside the frame, naming the others involved, describing what they had done and admitting how his own part had been concealed afterward. Pain had worn his voice down to a strained rasp, but halfway through he still tried to make himself sound less responsible.
I stopped recording and crossed the room.
His eyes dropped to his hand.
"No, wait—"
I flattened it against the chair arm and brought the hammer down.
His finger burst beneath the impact with a wet crack, bone splintering through torn skin as blood flooded between his knuckles and poured across his trousers. Nathaniel screamed until his voice broke, thrashing hard enough to wrench the mangled finger farther sideways and tear another howl from his throat while tears streamed down his face.
I waited until he could speak before restarting the camera.
He did not minimize anything again.
By the end of the confession, Nathaniel could barely force the words out. Blood had soaked through his shoe and spread beneath the chair while more coated his ruined hand and darkened his trousers, but he finished before I stopped the recording and checked both files.
Then I posted them from his account.
Nathaniel watched them appear online, one after the other, and whatever remained of his composure disappeared with them.
"You ruined my life."
"You managed that without my help."
I rose and walked toward him, forcing the chair backward as he tried uselessly to escape.
For years, Nathaniel had mistaken silence for absolution. He had hurt people, watched adults protect him from consequences and eventually grown confident enough to sell Dashiell's pain for money.
I lifted the hammer, and Nathaniel started screaming before it ever reached him. The blow crashed into the side of his face hard enough to whip his head sideways, splitting his cheek open and spraying blood across the floor and the front of his shirt as his body collapsed against the restraints.
Blood filled his mouth and spilled over his lower lip while swelling spread across one side of his face, but his chest continued to rise.
Exactly what I wanted.
I wiped the hammer against his shirt and handed it to the man waiting near the doorway.
"Keep him alive."
Death would have ended things too quickly, and I had no interest in being kind.
Later, I opened the file my investigators had sent and found that Nathaniel had given them more than he realized. The email account created to contact him led nowhere, as did the number used afterward, but the payment had passed through enough accounts to leave a trail.
A company led to another account, then another transfer, until the money finally connected to someone who had worked for Calliope Langford.
It was not proof yet, but it was enough to keep digging. If Calliope was behind this, losing her career after the first time she tried to destroy Dashiell had taught her nothing.
I closed the file knowing I had been far too merciful once already, and this time I would do something she could never recover from.