“What did he do?”

“He raped my mother.”

Eleanor gasped. She pulled back and looked at Søren but found his face was blank, his eyes empty of emotion.

“She had you.”

“Yes. I don’t know if it was intentional, raping my mother so she could give him the son his wife couldn’t. Deliberate or not, that’s what happened. She had me and named me Søren, a family name. My father named me Marcus after himself.”

“That’s why you hate the name Marcus?”

“For many reasons. My mother wanted to flee, and would have, except she loved Elizabeth like her own child and couldn’t leave her with my father, couldn’t leave her unprotected. So we stayed in that house. My father pretended I didn’t exist. It was the only way to keep peace between him and his wife, jealous of the beautiful Danish girl who cared for her child. I think my father was waiting for something, waiting to see something in me. And he did see it.”

“See what?”

“I spoke my first words six months earlier than my sister had. I started playing piano at age two. I mastered new skills quickly. My father decided I showed enough signs of high intelligence that I deserved to be acknowledged as his son. I pleased him enough that he paid the necessary bribes, had paperwork altered. His wife became my ‘mother’ and he my father.”

“And here I thought my parents had a rough marriage. What happened to your mom?”

“I was shunted off to boarding school in England when I was five, and my mother summarily dismissed and returned to Denmark. We didn’t see each again, not for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Thirteen years.”

Eleanor’s eyes filled with tears at the sorrow in Søren’s voice.

“Thirteen years …”

“School was difficult for me. I knew there was something different about me. My father had seen it. I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“Like father like son, Eleanor. I was … I am a sadist. I take the greatest of pleasures in inflicting the gravest of pains.”

He stopped speaking long enough for the words to sink into Eleanor. She felt them settling into her body, into her blood, like some sort of magic incantation meant to change her from a girl into another being. She let them change her.

“Go on.”

“The boys at school, I scared them. Even the simplest football game could turn bloody if I lost control. I pulled away, far into myself. I learned to keep my distance. I wanted to hurt them, but I didn’t want to hurt them. I was a wolf on a leash, a leash that I held. And one night, when I was ten, the wolf broke the leash.”

Eleanor shivered at his words.

“What happened?”

Søren smiled slightly.

“Have you read Lord of the Flies?”

“Yeah, freshman year.”

“That book is a fair representation of what the boys at my school were like. Simply take them off the island, put them back in school.”

“Were you Jack?” she asked, remembering the cruelest of the boys.

“No. Nor Ralph. I was almost Simon.”

“Simon was the one who was murdered, right? You’re not dead.”

“Because I fought back. I started at a new school when I was ten. Most of the student leaders of the school, the prefects, were predators—sexual predators. A cycle of abuse had started years earlier and it was forever perpetuating itself. When the boys were first-year students, they were used by the older boys. When it was their turn at the top of the hierarchy, they meted out their vengeance on the younger boys. You were predator or prey at the school. The most notorious of the prefects came after me. He didn’t live to regret that decision.”

“Didn’t live? You mean—”

“In the middle of the night he came to my bed in the dorm room I shared with three other boys. He pulled the sheets down and covered my mouth with his hand. Ten minutes later, his blood was staining the floor.”

Eleanor went numb. She couldn’t even speak to ask him to stop or go on.

“He died six weeks later. He never awoke from the coma I put him in.”

“You killed him.”

“I did.”

“Did you get in any trouble?”

“It was considered self-defense by the law and the school. Everyone knew he was the worst of the offenders at the school. He was also fifteen and I was ten. He was one hundred and sixty pounds and I was one hundred and ten at the time.”

“You beat to death a kid five years older than you and fifty pounds heavier?”

“It took six weeks for him to die of infection. But yes, I caused his death. I had no regrets, only shame.”

“Shame? Why?”

“Because I had my first orgasm while I was beating him to death.”

Eleanor stopped breathing. Søren looked away from her as if he couldn’t bear to meet her eyes.

“What happened next?” She forced the question out.

“Some students were terrified of me. Some of his victims wanted to canonize me. Instead I was sent back home to America. My punishment of the boy had been so savage, and I so remorseless, no other school would have me.”

“You came back here?”

“I turned eleven in England over the Christmas holiday and came home in January. Father said he would find a school in America that would take me. Until then doctors told him it would be best that I was kept away from other children.”