He picks up the phone gingerly and glances at the image on the screen. “What the fuck is this,” he says, his voice flat.
I don’t answer. I’m not going to describe what he’s about to see. I’m not sure I could.
Winston presses play, and his thumb searches for a button to make sure the volume’s down. It already is.
Part of my mind shears off and goes somewhere else while Winston watches. I know what’s in each of the videos. They were taken from the vantage point of my backpack from school, propped on a chair.
He’ll be able to see me and the bed. For the first twenty seconds, that’s all there is.
“Leo, tell me what the fuck I’m looking at.”
At twenty-one seconds, Caroline steps into the frame. Winston’s face pales. His teeth lock together. He wants to turn it off. His wrist flicks as if to set the phone down. He keeps watching. By forty seconds, I’m on my back on the bed, Caroline on top. The sex was always that way.
This is the longest ninety-two seconds of my life.
When it’s over, Winston looks at me, my phone in his hands.
“Is there more?” His inflection stays steady. Stays flat. He must know by now that there is more. His eyes glint with an emotion I can’t name, but his expression remains stoic.
“Swipe and find out.”
He does and stabs his thumb into the center to make it play.
Same angle. Same day. Different scene. Caroline with a whip in her hand. Welts appearing on my back. Welt turning to cuts, turning to rivulets of blood. Toward the end of this video, a moment arrives when she thinks she might have killed me. I’ve stopped moving. Stopped responding to the blows. Caroline purses her lips. She looks beautiful, even like that. A beautiful coiled snake. And then she draws back her arm and opens another wound.
“How old?” How old am I in the videos, he means. He does not want to ask this question.
“Fourteen.”
Winston curses. “How many are there?”
“Three.”
“I’ve seen enough.” It’s too late for him now. It’s been too late since he pressed play on the very first video. If he’d have thrown me out, if he’d refused the meeting, he wouldn’t have to know this. “How much to keep this quiet?”
“Keep going.”
He glares at me.
I glare back.
The last video is objectively the worst. Winston grits his teeth and presses play.
I’ve only ever looked at the first few seconds of this video and the last few seconds to make sure it’s intact. I’ll never watch the rest, except in my memory.
Except when I can’t keep it buried.
In the story I tell about that day, if I tell it at all, I leave this part out. That was the story I told Eva. That Caroline whipped me, and then she sent me out onto the sidewalk to get home or die trying. It’s close to the truth. She did whip me. And she did send me away. I left out her name, and I left out one other part.
The video shows what happened after the whipping. And before she let me go.
In one way, the content is substantially similar to the other two. There is the bed. There is me. There is Caroline.
She’s even in the same position she was in by the halfway point of that first video. Straddling me with an imperious expression.
The difference is the blood on the sheets from the wounds on my back.
That, and the screaming behind gritted teeth.
Winston makes it fifteen seconds before he drops the phone, stands up, and paces to the window. I stand up too. Put the phone in my pocket.
And wait.
It takes time to process a scene like the one I’ve just shown to Winston. My whole chest is a minefield. It’s going to explode. Watching him watch those videos made them all play again, in full, in my mind. It doesn’t matter how hard I’ve tried to forget. It’s like taking a blowtorch to my soul. I never imagined I’d tell someone else, much less a Constantine. But I’d do anything for Haley. Even this.
Winston turns to face me, his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t care about that building.”
He’s talking about a building I bought just to fuck with him. He made up a whole scheme to force me into selling it back, which of course I did. Winston fancies himself the king of New York City real estate. It’s a vulnerability that’s easy to exploit.
“No. I didn’t.”
“And you didn’t care about Ash.”
Ash, his girlfriend. I made a bit of trouble for them via posting a few videos on the Internet. I had them all taken down, wiped completely, after the game was finished. It was a bullshit thing to do, but I didn’t care who got hurt. Back then, I hadn’t met Haley Constantine. “No.”
“That was a fucking message. To her.” He means Caroline. “To show her what you could do.”
“Yes.”
No more waiting. No more delaying. The moment of penance has arrived. I feel it like a rushing wind against my scarred back. I have not come to bring peace. Not to Winston. I have come to lay down my fucking sword.
And so I open my mouth and tell him. All of my organs, out in front of him. What it was like to find myself in over my head at fourteen. The whipping. The revenge games. What it was like to drown in my own blood. What it was like to burn in the fever afterward.
Everything I can bring myself to say.
“She took Haley,” I say, my voice hard as a diamond. “Now she’s announcing an engagement and sending that asshole to press conferences to accuse me of kidnapping. It’s hurting Haley. I need it to be over.”
Winston studies me for a long time.
“Is that the price for you to keep your mouth shut? Me, calling off my mother?” He knows as well as I do that videos like the ones I have won’t ever go away.
For the first time ever in front of Winston Constantine, I drop the Morelli mask and level him with a look that’s entirely me. “It’s not a bargaining chip. I’m not threatening to release the videos. Do you think for a fucking second I could live with that?”
“You released videos of me and Ash. We had to live with it.”
“You weren’t raping her in those videos.”
The eldest Constantine son looks away. “If you’re not going to release them, then why the fuck did you show me?”
“Would you have taken my word for it?”
“No.”
“That’s why.”
Winston puts a hand to his forehead and releases a heavy sigh. He’s a calculating bastard. And now he’s having to recalculate his entire life. I don’t expect it will change his view of me, and I don’t care if it does. All I care about is Haley. All I care about is giving her what she wants, which is a life free of Caroline’s bullshit. Even if it means carving into my flesh and bone to do it.
“You want this finished,” Winston says finally. “Does that mean you’re going to stop, too?”
I give Winston an incredulous look. “I’ve wanted this to be finished since I was fourteen. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
A long pause. I survive painful heartbeat after painful heartbeat. I survive another trip through my memories. I survive another burst of searing pain across my back.
“Fuck.” Winston takes in a deep breath and gives the window one last glance. “I can’t make any guarantees. But I’ll talk to her. I’ll find a way. This has to stop.”