Chapter 10 – The Puppet Master
1270 Words
The photograph was still damp when Evelyn slid it across Adrian’s desk.
The edges curled like dying leaves, the faces blackened at the corners, but the center was intact. Her father’s eyes shone with the fervor of a man already halfway to madness. Adrian’s face was younger, harder, less polished than the mask he wore now. They stood shoulder to shoulder. Partners.
“You lied to me,” Evelyn said. Her voice shook, but her hand was steady against the wood. “You didn’t just treat him. You worked with him.”
Adrian glanced at the photograph only briefly before lifting his gaze to her. His expression was unreadable, carved from stone.
“I never lied,” he said evenly. “You asked if I treated him. I did.”
“You stood beside him. Smiling.”
“I was younger then. Naïve. I thought I could help him.”
“Help him?” Evelyn laughed, sharp and bitter. “He wrote about you in his journals. He called you a prophet of desire. He burned our family for you.”
Adrian rose slowly, his chair groaning back. His shadow stretched long across the office wall.
“No,” he said, voice low but cutting. “Your father burned because he could not distinguish faith from obsession. I warned him, Evelyn. I told him where his path would lead. But he craved fire. He needed it.”
Her nails dug crescents into her palm. “And you fed him.”
Adrian leaned forward, planting his hands on the desk. His eyes locked onto hers with unbearable intensity.
“I fed him because someone else had already lit the match.”
The words sliced through her. “Someone else?”
Adrian didn’t blink. “You think I was the architect of your father’s ruin. But there was always another hand. A shadow moving the pieces long before I arrived.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t expect anything.” He straightened, pacing slowly around the room. His voice shifted into a lecture tone, deliberate, controlled. “Obsession, Evelyn, is rarely born in a vacuum. It’s planted. Nurtured. Cultivated. Your father’s mind was a garden overrun with weeds long before I touched it.”
“And who planted them?” she demanded.
Adrian stopped behind her, his presence a weight at her back. “That,” he said softly, “is what you must discover.”
Her skin prickled. She turned to face him, but he was already moving, pulling open a drawer. From it, he drew a thin file, worn at the edges. He set it before her.
The name typed across the top made her blood run cold.
Reverend Malcolm Darius.
Her stepmother’s maiden name was Darius.
Her fingers trembled as she opened the file. Inside were letters, correspondence between her father and a man who signed each page with a curling flourish: M.D.
The letters were venom disguised as devotion. Your faith is power, David. Do not waste it on the flock. Channel it. Let desire be your altar. Let your daughter be your vessel.
Evelyn’s stomach twisted.
She looked up at Adrian, voice cracking. “Why are you showing me this?”
“Because you’ve been playing a game without knowing the rules,” Adrian said. “I told you from the beginning, obsession runs in your blood. But your father’s madness wasn’t born of me. It was engineered.”
“By him?” She slammed the file shut. “By Malcolm Darius?”
Adrian’s gaze darkened. “The puppet master. He whispered into your father’s mind. He manipulated me as well. He wanted us all bound in his strings.”
Evelyn shook her head, refusing to let the words take root. “My stepmother… she would have known. She must have.”
“She was his acolyte,” Adrian interrupted. “She believed in him. Believed in what he preached. She still does.”
The room tilted around Evelyn. She saw her stepmother’s face, stern and cold at the funeral, her voice dripping with pity edged in steel. You must stay away from that man, Evelyn. He ruined us.
But what if she hadn’t been warning her?
What if she had been controlling her?
Evelyn pushed back from the desk, her breath ragged. “No. No, you’re twisting this. You want me to be confused. You want me dependent on you.”
Adrian didn’t follow. He only tilted his head, studying her with a predator’s patience. “Then leave,” he said simply. “Run to her. Ask her what really happened. See what answers she gives.”
His calm unnerved her more than his intensity ever had.
“Why?” she whispered.
“Because,” Adrian said, his lips curving faintly, “the truth has a way of chaining you tighter than any lie.”
She fled his office, clutching the file against her chest.
Rain slicked the campus stones, cold against her shoes. Her mind raced faster than her feet. Could Adrian be telling the truth? Could her father have been corrupted not by the professor she hated, but by the shadow figure behind them both?
She thought of the journals. The phrases that had felt foreign, ritualistic. Let desire be your altar. Let your daughter be your vessel. The words weren’t her father’s. They were someone else’s.
Someone who had used them all.
Her stepmother’s face rose again in her mind, her eyes always watching, always judging.
Had she been a victim, or the hand that pulled the strings?
By the time Evelyn reached her dorm, her hands were numb. She locked the door, drew the curtains, and spread the file across her desk.
Letter after letter, all written in the same hand. Urging her father deeper into obsession. Encouraging experiments with “sacrifice and flame.” Suggesting that purity could be transformed into power through destruction.
And then, her heart stopped. One letter bore her name.
The girl is the key. She is not your daughter alone. She is an inheritance, a vessel, and an altar. Keep her close. Teach her fire. When the time comes, she will burn brightly.
Evelyn dropped the paper, bile rising in her throat.
Her father hadn’t just loved her. He had prepared her. Groomed her. Not for Adrian. For this. For the puppet master’s plan.
Her reflection in the window caught her eye…wide, pale, trembling. For the first time, she saw not just herself, but the vessel described in the letters.
She hated it. She hated him. She hated them all.
Her phone buzzed. A message.
No name, no number. Just words in thorned script.
You’ve begun to see. Come to the church tomorrow night. Alone.
The breath hitched in her chest. The old church, the one where she had found the photograph.
Her hands shook as she deleted the message. But she knew she would go.
Because if she didn’t, she would never know the truth.
She lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling, the words of the letter circling in her skull: She is inheritance, vessel, altar.
Was she nothing but that? A pawn in someone else’s obsession?
Or could she twist it? Claim the fire for herself, turn the game back on them?
Adrian’s voice came again, low and magnetic: The truth chains you tighter than any lie.
But chains could also be used as weapons.
She closed her eyes, her decision hardening.
If a puppet master was pulling the strings, then tomorrow night, she would follow the strings to his hands.
And she would decide who burned.
- Writer
