Page 107 of The Psychopaths

Confusion tangles my thoughts. Yes, Aries had been rough, desperate even, but he didn’t take anything from me that I hadn’t given him. They both wanted to use me to hurt each other.

“You’re just as much at fault as he is.”

A twisted smile appears on his lips, sending a rush of cold dread slithering down my spine. “Catching up, finally? Realizing that I’m the monster I told you I was all along?”

“Nothing you do will ever make me believe you’re a monster. You’re hurt, you want retribution, you want to make them feel the same pain you felt. I understand that. I want to help you. That’s why I’m here, but we had a deal. I gave you what you wanted.”

He rolls his eyes. “The virgin sacrifice balances the scales?”

Something in his tone sets alarm bells ringing. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying”—he moves closer, eyes never leaving mine—“that Aries got far more out of this bargain than I did.”

I recoil slightly, mind racing to decode his meaning. “I don’t understand.”

“He didn’t just take your virginity, Lilian.” Arson’s voice drops lower, an edge of pain beneath the anger. “He took what he wanted and left you unconscious on the wet floor. Used you as a distraction to escape. Would have been halfway to freedom if I hadn’t stopped him.”

The revelation hits hard, pieces clicking into place.The soreness. The abandonment.The way Arson had been the one to carry me to safety, to clean me up, and care for me afterward.

“You’re lying,” I whisper, but doubt has already started to take root. “He wouldn’t just leave me there.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Arson laughs humorlessly. “I know it’s hard to believe that your precious Aries…the one you’ve been pining after for years, the same one who kept you at arm’s length… would do such a terrible thing, that he would use you as a weapon against me when the occasion came.”

Unwelcome tears prick at my eyes. “Stop it.”

“You want to know who Aries is, how much you matter to him?” he continues relentlessly. “Here it is: he fucked you, got what he wanted, and walked away without a backward glance. He left you bleeding and unconscious on the cold concrete. There’s not a doubt in my mind that he would have let you die there if it meant gaining his freedom.”

Each word chips away at something fundamental inside me—the years of fantasy built around Aries, the noble stepbrother who kept his distance to protect me. Strong, dependent, fierce in loyalty. The reality Arson presents is too painful to accept, yet too specific to dismiss.

“I don’t believe you,” I whisper, though I can hear the uncertainty in my voice.

“I don’t need you to believe me. I know what I saw. Or did you forget that it was me who gave you a shower? Who fed you?Who tended to your wounds? Who held you in their fucking arms?” I hate what he’s telling me. Hate that it leads me to doubt Aries and his intentions. That it makes me believe I might not know him at all.

“Why are you doing this?” I demand, pushing aside the sheets to stand despite my nakedness, despite the pain that shoots through various parts of my body. “You’re not innocent, either. You used me to hurt him, to torture him. And you still fucked me, even after he claimed me. If you want me to believe he is a monster, then I would have to believe you are, too, and that’s not possible.”

His gaze skims over every mark, lingering just long enough to make my skin burn, before he meets my eyes with a quiet, unreadable stillness. “It is possible. You just don’t want to acknowledge it. The proof is in every bruise, the tenderness between your thighs, the bite marks on your shoulder.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“What do you want me to say?” His voice cracks with its weight. “That watching him touch you made my vision blur with rage? That seeing him inside you felt like betrayal carved into my skin? That I wanted blood before, but now I want war? That finding your limp body on that floor made me want to rip him apart, piece by piece, until he begged for the end?”

I’m caught off guard by his response. This isn’t the calculated manipulation I’ve come to expect from him. This is something else—something dangerously close to genuine feeling.

“I want the truth,” I insist, stepping closer despite my vulnerability. “Not whatever twisted version serves your revenge fantasy.”

The air is so tense, crackling with unsaid emotion and rage. I’m waiting for the moment he snaps, but it never comes. Instead, he moves to the desk where his laptop sits closed. Hemakes quick work of opening it and typing in a few commands before he turns the screen to me.

“Don’t believe me?” he asks, voice flat. “Take a look for yourself.”

The security footage is grainy but clear enough. The time stamp shows yesterday’s events, during the flood. The camera angle captures the corridor outside Aries’s cell. I watch with growing horror as the events unfold on screen. Aries finishes inside me, then my body goes limp beneath him. He pulls out and pushes up off the floor. There’s no hesitation, no moment of concern or care for me. He simply stands, gathers his soaked pants, and walks away.

The camera follows his retreat down the corridor, and not once does he look back at my unconscious form. The clinical brutality of it, the casual disregard, makes my stomach clench.

“He didn’t even check to make sure you were still breathing,” Arson says quietly. “Didn’t try to move you out of the water. He just used you, fucked you, and discarded you like you meant nothing to him.”

A knife pierces my heart. I want to deny it, to claim the footage is manipulated, but the evidence is too raw and too real to be anything else. The time stamps continue, showing minutes passing with me lying there on the floor. Then Arson appears, regaining consciousness.

The rage on his face as he pushes himself up is unmistakable. Not calculated. Not performed for cameras, he might not have remembered were there. He wears a mask of pure, protective fury as he first checks me, then follows his brother.

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