Harry was standing in the hallway, surrounded by three suitcases.
“Christ!” he yelped, immediately backing himself against the wall.
He was such easy prey. If I hadn’t been so young, so impressionable, and such a fuck-up, maybe all of this could have been prevented when I was a kid.
Maybe I could be with Lenora now the way I wanted to.
Maybe I’d have a future that wasn’t all bleak.
“Vaughn?” he asked. “Is that you? How did you get your hands on that mask? This is… Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“God’s not going to save you.” I tsked, well aware of how creepy I looked with the mask.
This was one for the fucking books. If nothing else, the great Harry Fairhurst, creator of the most human-like eyes in the history of art, was going to go out in style.
“What is in your hand?” he gasped, wincing visibly. “God, I don’t want to die. Vaughn, I was young. I did some horrible things, but I…I…stopped. You know I did. You saw me with Dominic Maple. I haven’t done those other things in nearly five years.”
I lifted the khopesh—an Egyptian sickle-sword—examining it from all angles. I’d forged it myself in my cellar afterhours. It took me weeks to get it just right. It was small and sharp. I looked down, examining it through the slits my mask provided, feeling hot and sweaty under it.
“Let’s talk about the heartless prince,” I said with a calm I couldn’t really feel. Not killing him wasn’t an option. This was what I’d been waiting for since I was eight. But it wasn’t as climactic as I’d thought it would be.
He was sweating and shaking, his back against the wall, but seeing his fear didn’t bring me as much pleasure as seeing Len’s face when she opened the door for me.
Harry pissed his pants just then. He couldn’t even cover it, because one of his hands was stretched up, begging me not to hurt him, while the other was still in a cast and a sling. Also my doing.
“I just said some things. I didn’t mean them…” he started.
“Remember our conversation that day?” I strode to him purposefully, ignoring his words. “Because I do, very damn well. According to one researcher, the death mask was originally intended for someone else, not the young prince. The artistic accuracy and skill is so precise, people find it hard to believe it was made in such a rush.” I took another step, watching him collapse on the floor, against the wall. “They think it was intended for his stepmother, Queen Neferneferuaten. So really, it was someone else who should have died and put on a mask.”
I carefully removed the mask from my face, waiting for the sick pleasure to kick in.
But it wasn’t there.
I went through the motions, cradling the mask against my waist. My hair stuck to my forehead, and when I looked down and saw Harry weeping, all I wanted to do was kick his face, turn around, and go straight back to Lenora.
It was frustrating as shit, because there was nothing I craved more than to be present in this moment, which I had planned for over a decade.
I put the mask on his face, and he was so scared, he didn’t even try to struggle. With his face covered, he squeezed his eyes shut, sobbing, in hysterics.
“Please. I know you’re not a murderer. Please, Vaughn, please.”
I stared at him, clutching my weapon, turned off by the idea of slitting his throat and letting him bleed dry. I was going to make it look like burglary. I did have the perfect alibi.
“Lenora will loathe you,” he spat, trying another tactic.
“Lenora knows,” I corrected. “She understands me.”
He laughed humorlessly, shaking to the core. “That doesn’t mean she’d ever look at you the same way. You think she’d want to be touched by a murderer? Kissed by a cold-blooded killer? You think she’s going to marry one? Have his children? Do you think my sweet, beautiful niece is able to fall in love with the man who killed her uncle?”
When I remained silent, debating whether this question was even relevant, he took it as a sign of my weakness, regaining some of his confidence.
“We can make this all go away. I sucked your cock and came into your hand. Big fucking deal. I didn’t sodomize you. You didn’t fuck me. Other boys had it a lot worse, Vaughn, so stop being such a bitch about it. Let me go, and I promise to stay in Brunei for the remainder of my life. I have the means to sustain myself there.”
“You’ll just harass other boys.”
That was part of why I wanted to kill him. Not only because of all the things he did to me, but because of the prospect he might do them to others. He’d said he hadn’t touched an unwilling victim in five years. I had no reason to take his word for it.