The letter from Montana was not an end, but a beginning. It was a spark thrown onto the tinder of Thomas Logan's ruined life, and James watched the nascent glow with anticipation. John Howlett's response had been predictably ruthless: a terse, legalistic rebuttal and a warning shot across the bows, sent via a private courier to ensure deniability. But James knew a man like Thomas would not be deterred by legal threats. He was a creature of impulse, and his impulse now was one of desperate, vengeful rage.
He would come. It was an inevitability. And his arrival would be the final, perfect test for Victor.
James found his brother in the old logging camp, a place that smelled of sap, decay, and Victor's feral musk. Victor was practicing, as James had instructed him—not wild hacking, but controlled, powerful strikes against a designated tree, focusing his rage into a single, devastating point of impact. The progress was minimal, but the intent to please was there. The leash was holding.
"He's coming back," James said, his voice cutting through the rhythmic thwack of Victor's claws.
Victor stopped, panting, his body glistening with sweat. "Who?"
"Your father." James let the word hang, watching Victor's face. There was no affection there, only a complex web of resentment, fear, and a twisted sense of obligation. "He wrote to John. He's demanding money. Making threats. He's not coming back for you, Victor. He's coming back for what he thinks is his. He's coming back to finish what he started."
Victor's eyes narrowed. "What he started?"
"The destruction of this family," James said, his tone flat and factual. "Our family. He tried to kill me in the library. He would have, if not for… what I am. What would he do to you, I wonder? The son who failed him? The son who now sides with the Howletts?" He took a step closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "When he drinks, what does he say to you, Victor? What does he call you? I've heard the shouts from the cottage. 'Useless.' 'Disappointment.' His fist is his favorite argument, isn't it?"
Victor looked away, a muscle twitching in his jaw. The memories were vivid, written in the subtle flinch of his shoulders. The psychological groundwork had been laid for years; James was merely connecting the wires.
"He doesn't see a son," James pressed, a surgeon probing a wound. "He sees a tool that didn't work as advertised. A possession that defied him. And now he has nothing left to lose. A man like that… he'll want to break his toys before he leaves them behind for good."
"What should I do?" Victor's question was a low growl, stripped of its former defiance. It was the plea of a weapon asking for a target.
"You protect what is yours," James stated. "Your place. Your future. The freedom I've given you to be what you are. He is the last chain tying you to the life of a beaten dog. He is the past, Victor. A past of bruises and shame. We are the future. But the past has a nasty habit of returning to strangle the future in its crib."
He didn't give a direct order. He never did. He painted a picture and gave Victor the brushes. He defined Thomas not as a father, but as a threat, a disease, an embodiment of all the pain and humiliation Victor had ever endured. And he gave him permission to be the cure.
"When he comes," James said, turning to leave, "remember who offered you a purpose, and who offered you only a fist."
The stage was set. The script was written. All that was needed was the leading actor.
Thomas Logan arrived three nights later, under the cover of a torrential downpour. He was a specter of his former self, clothes sodden and hanging loose on a frame gaunt with whiskey and failure. He didn't come to the main house. He went straight to the old cottage, a squatter in his own former life, breaking a window to get in. James, from his bedroom, heard the splintering glass as clearly as if it were in the next room. He listened to the sounds of stumbling, the crash of a bottle being found and drained, the guttural, self-pitying curses that soon turned outward.
It was time for the final act.
James went to Victor's room in the servant's quarters. He didn't need to say a word. Victor was already awake, dressed, his body tensed like a spring. The scent of his biological father—a familiar stench of sweat, cheap alcohol, and despair—was a ghost that had haunted this place for weeks. Now it was real, and it was a provocation.
"He's here," Victor said, his voice a gravelly rasp.
"He is," James confirmed. "And he's calling for you. I can hear him. He's saying you're a traitor. That he should have 'beat the Howlett out of you' when you were a pup."
It was a lie, of course. Thomas was currently cursing John and Elizabeth. But the lie was a perfect fit for the narrative James had constructed. Victor's eyes glowed with a feral light. The last restraint snapped.
Without another word, Victor shoved past James and stalked out into the raging storm. James followed at a discreet distance, a shadow in the downpour, his senses dialed to their maximum. This was the culmination of his experiment. He would observe the results firsthand.
Victor kicked the cottage door open, the wood splintering around the lock. The scene inside was a tableau of squalor. Thomas was slumped in a ragged armchair, a bottle in his hand, his eyes bleary and red-rimmed.
"You," Thomas slurred, looking up at the hulking form of his son filling the doorway. "Come to see your old man? Come to beg for forgiveness for siding with that demon-boy?"
"I came to show you what you made," Victor snarled, stepping inside. The room was small, cramped, the air thick with the smell of mold and rotgut whiskey.
Thomas laughed, a harsh, broken sound. "I made a monster! A stupid, ungrateful beast! You and that… that thing in the big house. You're both abominations! My blood is a curse!"
"You're the curse!" Victor roared, his control fraying. "You and your fists and your bottle! You never saw a son! You saw a punching bag!"
"I saw a failure!" Thomas shouted back, lurching to his feet. The old dynamic, the only one he knew, took over. He saw defiance and his answer was violence. He swung the whiskey bottle in a clumsy, wide arc.
It was the trigger.
Victor didn't dodge. He let the bottle smash against his temple. Glass shattered, whiskey and a trickle of blood mingled on his skin. But the healing factor James had observed in him sealed the cut in seconds. The act of violence, instead of subduing Victor, only confirmed everything James had told him. He'll want to break his toys.
With a roar that was more pain than anger, Victor lunged. It was not the controlled strike James had been teaching him. It was pure, unadulterated feral instinct. His claws, thick and sharp, slashed out.
Thomas Logan, in his final, sobering moment of terror, saw the beast his son had become, the beast he had helped create. He raised his arms in a futile, human defense.
It was no use.
Victor's claws tore through flesh and bone with sickening ease. The violence was not clean, not surgical like James's force scalpels. It was a messy, brutal, visceral disassembly. The cottage echoed with screams that were quickly drowned out by the storm and the wet, tearing sounds of the attack.
James watched from the doorway, his face impassive, the rain soaking his clothes. He observed the biomechanics of the kill, the patterns of the strikes, the limits of Victor's rage. He was a scientist documenting the climax of a trial.
When it was over, Victor stood panting in the center of the room, his clothes and hands drenched in blood, surrounded by the horrific aftermath of his rage. The anger drained from him, replaced by a hollow, shaking stillness. He looked down at what he had done, at the remains of his father, and then his wide, shocked eyes rose to meet James's calm, observing gaze.
The horror of the act, the finality of it, crashed down on him. He had crossed a line from which there was no return.
James stepped into the cottage, his boots careful on the bloody floor. He looked at the scene, then at Victor, his expression one of cool assessment, not judgment.
"He gave you no choice," James said, his voice cutting through Victor's ragged breaths. "He was the past. You are the future. You have proven your loyalty. You have secured our position."
He placed a hand on Victor's shoulder. The gesture was not one of comfort, but of ownership. The hound had not just been leashed; it had been blooded. It had been made complicit in the ultimate crime, binding it irrevocably to the master who had commanded it.
"Now," James said, his voice dropping to a practical whisper. "We clean up. We bury the past. And we never speak of it again."
Victor, numb and morally annihilated, could only nod. He was now, and forever, James's creature. The last link to his old life was a corpse on the floor, and the only path forward was the one his brother laid out for him.
As they worked through the night to dispose of the evidence, James felt a profound sense of order. The variable of Thomas Logan was eliminated. The tool of Victor was perfected. The landscape of his world was becoming increasingly tidy, all of it arranged according to his design. The monster was not just hiding in a boy's skin; he was now the puppet master of a patricide, his hands clean, his will absolute.