Page 36 of The Mourning Throne
Alright. Play hard to get. No skin offmy back.
He unlocked the screen, swiping through the four videos he had saved. Fucking files werehuge. If there was a compression app that kept the quality without all that transferring—
Nope.
Not the time to get distracted.
“Wow. Almost two hours. A full 110 minutes.” Lex tapped the side of his phone. “That’s like, a movie! A whole feature-length film starringyou.Do you know what that means, Ollie?”
Only sniffling.
Lex looked back over and—why was he crying already? Lex hadn’tdoneanything yet.
Ollie made a sound. Not a word, not a full protest. The kind of noise a person made when they were trying to askwhatwithout actually saying it.
Making his way off the bed, Lex hooked his fingers into the knot at Ollie’s wrists and dragged him out of the corner. Ollie’s foot dug into the carpet, knee bent at the wrong angle like he was desperately trying to stop what was going to happen.
Sad.
Lex moved him to the far wall, pushed hard on his shoulder; Ollie went down. Lex plopped next to him.
“Itmeans,” he continued. “That you did a good job. Does that make you happy?”
Ollie wiped his face on his shoulder. Nodded.
“Good. That makes me happy, too.”
One more thing to add to that mental list Lex had growing.
“Do you know the thing that’ll make you a better person? Facing the scary stuff head-on. You wanna do that?”
“I…” Ollie inhaled, looked from the paused video back to Lex. Video. Lex. “D—do I have to..?”
“Kinda.”
Ollie stared at the phone like it might bite him.
Lex pressed play anyway.
Volume low. No need to blast it. The audio was clear enough. That first gasp. The scrape of knees against tile. The soft, crushed sob of Ollie sayingI’m trying.
Ollie lasted all of fifteen minutes—secondsbefore Morgan started laying into him on the video—when he began shaking so hard, Lex’s entire arm vibrated.
“No—no, please.Please.Don’t make me—”
“Ollie,” Lex said, firm enough to pass for gentle scolding. “You have to face the real world sometime. It’s not all make-believe and test scores.”
The tears started coming faster.
“I don’t want to—”
ScreenOllie’s cry of pain cut the sentence in half, and Lex saw therealOllie snap his head away.
Lex didn’t press pause. Just kept talking.
“Icouldhave let Morgan kill you. But you’re here. You’re alive. Now I have someone to watch this with. Watching this makesmehappy. And when I’m happy… I like doing nice things for people. Help them. Protect them. Don’t you want me to do nice things for you?”
Ollie sniffled, shoulders shaking as he sobbed. Snot ran down his lip, dripped onto his leg.
