Lennon rounded the corner to find Benedict in the kitchen, preparing two cups of tea. His hand shook a little as he filled the strainers with heaping spoonfuls of oolong. He spoke without looking at her, but she felt him enter her mind as soon as she stepped into the kitchen. It felt nothing like being examined by Eileen. His was a soft presence within her, like cold fingers skimming along the plain of her psyche. But even though Benedict wasn’t particularly probing, he must’ve seen something within her that disturbed him, because he flinched, as if she’d struck him, and a spoonful of tea leaves scattered across the countertop when he did.

“You’re not the Lennon I know, are you?” he said.

Lennon came to stand behind him. She wondered what he’d seen to make him so afraid of her. Was it Ian crushed within the doors of the elevator? The culmination of all that she’d become since they’d last spoken? A gatekeeper? A murderer? “No,” she said. “I’m not her.”

Benedict nodded, poured water into the teacups, stared down into the blooming steam. She wondered if it was shame or fear that kept him from looking her in the eye. He set sugar and a small pitcher of cream on the tea tray, then nodded down the hall. “Let’s talk in the study.”

They sat on either side of the large oak desk where Lennon had first been interviewed all those months ago. As soon as Lennon settled into her seat, she noted the golden letter opener on the left side of the desk. It was the same one she’d found crusted with blood the day they’d discovered Benedict dead.

“Are you all right, Lennon? You don’t look well.”

Benedict’s gaze was arresting and almost painfully harsh, like staring directly into the sun. “I’m fine,” she said.

“You didn’t sleep well.” It wasn’t a question.

“I slept fine,” she said—a lie. She’d stayed up half the night thinking about August.

Benedict narrowed his eyes. “You’re here because you have a question. So why don’t you ask it?”

The question she most wanted to ask, Benedict didn’t yet have the answer to. So Lennon settled on another. “Who is August?”

Benedict lifted his teacup, took a small sip. “Dante didn’t tell you about him?”

“All he said was that August was a friend of his and a student of yours. Apparently, they had a falling-out? And I’ve heard rumors—”

“Rumors from who?”

“Claude.” Here Benedict’s face pinched into a frown, as if he was angry at him for disclosing something he shouldn’t have. “Alec mentioned something too.”

“Well,” said Benedict, and he leaned back into his chair, “August was a brilliant boy. One of the kindest you could ever meet. You would’ve loved him, Lennon. Everyone who met him did. He was an artist. He painted the portrait behind me.” Benedict gestured to the gruesome portrait on the wall. “He painted one for everyone he held dear, which frankly wasn’t very many people at all. He was shy, so he didn’t have many close friends. He didn’t like to open up. But August always found ways to express just how much he cared. For his friends. For the world, even. He was good. Or at least he was at first. You see, August—like you—was particularly gifted. And he—again, like you—possessed a very important ability. He could open doors that led from one space to another.”

“He was a gatekeeper too?”

“A brilliant one,” said Benedict. “Better than you. Better than Dante. I began training August and Dante both. August immediately excelled. But over the months of our training, he grew…reclusive, paranoid, disturbed, even. This was the price of his talent, I think. Because as August slowly began to lose his mind, his power grew exponentially and in a way that frightened me, a way that should have frightened everyone else, but they were greedy. They could only see the golden potential of what he could do for the world, not all the ways he could harm it. The ways that he intended to.”

“I thought you said he was kind.”

“I said he was kind. But this power—when pushed to a certain point—is corrupting. And that’s what happened to August. That sweet boy turned violent and demented.”

“Demented how?”

Here Benedict paused for a moment, considering. “It was his mind. Something went wrong with it. First it was animals, rats turning up dead in the labs where he worked. Dying by the dozens. I didn’t want to believe it was him at first, but then his housemates at Logos began to express…complaints.”

“What kind of complaints?”

“They felt that August was…preying on them. The girls were the first to raise the alarm. They were having nightmares that were…particularly twisted, violent in nature. Some might call them harassing, even sexual.”

“And you believe August was the source of these dreams?”

“I didn’t at the time. But then, during one of our lessons, August…snapped. In a moment of frustration he attacked Dante, put his hands around his neck. It all happened so quickly. Dante was young then, and startled, I’m sure. Even then I don’t think he was ready to believe that August was as sick as he was. But I knew, in that moment, that something had gone horribly wrong. So I looked into his mind and what I saw there was…perverse, like glimpses into the psyche of a serial killer. What I saw within him aligned with everything I’d feared. The dead rats. The nightmares plaguing his housemates. All of it.”

“It sounds like he needed help. Psychologically.”

“He did,” said Benedict. “But there was no doctor who could’ve put his mind back together. Not after the way it was broken. August was powerful, you see. And he didn’t just lash out with his body, he lashed out with his will too. During one of his tantrums he would siphon power from anyone around him. His will would rend through the air with such a force that windows broke. The house shifted on its foundation, cracks racing up the walls.” He gestured to one of them, a faint discoloration in the paint, so that if you squinted you could see where the plaster was patched over. “But none of that was what really scared me. It was that look in his eyes, a kind of hatred. Like he knew he could do worse and wanted to. I knew then that I’d lost him, that he was going to kill someone, probably many people, if someone didn’t try to stop him. He was that sick.

“Desperate—and frankly hopeless at that point—I went to Eileen for help, and told her that August needed to be removed from the school. But she wouldn’t hear of it. August had done great harm, yes, but he’d learned to endear himself to the people that mattered. Eileen included. He remained at the top of his class, one of the most promising students that Drayton had produced in several decades. Eileen thought he was a genius, and perhaps more importantly she thought that he—much like Dante—was wholly loyal to her. So, per Eileen’s request, I set my reservations aside and continued working with August, and August kept growing worse. More dangerous. The situation grew untenable, as I knew it would, and so I was forced to make a decision. I confided in the only person who could see what I saw. A person who knew August well, who had his trust and through that trust the ability to stop him.”

“Dante,” said Lennon.

Benedict nodded. “He was the only one who could do it. I asked him to make it seem like a suicide and to make it as painless as he could. It broke his heart, but he knew he had to do it. And then he did.”

So this was what Claude and Alec had been alluding to. The great crime that Dante had committed, though not alone, perhaps not even of his own volition. Benedict had cursed him with the task of killing his best friend. And Dante—whether forced or not—had complied.

Lennon began to shake, and as she did, she felt Benedict begin to occupy her mind. The first time he’d persuaded her—months before, when he’d tried to force her hand into the fire—he had been utterly brutal. But this time, Benedict entered her mind gently. She could feel his presence within her, like a cold stream of water flowing down from her mind, into the hollow cavity of her chest and then pouring through her limbs as if his will was blood and her heart was pumping it through her, the effect less painful than paralytic.

“You’re so like him. August, I mean. You’re both so brilliant. So dangerous.”

“What are you doing?” she demanded, fighting against a blackout.

“I won’t stand by idle and watch another one of my former students succumb to their own demons at the risk of everyone around them. I won’t let you become August. And if Dante is too stubborn to handle this himself, then I will.”

“I’m not August,” she said, and it was a struggle just to speak. When she attempted to stand, she discovered that her legs were stone-numb, senseless.

“But you are,” said Benedict. “I know what you’ve done to Ian. I see the chaos and violence in your mind, eating away at it like a cancer. Admit it, Lennon, you’re out of control. You don’t even trust yourself.”

“You can’t do this,” said Lennon, her voice weak. “The gates will fall without me.”

“I’d rather take my chances with the greater world than entrust Drayton to you alone,” said Benedict, and his efforts redoubled. His will crushed her psyche.

Lennon raised the walls of her mind, fortifying her psyche in the safehold of her childhood bedroom, just as she had been taught to do. But Benedict’s will was inescapable. It compromised the doors and the windows, filled the room like a flood.

“If you resist, this will only be worse for you,” said Benedict. “I want this to be fast and painless, but you’re making that difficult for me, Lennon. And I don’t think either of us wants this to be difficult. Try to go to sleep.”

The letter opener blurred and doubled before her eyes. Her limbs felt heavy. She couldn’t speak. She realized that even if she’d wanted to stand up, she wouldn’t have been able to. She couldn’t feel her legs or arms or fingers. She couldn’t swallow or blink. Her eyes were burning, filling with tears. Her entire body was paralyzed.

Panic, real panic, seized her, even as logic told her—in an ever-softening whisper—that she had no reason to be afraid. She already knew the outcome of this clash. She would not die here, with Benedict, because she’d lived long enough to discover him dead. Because the only body they’d found in that house was his. Because he would—Lennon believed—never leave the chair he was sitting in, which meant that someone was coming to save her, that or Benedict would interrupt himself. Whatever it was, this could only end one way: with Benedict dead and her alive. So she decided to wait, to hold on for as long as she could, until someone or something intervened. Because she knew that someone had to.

“There you go,” said Benedict. “Ease into it. I promise it won’t be so bad. People make a big deal out of these things, but the reality is that our bodies are made to do this. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Surrender to it and it’ll be just like sleep. Better, even.”

Her heartbeat was slowing. But her brain was so suppressed that there was no panic, no adrenaline spiking through her veins. In fact, Lennon wanted to sleep, wanted to give in to it. She was so terribly tired; she had been for a long time, even before coming to Drayton. And there was nothing about Benedict’s presence in her mind that felt painful or sinister. To cave in to him would’ve been as easy as falling into the kind of deep sleep that Lennon had been craving for years.

“That’s it,” said Benedict. “There you go. Rest. It’ll be all right. I know you’ve wanted this for some time. I saw it in your eyes the day we first met.”

Lennon was about to give in when her slowing heart stuttered.

It was hard for her mind—weak under Benedict’s influence—to even form thoughts. But in that moment, as her failing heart struggled to beat, these words crossed her mind: No one is coming.

She was out of time. Her vision began to fail.

Something had gone horribly wrong, and she was going to die.

Unless she saved herself.

Lennon’s gaze homed in on the desk, on the golden letter opener.

“I’m not going to do it with that, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” said Benedict, sensing that she was fighting him once again. “I wouldn’t hurt you in that way. I’m not cruel like that. I just want to keep you comfortable. That’s my aim.”

Lennon closed her eyes and all at once, she was back at Logos House, and it was Ian sitting across the table and not Benedict. And they each had a knife.

Lennon was surprised to hear herself speak: “You’re not going to hurt me.”

Benedict went very still. “What?”

Lennon was crying now, as she met Benedict’s gaze. “I said you’re not going to hurt me. You’re not even going to live to leave that chair.”

Benedict’s eyes went wide.

Lennon’s mind clamped down like a rattrap around Benedict’s, every part of her overcoming every part of him, seizing control when he least expected it.

“You’re going to pick up that letter opener,” she said.

Benedict’s hand twitched, like a thing possessed, and slid across the desk. He fought it, fingers fumbling, but Lennon forced them into a fist around the handle just the same.

“Stretch out your left arm.”

He extended his arm, stiff as rictus, his joint bending in such a way that for a moment Lennon thought his elbow would simply snap under the pressure of her will.

“Put the letter opener to your wrist.”

Benedict moved its sharp point to his forearm. His mouth was open. Tongue pressed against the backs of his teeth. His eyes were wide and wild with fear and shock. He tried to speak, to plead, but Lennon wouldn’t let him.

“Do it,” she said. “Do it and make it quick.”

The tip of the letter opener embedded itself between two blue veins. His skin gave way with a pop. There was blood. Then the letter opener disappeared into the wound.

“It’s okay,” she said, as Benedict’s blood slicked the desk. “It’s going to be okay.”