Page 62 of King of Liars
He was supposed to choose me over Two.
I glanced around at the mess I’d made as I’d tossed all my things around, like some prepubescent brat. Clothes were scattered across the floor. My lamp crushed the shade beneath it as it lay beside the nightstand. Open books, their pages bent, were strewn on the floor, beside the walls.
“Nick, what a mess you’ve made.”Katherine’s words sounded like they weren’t just in my mind, but as if she were standing in the fucking bathroom doorway, judging me, wanting me.
I turned to the door to make sure she wasn’t there…
No, just in my head, like so many times before.
“Why did he leave?” I asked her phantom image because she was still imprinted in my mind, eternally haunting me.
I imagined her laughing, mocking me. Her phantom traipsed around my things, crept toward me in the vanity. Despite knowing she’d hung herself after a psychotic break a few years prior, the memory of her lingered within me.
I spun back to the mirror, gazing at my image as I imagined her creeping up behind me and ducking down beside me, surveying the man I had become…at least, a man compared to the child she’d known.
Katherine was my friend, my savior, my enemy.
“Liars, all of them,”she told me. She was one to talk—maybe the greatest liar who had ever deceived me.
I cringed as tears welled in my eyes. “Boss isn’t a liar.”
“Not yet, but he would be, same as the rest.”
That didn’t make it any easier to endure his rejection, especially after I’d learned he could give me what I needed. Oh, he had hurt me so much, shaken me to my core, to the point where I’d forgotten to shoutspade. He was one of us. Had always been one of us, whether he wanted to believe it or not.
“Guys don’t leave you, Nick. You leave them.”She was right. Guys didn’t fucking leave me.Idecided when the game was over, just as I had with Two…and Assface…and all those other bastards.
Boss had driven a blade right through my chest. Why had he hurt me?
Why had Two hurt me?
“Because they all hurt you,”Katherine said, picking the thought right from my brain. She’d been the master of reading my thoughts…or manipulating them, I could never be sure. In a way, I’d always been her apprentice, even long after we escaped, even after her death. She’d taught me the ways of the mind, through my own. Through every door she crept through, I’d learned the weaknesses of my enemies, and throughout my life, I had learned how guys like Boss operated, how to crawl inside their heads and burrow there to drive them mad.
It wasn’t just about my skill in infecting the human mind, no, but about doing as Katherine had done with me—finding that special person, the one who would let me in, crack the door open enough for me to shove the rest of the way through. Just as she had done with me.
I reached out and caressed the vanity mirror.
A mirror, yes…that’s all I was, pushing into their minds to reflect their real selves back to them.
My wicked liars.
My fucking liars.
You goddamn liars!
All I could see was Katherine’s phantom, laughing, practically cackling at my failure.
Where had I gone wrong with Boss? How did I fail where I had succeeded with so many others?
I imagined seeing Boss and Two around campus, out at the bar. They would hold hands, kiss, do anything to flaunt their freedom in front of me.
Two, you lost.
And yet, if he was a part of Boss’s victory, perhaps they were both to blame for my pain.
Faggots, both of them.
He left me.