“It’s not as satisfying if you don’t hear them scream.”
“That’s what makes you a demon.”
Charles laughed. “I guess you’re right.” He paused. “But you, Axel, really were exactly what he hoped for. He would have been so proud to know what he’d created. Are you sure you’re not the demon in this room?”
“He would have been proud, but he wouldn’t have understood. He was a demon, and demons don’t see truth.” Axel paced for a second and then stopped, staring at Charles. “I’m nothing like him,” he said. “He killed innocents for the pure pleasure of it, just like you. I do it out of necessity and for a grander plan, a righteous plan. I abolish evil and protect innocents.”
“What about her?” Charles nodded his head toward Arryn. “What about all of them?”
Axel glanced at Arryn, pressing his lips together. “It’s for the ritual. Only the power of a sacrifice will set us all free. It’s been written.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
Axel smiled softly. “Make light if you want. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t see truth either. Just like him.”
“No. He didn’t see truth, did he?” Charles said, more softly now. “He thought Everett was just like him. He thought Everett would take ownership of that room once he no longer could. I watched the videos. I know what he did.”
Axel stared at him for a moment, turning away and then back, his arms crossing and uncrossing as he became agitated. He let out a strangled chuckle, tipping his head to the low ceiling above. “Well, let’s see. That’s because my grandfather wasn’t only a demon himself, but he thought he had a secret recipe for his own demonic legacy. That’s what Everett was supposed to be! His legacy,” he repeated, voice going higher. “How could he let those special, special genes of his just die out? There are so few in the world, he said, those rare individuals who have the strength and the fortitude to extinguish unnecessary life.”
His legacy? Unnecessary life? Liza’s head was pounding as she tried desperately to understand. Gordon Draper was a . . . killer? What kind of alternate universe had she been dropped into?
“Those women were nothing more than manure for his garden—literally.” Axel let out another forced-sounding chuckle. “He hadn’t seen any possibility in our father,” Axel went on, “so he’d hidden his hobby from him, conducted his playtime elsewhere. But our father suspected. He suspected he was evil, and so he kept us away from him. Then our parents died and . . . well, we were at our grandfather’s mercy. He thought Everett started the fire that killed our parents on purpose. He thought he was fascinated by fire just like he’d been as a boy, but it was an accident. Only an accident. Everett was not like him. But he made him participate.” A high keening sound erupted from Axel’s mouth before he cut it off. “To hear my brother beg him not to . . . to hear him . . .” Axel’s voice broke but, once again, he gathered himself quickly. “He tried to make Everett his legacy. And instead he ruined my brother. He ruined him.”
Ruined. She stared at Axel in horror, trying desperately to understand what was happening, what this whole thing was about. Ruined. It was the word her brother had used too. The reason he’d wanted so desperately to set them all free.
In some sort of sick and twisted effort to create a legacy of horror, Gordon Draper had apparently traumatized his grandsons so severely, and in the wake of such a tragic loss, that one had taken his own life and the other had gone insane?
Was she understanding this correctly? It seemed too unbelievable to be true.
And yet here they were, chained to chairs in an underground cavern about to be set on fire.
“Explain it, Dr. Nolan,” Axel said, his voice hoarse. “Tell us all why he thought Everett’s supposed obsession with fire meant he’d inherited our grandfather’s demonic genes.”
Liza’s head cleared infinitesimally. Fire . . . fire.
She blinked, swallowed, mindful of angering him or . . . pushing some unknown button. “It’s called The Macdonald Triad,” she said haltingly. Gordon Draper had believed his grandson carried his same psychopathic tendencies, the same flawed sequence of genetics. “Your grandfather believed Everett had exhibited at least one of the three signs said to be predictive of later violent tendencies, particularly