Page 60 of King of Liars

“I didn’t respect his privacy.”

Aiden’s eyes narrowed as I took a breath.

“Just keep in mind, whatever comes next, if you ever had a chance of getting back in with the knights—”

“Ryan, I may have let King get into my head, but I just let you into my soul.” He set his hand on my face. “I’ve made my decision.”

He couldn’t have known what that meant to me.

Although, it didn’t magically make this any better.

Easier, perhaps, but still hard as hell.

18

Boss

As soon as Ryan had opened the door to his place, I knew I’d made the right decision.

He’d been crying, I could fucking tell. He was hurt. That goddamn bastard hurt him, and after sharing a fuck and the darkness in my heart with him, I had hope that maybe we could heal together.

“…if it’s strength you need, take what’s left of mine.”

It was the only way I could find the will to tell him—the only person I’d ever shared that story with. And there was freedom even in what little I’d managed to get out.

Not the kind I’d felt when I released it during King’s game. No, there was relief—sincere relief.

“You spend that much time with a guy…in the way we do…you can’t help but care about them,” Ryan said. “Corey knew that. And I knew when King exiled him that it wasn’t fair. Corey just wanted to get to know him, same as we all did. It’s like you and I’ve talked about before—you can’t see what King needs, and what we clearly need with it, without thinking there must be so much pain behind it.”

There was no doubt about that. And seeing Ryan’s concern as he talked about it, how much he cared about King, reminded me how wrong it was for King to have toyed with his emotions before tossing him out like he had. Ryan wasn’t a bad guy.

Even more now, I was eager to hear his side of what had transpired before I’d come over.

He bit his bottom lip, remaining quiet for a moment before continuing. “That night we ran into Corey at that party, he approached me, told me I’d want to know the truth about Sy. I didn’t realize you could see us chatting. Thought I’d done a good job of checking around to make sure there weren’t any knights around. See, Corey and I were friendly back when he was with the gang. He told me to text him if I wanted to know more, that he knew I’d want to know more. Then he noticed One come in and told me to start shit so King wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“So that whole scene was an act?”

“A lie,” Ryan clarified, sounding disappointed in himself for failing King. “I wound up messaging him, and he met me, showed me a file on Sy…well, Nick Hoffman. That was his name when he was a kid. The file had some…very illuminating reading material. I’m guessing One or Hole or King had been suspicious and checked my phone or something, gotten on to me after that night at the party. And as you can probably guess, King has some fucked-up shit in his past that’s the reason Rule Four exists. I figure he got Hole to get friendly with me so he could search my place to see how much I knew, and that’s when he found that journal entry.”

That made a hell of a lot more sense than King finding some random journal entry against Ryan.

“Apparently, Nick was raised in some religious cult in South Georgia. Weird shit. Modern Spiritualism. Sort of New Age crap, where the leader, Katherine Monroe, claimed she was channeling spiritual beings. She took an interest in Nick and some other boys and made them tend to her needs, if you get what I mean.”

“How did a background check get to that?”

“The PI pieced together articles and old records in the small town where it all took place, narrowed it down to his mom’s involvement in the cult at the time. She was old money and married this asshole who dragged her and Nick into the cult. They got in over their heads before she found a way to leave, and her family took her back. Nick’s mom legally changed their names, and they moved to North Carolina, where he started working with a therapist about the experience. From the court documents, it sounds like this Katherine person psychologically terrorized her victims. Made them feel like she was protecting them from spiritual beings, and that they had to do these sexual acts on her to protect them.”

“Holy fucking shit.”

“I always wondered how Sy was so goddamn good at manipulating and controlling,” Ryan went on, “but it seems he learned the art from his tormentor. And I don’t think it takes any stretch of the imagination to know he uses us—his knights—and these fucked-up moments as some kind of messed-up therapy for everything he went through.”

Same as I had used it.

Same as we all had.

“To my knowledge, he doesn’t see anyone else for help right now,” Ryan went on, “which once you know that, you know he should be.”

“And you were going to keep on being a knight, knowing this?”