Page 111 of Victorious

He’d drown.

The only positive was that the effort seemed to be weighing on Gabriel, too. Behind his glasses, shadows curved beneath his eyes. Good, thought Eli, grimly.

“Tell me about Victor.”

Eli’s fingers twitched on the edge of the chair.

Years before, when he’d first suspected Victor was alive again, he’d kept the information to himself, not to protect the other man, but to keep anyone else from finishing what he’d started.

The same possessiveness still gripped him now—the conviction that Victor’s death belonged to him, and him alone—but Gabriel’s words were an order, and the truth rose up to meet it.

“We met at Lockland University,” he said. “Victor was top of the class. Until I transferred, sophomore year…”

Eli closed his eyes, and saw a memory tacked like a Polaroid to the back of his mind.

Angie, her arm slung around Victor’s waist, curls lifting off her face in a strawberry cloud. Both their faces turned toward him.

Victor, stern-faced and sharp. Angie, electric and ambitious.

His mind was full of shots like that—those years had been the happiest of Eli’s life.

The three of them, ranged around a café table. The three of them, heads bowed over their books, or laughing on the way to lab, or sprawling in the library. The three of them, tangled together as if they’d always been a set. Even though that wasn’t true. Eli had been the interloper. The new addition. A wedge between the two of them. But he hadn’t been trying to edge Victor out. Only to bring himself in. To carve a place where he could fit. And for a while, it had been perfect.

Angie, who let him pretend to be normal.

Victor, who reminded him he wasn’t.

They’d been happy—he’d been happy—and Eli often wondered what could have been. If Victor hadn’t killed her.

“So you were friends?” asked Gabriel.

Eli blinked, and the memory died, replaced by the cool green walls of Gabriel’s office. The texture of the chair under his palm. The faint hum of windowless space.

“Friends. And rivals.”

Another memory—Victor sitting across from Eli at the college bar, those pale blue eyes hanging on him as he spoke his ideas into the world.

“Victor saw me for what I was.”

“And what was that?”

A hero, he wanted to say. But he couldn’t seem to lie, even to himself.

“A wolf. Pretending to be a lamb.”

Victor, mouth tipped in a sardonic smile as he raised his glass to toast.

“We recognized each other.”

Victor, sitting on the edge of the tub as Eli lowered himself into the icy water.

“We challenged each other.”

Victor, eyes ice cold with envy when Eli learned that it had worked.

“We were young, ambitious.”

Victor, face contorted in anger when Eli told him it wasn’t worth the cost.