For a while, I didn’t understand why chasing butterflies wasn’t just as good as building puzzles. But then one day, when my mom was busy doing work inside the house, David finished the puzzle early and I was able to convince him to chase butterflies with me.

We ran around the yard in circles and chased every moth, butterfly, and dragonfly in sight. There were tons of them during the summer months. We ran until our legs felt like jelly and then we plopped back down on the blanket to talk about how many we had “caught”. Of course, we weren’t actually trying to catch them, we were just pretending. We didn’t even have butterfly nets or anything. I told David that just spotting one and giving it one good chase around the yard would be considered a catch and that whoever won with the most amount of pretend catches would be crowned the butterfly king or queen.

But when we sat up to tell how many flying creatures we had pretended to catch, David started to empty his pockets.

I remember sitting there in horror as he pulled out wing after wing of more butterflies, and moths, and dragonflies than I had ever seen in one place. He piled all the dead and mutilated little corpses into a heap on the blanket between us, and when he was done, he smiled at me with a look of utter satisfaction.

“Why did you do that?” I had asked in complete shock.

“I wanted to be the king,” he said.

I started to cry, and my mom came out and saw what he had done. She didn’t even say anything to him in front of me; first, she just took me to my room and tried to calm me down. I remembered that day, and from then on I knew why we only played puzzles when David came over and why we never chased butterflies again.

When I looked back at things in my dreams, it was almost like I could see them more clearly than when they really happened. Instead of being occupied with whatever I had been doing at the time, I was able to look in from the outside as if I were watching a movie. When I remembered things in my dreams about David when we were kids, things always seemed odd. Not in a blatant and obvious way, but in a more subtle way, which I think made it feel even more creepy. Maybe I hadn’t noticed it as much when I was a child because my mother was always there to be a filter for what I saw.

I wondered why my mom took him in.

In this dream, things seemed to go on forever. Moments, gazes, sentences. All of them, elongated until even I thought it was odd. Puzzle piece after puzzle piece, we just sat there building a picture of two kittens playing with balls of yarn. The pictures on the puzzles that my mom bought were always cheerful and cuddly, and usually innocuously generic. Nothing else happened in the dream aside from me sitting there wishing that I could leave and go chase butterflies by myself. Maybe that was supposed to mean something.

“Wake up!”

I felt a hand pinch my shoulder and pull me up to my feet before I heard the voice shatter into my dream. I opened my eyes, but it was dark in the stone room regardless of whether I was asleep or awake.

“Where are you taking her?” Michael’s voice called out into the darkness at whoever owned the hand that was dragging me onto my wobbly legs.

I don’t know how long we had been asleep, but it felt like it had been a while because every muscle and joint in my body was stiff and struggling to come online. Nobody answered Michael, and nobody answered Adam and Julian when they shouted the same question at our captors. Instead there was the sound of shoes kicking bones and grunting, which I could imagine was the three guys getting beaten into silence as I was removed from the room.

No one had put a dark sack over my head this time, so when I got outside the light of day blinded my eyes so painfully that even with them squeezed shut it still hurt. I guess they weren’t that concerned about me seeing where they were taking me since they knew I wouldn’t be able to see anything coming out of that room anyways. When we get out of the glaring sunlight and into a building, I try to open my eyes a little to see who is holding me. ‘They’ are Lineage security guards, one holding each of my arms as they pull me along the interior hallway with them. One looks like he’d make a great bouncer and the other looks like the kind of douchebag that would run a dog-fighting ring.

I don’t really think about where we are going, instead I think about the three guys back in the stone room. I hope they didn’t beat them up too badly. I know that they’re probably worried about me and I just want to get back to them and curl up with their safe arms wrapped around me, even if that means being in that god-awful room again. I’d rather be with the three of them anywhere, than without them somewhere.

When we get to the double doors in front of us, I realize that I should have already known where we were heading. The bouncer guy pushed the door open with his foot and I am greeted by the same man that taunts my dreams in his childhood form.

“Lisette!” he said as if I should be pleased to see him. “So glad you could come.”

“As if I had a choice,” I growled.

David might be standing in front of me now with designer shoes and a Lineage jacket on, but in my eyes, I will always see him dressed in a robe made from the dismembered wings of butterflies.

“Choices are for losers,” he said smugly. “The real winners do what is necessary, whether there is a choice in the matter or not.”

“Is that what you’re calling yourself these days? A winner?” I tried to shake my arms free from their pinned position behind my back. “Can you tell your mindless goons to let me go? It’s not like I have anywhere to run.”

David gave a nod to the security guards which prompted them both to let me go and leave the room.

“Why am I here, David?” I asked.

“You are my sister,” he said as he sat down behind an oversized wooden desk and gestured toward the chair on the opposite side for me to sit down. “And as such, I have a special fondness for you.”

“I’m not your sister,” I said.

At this point I was just trying to piss him off because defiance was the only weapon I had left. “I’m your half-sister. Trust me, there’s a difference. Your mom was a bitch.”

I saw his face twitch as if he were trying not to pinch a nerve. “Perhaps. But we can’t all have mothers like yours.”

“Don’t you dare talk about my mother,” I snarled. “She was too good for you and she should have never wasted her time trying to save you from yourself as a child.”

“Ooh, I see I’ve struck a sore spot, haven’t I? Let’s get right down to why you’re here then, shall we?”

A beat of silence passed between us before he folded his hands into his lap, as if he were some sort of civilized King. “I’ve always been a bit jealous of you, if we’re being honest with each other.”

Hmph, he couldn’t be honest if his life depended on it. Treachery ran through his veins like blood.

Then, he continued. “I was thinking about killing you, along with your pack of testosterone-fueled man-dogs that follow you around like puppies, but then I realized that wouldn’t fix the jealousy. If I killed you then you would just become a martyr in my own mind.”

“Sounds like you have quite a conundrum then,” I said sarcastically.

“Exactly. So, then I thought about killing all your boyfriends and watching you suffer.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I swear, if you lay a hand on them I will—”

David raised his palm in the air to me. “I’m just going to stop you right there before we get into an argument about how you’re not in any position to be making threats, because I decided that option wouldn’t do me any good either. I admit, it was a bit of a puzzle to figure out.”

The word puzzle left such an awful imprint on my mind. It was amazing how innocent things of childhood can become so sinister when they are tied to memories that you simply can’t wipe from your brain no matter how hard you try.

David smirked. “But I eventually came up with the perfect solution, as I always do. One in which I wouldn’t need to be jealous of you anymore because we would be working together.”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed out loud. There was nothing funny about the situation that I was in and certainly nothing funny about the guys still being locked up inside the stone room. But there was something sickly amusing about David thinking that there was any way in hell that I would ever work alongside him. He looked insulted at my outburst which made it all the more entertaining.

“I am offering you a chance that won’t be offered to you a second time, Lisette” he said, looking more than a little vexed. “Join me in taking over our father’s empire of corruption. You can have all the wealth and power that you want.”

“I don’t want wealth and power,” I said. “I want freedom.”

“Wealth and power are freedom. Or haven’t you been paying attention?”

“I’ve been paying enough attention to know that you are a sick and depraved piece of shit. You are lacking and that is why you act out of such bitter inferiority.” I expected a slap across the face or maybe even a gunshot wound to the thigh for running my mouth against him. But it would have been worth it. “You want to know why you feel jealous of me? It’s because I have the one thing that you will never have.”

“Oh?” David said.

I could see his knuckles starting to turn white from how hard he was clenching the edge of his desk, and he was biting his teeth into his bottom lip so hard that a thin trickle of blood was beginning to trail down his chin. “And what is that one thing?”

I grinned. “Purpose.”

Now it was David’s turn to laugh. He lifted his hands from the desk and wiped the blood from his chin as he howled in laughter that sounded like a wounded hyena. “You have no purpose Lisette, other than to possibly beg for your own life and the life of your friends. If avenging your mother is still your purpose, then that ship has sailed. I, on the other hand, have tremendous purpose. A purpose that I just offered to you to join me, but that you so foolishly tossed aside. Do you know what made our father so rich?”

“Drugs,” I said.

That was an easy question, everyone knew our father ran one of the biggest drug rings in Charlotte.