Page 142 of Creeping Lily
“I should have ended this by starting with you,” Titan snarls, his voice guttural, raw, more animal than human.
Bentley’s lips curl even as his breath shudders, eyes bulging. He forces out a rasp, a sneer twisted by pain. “Do it… coward. Kill me.”
For a moment, time halts. Titan’s grip tightens, veins bulging in his arms, the life draining from Bentley’s face beneath his hands. I see it—the war inside him, the brutal, soul-eating battle. One choice ends this. One choice damns him forever.
Then, with a sound that’s half-snarl, half-sob, Titan shoves away. His chest heaves, his shoulders sag like they’ve carriedcenturies. He staggers back, blood dripping, eyes hollow. “You’re not worth it,” he says, the words flat, dead, torn from somewhere deep inside him.
Bentley hacks, dragging in lungfuls of air, his face a grotesque mask of defiance and ruin. Titan doesn’t even look at him again. His silence is heavier than any sentence, heavier than death.
I move to him, trembling, my hand brushing his arm. He flinches like my touch burns, but he doesn’t pull away.
“It’s over,” I whisper, the words shaking out of me, though I don’t know if they’re true.
Titan doesn’t respond. His eyes stay locked on Bentley, but what he’s staring at isn’t his brother anymore. It’s the battlefield inside him, one we’ll never see, one he may never crawl out of.
Tom Walker insiststhat I destroyed his family, that everything began to unravel with me. He’s adamant, as though saying it often enough might make it true. But I know better. Their downfall didn’t start with me—it began long before, on November 8, 1999, when Tom Walker paid Larry Shine to switch a lifeless newborn with a living, breathing child who wasn’t his, cursing his bloodline for all eternity. Maybe it began even earlier, in the quiet, hidden sins Tom carried like a cancer, feeding on his soul long before I ever crossed his path.
The moment he stole another person’s child and claimed him as his own was the moment Tom Walker sealed his fate. That act wasn’t just a crime; it was a declaration. A decision to sacrifice truth, love, and humanity at the altar of control. Whatever he thought he was protecting, whatever legacy he believed he was building, it was doomed the second he placed his hands on another’s life and called it his. Because that child he stole andultimately claimed as his own – that child would inevitably be his downfall.
Power corrupts. It destroys.
It destroys not with a single blow, but with the slow erosion of what is good, what is pure, what is human. It seeps into the cracks of the soul like water into stone, freezing, expanding, shattering from within. It whispers sweet lies, promises gilded with ambition, until those who wield it forget who they were before its touch. Power turns love into leverage, trust into manipulation, and dreams into weapons. In its shadow, even the brightest hearts dim, and the strongest convictions crumble into dust. For power does not merely change hands; it changes hearts.
But this story isn’t just about power. It’s about the people who surrender to it.
Power corrupts. But it is people who destroy.
72
TITAN
The Walkers didn’t just build a web of lies. They built a labyrinth meant to trap, to crush, to suffocate. Every thread is slick with disease, every knot tied in blood, every strand tightening the more I pull. It coils around my throat, daring me to breathe while reminding me who spun it. Tom Walker. Always Tom. The center of the web. The puppeteer who smiled like a father and schemed like the corrupt politician he was.
The lodge breathes with ghosts tonight. Moonlight leaks through the cracks in the boarded windows, pale streaks across the walls like skeletal fingers. The air is dense; I feel it pressing against me, like the weight of the past has taken on flesh and bone just to suffocate me. Every corner hums with secrets, every creak of the old floorboards whispers of sins buried but not forgotten.
And it all comes back to him. To Tom. To the perfect family portrait he fought so hard to frame in gold. Lies that began with a dead baby. A tragedy that should’ve ended in grief. Instead, it was scrubbed clean and rewritten into something monstrous.
The truth peels away in layers, slow, jagged, cruel—liketearing scabs off wounds that never healed. Olivia, the woman I once called mother, smothered her child in sleep. A baby boy. He should have let her grief destroy her. It should have been the end. But Tom Walker doesn’t believe in endings, not when he can twist them into beginnings. He didn’t mourn. He didn’t falter. He didn’t even hesitate.
He found Larry Shine, a man who lives in places sunlight doesn’t touch. A fixer. A parasite who feeds on desperation, trading in secrets, favors, corpses. Shine didn’t just clean up problems—he erased them. For the right price, he gave Tom exactly what he wanted: a breathing child to fill Olivia’s empty arms. A replacement. A mask.
Me.
The thought curdles in my stomach. Some nameless baby ripped out of the arms of a mother who’d just given birth to him, traded like currency, handed to a man who only wanted a prop for his façade. Not a son. Never a son. Just a pawn. A symbol. A lie.
Why? That’s the poison in my veins. Why didn’t he let grief do what it was meant to do—end things? Why build a legacy on theft and deceit? Why tether me to his name like a chain around my neck?
Because Tom Walker never cared about grief. He cared about control. Every move he’s ever made was a calculation. Olivia’s tragedy was just another number in his ledger. The baby she lost, the baby he stole—they were pieces on his chessboard. And when that wasn’t enough, he moved on to Lily.
He set her up as neatly as he did me. A scholarship, a future, all wrapped in the perfect bow. But nothing about it was kindness. No. It was strategy. A guarantee that when her life ended, it would be an easy cleanup. Another girl swallowed by Colt University’s statistics, filed away in some police folder nobody would ever look at twice. She wasn’t a daughter to him.She was collateral. A pawn. Another mask to wear until it cracked.
My fists tighten until the bandages on my shoulder strain, the ache sharp enough to keep me tethered. I rise from the chair, every movement stiff, deliberate. The room tilts, but I force it steady. Because I see it now. Olivia’s lost child was just the first victim. Lily is the latest. But she won’t be the last—unless I end it.
I stop in front of the fireplace, staring at the blackened glass of the mantle clock. My reflection glares back—fractured, distorted, a funhouse mockery. The mask is gone—stripped from me like a second skin I can never crawl back into. Lily made sure of it. She didn’t just insist I discard it; she demanded it, like tearing away the last excuse I had to stay hidden in the dark.
Now there’s nothing between me and her. No silicone, no shadows, no lies to shield the wreckage of who I am. Just raw flesh, scarred truth, and the one woman ruthless enough to look me in the eye and tell me to stop pretending I need the mask at all.
I sendLily out with Justin. My voice leaves no room for argument—low, edged, the kind of tone she knows means it isn’t up for debate. She clutches my shirt for a heartbeat too long, her wide eyes begging me to let her stay. But I can’t. I won’t let her see this.
