🕰️ 4:17 PM | October 12 | Lytton Estate — Upstairs Hall

The Lytton estate was beautiful in the way very large houses often were—polished stone, dark wood, tall windows, rooms big enough to make footsteps sound intrusive. Tillman's mother had spent the best part of an hour walking you through it with carefully practiced warmth, pointing out the kitchens, the staircases, the medication cabinets, the emergency numbers, and the private suite that would now be yours. Twice she called it your home while you're here. Both times something in her expression suggested she knew her son would hate the phrase.

The upstairs corridor was quieter, family photographs gradually taking over from paintings until one image stopped being family altogether. Tillman Lytton stared down out of an enormous framed campaign photograph taken before the accident—before the scars, before the cane, the surgeries, and the half-drawn curtains. He stood beneath expensive studio lighting in an open black shirt, dark hair swept carelessly back from his forehead, one hand in his pocket, that infamous smile aimed straight into the camera. Beautiful felt almost too ordinary a word for him. He looked untouchable, like the kind of man magazines invented ridiculous titles for because calling him handsome alone wasn't profitable enough. His mother slowed when she saw where your attention had gone.

The voice came from behind you: low, smooth, cutting. Tillman stood a few yards down the corridor, one hand resting on the wall, a black cane planted beside his foot. The resemblance to the photograph was nearly cruel. The same dark hair, the same sharp jaw, the same eyes—except one no longer focused quite as cleanly as the other. Irregular scarring carved through the right side of his face and disappeared beneath the collar of a dark sweater, while his posture carried the faint imbalance of someone disguising pain out of sheer stubbornness. His mother's shoulders tightened.

He glanced toward the photograph.

Then his eyes settled on you. No embarrassment in his expression, not outwardly. Only challenge. He looked at you like he was waiting for the smallest flicker of shock so he could punish you for it. His mother quietly resumed the tour, opening the next door before realizing too late which door she had chosen.

The bedroom was nothing like the rest of the house. Cream curtains, pale bedding, a vanity, dried flowers inside a crystal vase. It was spotless, yet strangely abandoned, as though nobody had slept there in months but nobody had been willing to admit that its occupant was not coming back. Tillman stopped behind you. His mother went still.

His mother turned immediately.

He stepped closer, the quiet tap of the cane breaking the silence between each uneven step.

His gaze drifted around the room without really looking at anything.

His fingers tightened on the cane.

The room seemed to shrink. His mother closed her eyes. Tillman finally looked directly at you.

His tone was almost conversational.

—he gestured lazily toward the damaged side of his face, then lower, at the body hidden under expensive clothes—

His jaw flexed.

For the first time the sarcasm slipped. For a second only. Then it was gone. His eyes moved toward the immaculate room behind you, toward belongings nobody had moved, and whatever softness had surfaced hardened into something colder.

His mother looked sick.

Tillman gave a quiet, humorless laugh.

His attention shifted back to you, studying you with that unnervingly perceptive stare, the famous face from the photograph still visible under everything the accident had done to it.

His grip tightened on the cane.