Page 134 of Stolen Harmony
The office felt smaller suddenly, the air thinner, like Victor was sucking all the oxygen out of the room with his poison. The walls seemed to press closer, the windows offering no escape, just the view of a town that belonged to him now, that he could reshape according to his whims.
I lunged before conscious thought could intervene. My fist closed around his collar and I slammed him back against the wall behind his desk, hard enough to rattle the frames holding his degrees and commendations. His whiskey glass fell and shattered against the marble floor, amber liquid spreading across the polished stone like spilled blood.
“You son of a bitch,” I growled, my forearm pressed hard against his chest, cutting off just enough air to make him struggle. “You manipulative, sick son of a bitch.”
Victor laughed—actually laughed—the sound vibrating against my arm like the purr of a satisfied predator. His face was flushed now, blood rushing to his cheeks, but his eyes remained bright and alert and utterly unafraid.
“Ah. There it is. The famous Elias temper.” His voice was breathless but gleeful, like a child who'd finally gotten the toy he'd been wanting. “I was beginning to think you'd lost it completely.”
“You used him.” I pressed harder, watching his pale eyes water as he struggled for breath.
“I gave him exactly what he wanted,” Victor wheezed, his smile never faltering even as his face began to turn red. “What you were too cowardly to offer. He kissed me backlike he needed it to survive, Elias. His hands in my hair, his mouth hungry and desperate, his body—God, his body knew better than his head what it craved.”
Every word was a knife sliding between my ribs, each detail designed to corrupt and poison the memories I carried of Rowan's touch, his trust, his vulnerability.
“He begged, brother. He actually begged to be taken, to be used, to be anything other than the hollow shell you'd left him with when you decided propriety mattered more than love.”
“Shut up!” I shoved him harder against the wall, my vision going red around the edges. A picture frame fell and shattered, glass scattering across the floor like stars. “Shut your fucking mouth!”
Victor's laugh turned into a cough, blood flecking his perfect white teeth, but his amusement only seemed to intensify. He was feeding on my rage, growing stronger with every blow, every threat, every display of the violence he'd been trying to provoke.
“Do you want to know what he whispered to me?” His voice was barely audible now, forcing me to lean closer to hear him, to breathe the same air, to become complicit in his violation. “When his defenses finally crumbled and he let me see the truth underneath all that anger?”
My stomach churned, bile rising in my throat. “Don't.”
He leaned forward as much as my grip would allow, his lips almost touching my ear, his voice dropping to an intimate whisper. “He said he wanted to forget.”
My grip loosened involuntarily, and Victor took advantage of the moment to push me back, to straighten his tie and smooth his disheveled hair.
“You're lying,” I said, but the crack in my voice betrayed me, revealing the doubt he'd planted like a virus in my bloodstream.
“Am I?” Victor's eyes glittered with predatory satisfaction.
I slammed him against the wall again, my hand trembling with the effort not to crush his windpipe. He coughed, blood staining his lips, but his laughter didn't stop—if anything, it grew more delighted, more intoxicated by the chaos he'd created.
“You think he's innocent,” Victor continued, his voice hoarse but unbroken. “That he's some wounded bird you can rescue with gentle touches and patient love. But I saw the truth underneath all that carefully constructed vulnerability. He's hungry, Elias. Hungry to be touched, taken, consumed. He wants to be owned by someone strong enough to handle his darkness, and I gave him what you were too frightened to offer.”
“You're filth.” The words came out like venom, carrying all the disgust and hatred I'd been storing up for years of his casual cruelties, his calculated manipulations, his reduction of human beings to chess pieces in games only he understood.
“I'm practical,” he corrected smoothly, dabbing at the blood on his lip with a handkerchief that probably cost more than most people's monthly grocery budget. “I neutralized a potential threat to this family's reputation while simultaneously discovering the source of your recent distraction. And I must say, after experiencing him myself, I understand the appeal.”
He straightened his tie with hands that barely shook, already reassembling the mask of civilized authority that let him move through the world without anyone seeing the monster underneath.
“He's intoxicating, isn't he? That combination of fire and fragility, that way he looks at you like you're salvation even while he's begging to be destroyed. I can see why you've been so distracted lately, why your work has suffered, why you've been making suchpoor decisions.”
“Stay away from him.” My voice was barely recognizable, raw with rage and something deeper—fear that Victor had seen something in Rowan that I'd missed, had touched something I'd been too careful to reach for.
Victor's smirk didn't falter, if anything growing more pronounced. “Or what? You'll expose me? Destroy my reputation?” He laughed, the sound sharp and brittle as breaking glass. “Then the whole town will learn not only what young Rowan and I did in the privacy of his apartment, but what you've been wanting all along. Every careful touch, every loaded glance, every moment of improper desire you've been hiding behind a mask of mentorship and familial duty.”
The trap closed around me, each word a new bar in the cage he'd been building since the moment Rowan had set foot in Harbor's End. Destroy him, and Rowan went down with him. Expose the manipulation, and expose my own feelings in the process.
“Tell me,” Victor continued, his voice dropping to that same intimate whisper he'd used to describe violating Rowan's trust, “what will Harbor's End think when they realize that Elias Grant, pillar of the community, respected teacher and beloved widower, has been harboring indecent feelings for his dead wife's son? How long do you think it will take for the whispers to start?”
He moved back to his desk, pouring himself another whiskey with hands that were steady now, completely in control. “The beautiful thing about small towns is how quickly reputations can be destroyed. A few carefully placed words, a photograph taken at the wrong moment, a witness willing to testify about inappropriate behavior—it all adds up so quickly.”
The office felt like a tomb now, airless and suffocating, the walls pressing in from all sides. Every surface reflected backmy failures, my weaknesses, my inability to protect the person I loved from the monster who wore my brother's face.
“Even father knows better than to fight me now,” Victor continued, settling back into his leather throne with the satisfied air of a king surveying his conquered territory. “He gave me his house, his dignity, his silence. He sold out his own son's privacy for the price of keeping a roof over his head. Why should Rowan be any different? You both bend eventually, Elias. Everyone does, when I apply the right pressure.”
