a liar and a fraud. I should never have believed a single word that came out of your mouth.”
“I can’t argue that I’m not a liar,” Cyrus admitted. “But for what it’s worth, I was telling you the truth most of the time. I didn’t know my father was behind any of this until last night.”
Konstantin interrupted with an exaggerated snort. “Now tell her if it would have made a difference if you had.”
“It might!” Cyrus snapped over his shoulder, and his father laughed at him.
“As long as I promised to give you Blake, you’d have done whatever I told you to do.”
Cyrus’s face flushed with anger. I didn’t know why he was getting so pissed off. Did he really think it made a difference whether he’d been lying from the beginning or just since his phone call this morning? “Then why didn’t you tell me?” Cyrus countered.
“Because I would have had to watch you wring your hands and listen to you whine about it.” Konstantin gave Anderson a nudge with his foot, as if to reassure himself that he was still dead. Then he turned to me. “My dear son has pretensions of moral superiority. He doesn’t mind making an omelet, as long as he doesn’t have to break the eggs himself.”
The anger that flared in Cyrus’s eyes made me hope he and Konstantin were going to get into a fight. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to take advantage of that fight, but I was sure I would find a way to do something useful while they weren’t looking.
Unfortunately, they weren’t stupid enough to give me the opportunity.
Cyrus stood up straight, wiping the remainder of my blood off his hand and onto his pants. “I don’t think it’s a character flaw that I don’t enjoy hurting people.”
Cyrus had his back to Konstantin and couldn’t see his father rolling his eyes. For once, Konstantin and I were in agreement about something. It might make Cyrus more comfortable if someone else did the dirty work for him, but the fact that he didn’t enjoy it and would rather not see it didn’t make him a better person. Nor did the fact that he seemed to feel at least a little bad about it.
“You’re worse than he is,” I said to Cyrus. “At least he’s not a hypocrite!”
Cyrus hung his head in what looked suspiciously like shame. The look on his face said he actually did feel more than a little bad about what he was doing, and I suspected he was fully aware of the hypocrisy of his own position. The question was, was there some way I could take advantage of his vulnerabilities and turn him against his father? Because I didn’t care what Anderson had told me about how Konstantin couldn’t do anything to him. Konstantin had a plan, and a reason to believe it would work. Anderson might be a god, but that didn’t mean he was never wrong, and this would be the world’s worst time to prove it.
“Don’t do this,” I begged. “Blake still cares about you. I can hear it in his voice when he talks about you. You can work things out with him if you want to. But not if you kill all the other people he cares about. You do that, and he’ll hate you, and you’ll never have what you really want.”
My impassioned plea missed its mark.
“He’ll hate me at first,” Cyrus conceded. “But you know what they say about time healing all wounds. I’m willing to wait.” A tiny smile played along his lips. “And I think I’ll enjoy the challenge of trying to seduce him and win him back.”
Cyrus stepped over my outstretched legs, carefully avoiding the pool of Anderson’s blood as he put his foot on the first step. I realized that meant he wasn’t going to stick around and watch whatever Konstantin was planning to do to Anderson and me. I also realized that meant whatever unpleasantness was in store for us would likely start as soon as he left the basement.
I did not want him to leave the basement.
“Cyrus! Wait!”
I had no arguments left to make, no hope that Cyrus was going to change his mind. In fact, I had only two hopes left: that I could keep delaying things until Konstantin got careless and didn’t shoot fast enough to keep Anderson dead; or that Anderson was right and there truly was nothing Konstantin could do to him in the long run. Neither