Chapter 193: Something Lost
From the moment he was born, Andrew had barely seen his parents. By the time he was a few months old, they had already handed him off to a wet nurse.
Once he was weaned, the wet nurse was let go. A nanny took over. Then another nanny after that. The caregivers rotated in and out of his life with such frequency that he never learned to rely on any of them—he simply grew up.
The house was always quiet. The butler and the household staff stood around like furniture, never speaking to himnever changing their expressions. Somewhere along the way, Andrew stopped understanding what expressions were supposed to mean.
When he was two, a new addition arrived. There was no celebration, no warmth—nothing. The butler informed him, plainly and without ceremony, that the bundle in the nursery was his little brother.
Andrew felt nothing in particular about having a brother. He watched the baby wrapped in his blanket, those round, unfocused eyes darting around the room before the crying started—sharp, relentless wailing—and Andrew's only reaction was mild irritation at the noise.
The house fell quiet again soon enough. John stopped crying. He must have figured out early on that tears didn't get you anything in this place.
As they grew older, Andrew noticed that John was different from him.
Andrew found it impossible to care about anything. John, on the other hand, was always buzzing with some frantic energy—breaking things, causing chaos, seemingly delighted by the looks of distress he could provoke out the staff. Rattling the household seemed to be the only thing that made him happy.
But John should never have brought that chaos to Andrew's door.
When Andrew was seven and John was five, his little brother barged into his room and tore every book off his shelves, ripping them apart. Andrew decided the lesson needed to be physical. He put a snake in John's bed.
And just like that, the war between them began.
It was around that same time that Andrew wandered into the kitchen one afternoon, intending to add something unpleasant to John's soup, and caught the cook in the middle of cleaning a fish.
Blood sprayed across the counter.
For the first time in his life, Andrew felt something ignite inside him—a crackling, electric excitement that made his pulse spike and his whole body hum with something that felt dangerously close to joy.
He discovered, in that moment, that blood did something to him that nothing else could. It woke him up. It made him feel alive.
He recognized immediately that this wasn't normal.
Andrew never told anyone. He understood, with cold clarity, that if his parents found out, they wouldn't hesitate—they'd ship him off to a psychiatric facility and never look back.
He kept the secret. He always kept his secrets.
When he was ten, the house received another new arrival. This time, a little sister.
The first time Andrew saw Sophia, she was gnawing on her own fist—fat little fingers, impossibly pale skin, soft and round like something that hadn't yet learned it existed in a hard world.
His first thought was clinical, detached: Something that fragile probably wouldn't take much to break. I wonder how long she'll last in this house.
When their parents sat down to choose a name—flipping through a storybook, ready to pick whatever they landed on first—Andrew spoke before they could.
"Sophia," he said, without quite knowing why.
Something stirred in him. A faint, unfamiliar flicker. Some wordless, reluctant hope that this small, soft thing might somehow make it through the cold machinery of this family without being destroyed by it.
His parents agreed without interest, the same way they agreed to everything that didn't concern them. Which was almost everything.
Sophia grew. She learned to walk, to run, to laugh. Her smile was something Andrew had no reference point for—wide and unselfconscious and bright, nothing like John's sharp, calculating grins.
He also thought she was hopelessly naive.
She was two years old and still crying at the drop of a hat—face flushed red, eyes swollen, looking for all the world like a rabbit that had no idea predators existed. She went around trying to charm the staff, trying to win people over with smiles and little offerings. The Smiths didn't ingratiate themselves to anyone. Other people came to them. The fact that Sophia hadn't absorbed this yet was almost embarrassing.
She was gullible, too. He told her there was buried treasure in the back garden, and she actually believed him—toddled out there with a plastic toy shovel and started digging in the dirt, getting herself absolutely filthy in the process.
What she dug up, in the end, was one of John's old love letters, which she proudly presented to Andrew as proof of her discovery, requesting a trip to the amusement park as her reward.
He couldn't be bothered. He told the butler to pick up a cake from the bakery and sent her away with it. She was thrilled. Completely thrilled about a store-bought birthday cake.
Hopeless, he thought. Something that trusting isn't going to survive.
He was right, in a way. By kindergarten, she was already getting bullied. She came home crying about it—and then, somehow even more bafflingly, went to John for help.
Did she actually think John would protect her?
John, for his part, dragged her to some boxing class, apparently deciding that was a reasonable solution. One look at Sophia, and it was clear to anyone she didn’t belong in a boxing gym.
She ended up in the hospital with a cracked rib.
Maybe now she'll learn something, Andrew thought.
John, meanwhile, was thirteen years old and had apparently decided that hunting down a kindergartener to settle a score on his little sister's behalf was an appropriate use of his time.
A thirteen-year-old. Cornering a five-year-old. At school.
The cleanup required was substantial. Andrew handled it, as he always handled everything, and resolved that this could not continue. If neither of them was going to develop any self-preservation instincts on their own, he would have to force the lesson.
He stopped paying attention to Sophia. Deliberately. Completely.
If she didn't learn that the world was indifferent and cruel, she would spend her entire life being a liability—his liability.
There was also that boy from next door, the Greene family's son, who kept showing up and hovering around her. Andrew suspected the boy was the reason she was still so soft, still so dependent on the idea that someone would show up for her. He considered intervening.
But the Greene kid was the family's heir. Pragmatism won out. Andrew let it go.
The withdrawal didn't seem to teach Sophia what it was supposed to. She kept following him around anyway, trailing after him down hallways, appearing at the edges of rooms he occupied. He had no patience for it. He had no patience for much of anything, but especially not for this.
John, meanwhile, kept escalating. Because of course he did.
The dog was the last straw.
John had set the animal on him—a large, aggressive dog that lunged before Andrew could step back. The teeth caught the back of his hand. Drew blood.
His body responded the way it always did.
The excitement was instant. Immediate. His pulse spiked; his hands steadied. He reached for the knife he kept on him—a habit he'd developed years ago, carried under the logic of self-defense—and he dealt with the dog.
He hadn't noticed Sophia until it was over.
She was standing in the doorway. Her face had gone completely white. She dropped straight to the ground, sitting hard on the floor, her mouth open, unable to make a sound. Her eyes were fixed on him—on the blood, on his expression—and she understood, without him saying a word, exactly what she was looking at.
Good, he thought.
Now she knows what this family actually is. Now she'll learn how to survive in it.
What happened next wasn't planned between him and John—they never coordinated, never conspired in any deliberate way. But when the household needed someone to take the blame for the incident, both of them arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously, without discussion.
They pointed at Sophia.
Twice, she was blamed for things she hadn't done. Two months of being confined to her room, isolated, cut off from everything.
When it was over, she wasn't the same.
The smile was gone. She stopped following Andrew down hallways. She stopped crying. She stopped asking for things she wasn't going to get.
Around that same time, Michael started coming around more frequently—quiet visits, always managed to get Sophia alone somehow. Andrew watched from a distance and realized the boy was teaching her economics. Feeding her information their parents had explicitly blocked her from accessing.
Interesting, Andrew thought. He didn't interfere.
If knowledge was what it took to sharpen her, he wasn't going to stand in the way of that.
She did get sharper. Over the next few years, Sophia became someone you could take into a room full of corporate executives and not be embarrassed by. She had the presence, the composure, the vocabulary. She had finally grown into the image of what a Smith should be.
But something else had happened alongside it—something Andrew recognized because he'd watched the same thing happen to himself, and to John, years earlier.
As her intelligence grew, something else quietly vacated the space it had occupied.
Something she would never get back.
Something human.
Just like us, he thought, watching her across the room at one of those early business functions, her face perfectly composed, perfectly unreadable.
She'd lost some of it, too.