Page 188 of Kiss the Villain

Then Harrod killed the girl.

One shot. Point-blank. Her brains splattered onto a kneeling Grant.

I was seven. And I had to watch.

To learn.

To never become a failure like my brother.

Something inside Grant died that day. His soul, maybe. His humanity. I don’t know what exactly, but it turned him into something unrecognizable.

He’d already been through hell—finding his mother hanging from the ceiling at thirteen—and now the love of his life was taken from him in the cruelest way imaginable.

The tragedy of it all must’ve been so bad that he just…turned the switch off.

Abuse has a way of breaking people. Some escape it through death, like Grant’s mom. Some run, like my mom. And others become the very thing they despise.

Grant chose the latter.

Slowly but surely, he turned into Harrod.

Me? I bided my time. Patiently.

When I was nine, my mom finally left. She’d been planning it with Mom Jina for years, obsessing over every detail and kind of forgetting me in the meantime. She’d be so out of it sometimes, hiding the bruises covering her body like a walking battlefield, that she didn’t seemybruises.

Then, one day, she took me, and we fled. The three of us. All the way to Switzerland.

For three months, we lived like the happiest family in the world. But even at nine, I knew it wouldn’t last.

Harrod would find us. And he’d kill my moms.

So I called Grant and asked for help.

He traced my call and handed our location to Harrod. Because by then, Grant wasn’t just Harrod’s son; he was Harrod.

But before he hung up, Grant told me to wait outside when Harrod arrived. Said if I went with him willingly, the moms would live.

I struck a deal with Harrod.

I’d be his perfect son. The opposite of Grant. I’d give him everything he wanted—power, profit, status.Everything.

To this day, I don’t know why he agreed. Maybe he never wanted my mom. Maybe he feared losing me completely.

Whatever the reason, I had to call my moms and tell them I chose him.

Then I cut contact.

For years, I became Harrod’s golden child. StraightA’s, star athlete, problem solver. Everything Grant wasn’t.

And I thrived on it.

The control. The resources. The killing.

Especially the killing.

Slaughtering for Vencor became second nature—hunting, executing, then sharing a smoke with Julian and the others. Not all of them loved the bloodshed, but we all got off on the power. The knowledge that one day, we’d own everything.

I was riding that high when I met Cassandra on a blind date.

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