Chapter One

If only Carol were here to help me, thought Kaiden as he scrubbed at a dirty dish with a damp rag. I'd wash dishes until my hands bled. He dropped a plate as he lost himself to a devious daydream, and the resultant crash brought about a loud, hissing curse. Instead, I'm with...

"You broke another plate. That makes, what, three this month? I didn't know that somebody could be so useless. Too bad you don't have any money, else I'd make you pay for it." Then came the expected click of the tongue. "At this rate, I worry for your future."

Kaiden met the old man's gaze with a sour stare, his fists balled up where his grandfather couldn't see them within the sudsy water that filled the sink. "Stop acting like you give a shit about me. You basically kidnapped me and stole all my stuff, then forced me to work my ass off for free. You know what? I'm sick of this shit!" His hand grazed a stainless-steel steak knife that was hidden from view at the bottom of the sink. "I'm done taking–"

His head snapped forward as he was struck just above the right temple, which caused him to crumple to the ground in shock.

Brent...

His cousin had just squeezed his way through the door to the kitchen, his broad shoulders having put up a desperate battle against the black marble frame. At 6'3 and over 110 kilos, there wasn't a shred of fat on him, whose sunken eyes and bearded face gave off the appearance of anything but a high-schooler in the eleventh grade.

He'd only left for hockey practice fifteen minutes ago, after Kaiden had been forced to wash the entire family's dishes under the supervision of their grandfather. Why was Brent home so early?

"Didn't you have practice?" All sallow skin and narrow features, their grandfather's grumpy tone completed the miserable picture of his person. "You better not have skipped out."

"It was canceled." Brent hooked a meaty thumb over his shoulder despite the fact that there were no windows in the room. "There's a blizzard out there that'd freeze a mammoth. It's twenty below today, so that hunk of crap you gave me probably wouldn't have started up anyway."

"What are you looking at?"  their grandfather hissed at Kaiden. He picked up his sleek, mahogany cane, which had been resting against a nearby cupboard.

Kaiden jumped back just in time to avoid a stinging bite that he'd suffered through hundreds of times over the past two years. Even something as small as not giving a greeting when they passed one another within the estate would earn him a smart swipe at the knees.

This fucking lunatic.

As usually happened whenever Kaiden dodged his grandfather's strikes, Brent jumped in and gave him a resounding slap. Feeling hot blood leaking from his nose, Kaiden spat in his cousin's face. "You slap like a little girl."

Their grandfather smirked. "Don't beat him too hard this time. He's still got dishes to clean." He stopped on his way out. "Oh, and you know what will happen if you fight back, right?"

Thirty maids in the mansion, and Kaiden was stuck with most of the chores. He'd had a normal life up until just a couple of years ago, when his mother died in a car crash. This was five years after his father had died under similar circumstances, which left his grandfather as the next of kin, which was why he had fallen into such harrowing circumstances.

After losing his father, his mother had sold their house and then moved them across the province into a tiny apartment, where they had led a poor yet relatively happy life up until midway through his first year in high school. He'd had a lot of friends, a cute girlfriend that he'd kissed a million times, and great grades at school, but everything had changed after his mother had received a mysterious phone call and ran off in a rush. That was the last time that he'd seen her alive.

"What happened to you?"

His younger cousin, Penelope, stood in the open doorway of her bedroom. She wore a slight frown on her skinny face, which was soon obscured by a long curtain of messy orange hair.

"What do you think?" spat Kaiden, who limped past her without pause.

"Fine, I don't care anyway." She slammed the door with a dramatic bang, after which her heightened voice could be heard through the old, varnished walls of the hallway. "Maybe if you weren't such an asshole, you wouldn't get your ass kicked so much! You should be grateful that we took you in!"  

"Fucking bitch," he grated, stopping a few dozen meters away from her doorway to lean against the wall. He'd grown nauseas and had begun to see stars.

Another cousin of his walked by, hand-in-hand with a heavy-breasted maid. Both acted as if he didn't exist, though he saw pity in the woman's eyes as she passed by. All of the maids knew him by now, since he did more than his fair share of their collective workload. Once the stars no longer swam in his vision, he hurried downstairs and retreated into his room, a stone chamber in a discreet corner of the basement.

He left a trail of blood in his wake, but he was too fed up to care about cleaning up after himself. In this household, that would be the base expectation. He leaned his head against the door, refusing to allow any frustrated tears to fall. There had been an unopened wine bottle on the counter while Brent had been beating him, and it had come within Kaiden's reach several times throughout the tussle. Why hadn't he just grabbed it and broke it over the bigger boy's head? The same reason he always stayed his hand. His family members constantly threatened to have the police lock him up if he ever retaliated to their "discipline," which was well within their means as an incredibly wealthy and influential family. But at this point, did that really matter? How much worse could jail be than this hellhole, considering all the beatings and bullshit that he had to put up with? Kaiden might have been scared of his family, but his hatred for them far outweighed the fear.

"What the hell is wrong with you people?" he whispered helplessly. "Just because nobody else here respects you, this has to be my life?"

He'd never met anybody with a family larger than his, with over two hundred members living within the estate alone and another eighty or so staying elsewhere within the city. His grandfather and the man's five older siblings had built up a massive complex in a quiet suburban area, where they had all settled down with their families so that they could collectively manage their late father's fortune. Decades later, each of these geezers had pumped out at least eight kids, most of which had different mothers. Only two of his grandfather's brothers were still alive, though Kaiden's grandfather was the only one with limited funds. After a long-lasting lifestyle of greed and lust, the miserable sod had gambled and splurged away his entire inheritance, leaving his line of the family dependent on the others.

I should have just asked to get adopted by strangers.

It was a struggle not to mope as he stood there in silent solitude, thoughts of his mother keeping a fire lit in his brownish, hazel eyes. The night that she'd died, she had looked frightened. She had tried to hide it, but he knew her well enough to see through the forced smiles and hurried assurances.

Growing up, Kaiden had never heard mention of any extended relatives aside from his grandmother, whom he and his mother had visited once a month at the long-term care home that she'd lived in up until she passed away in his freshman year, just a few months before she was followed by her only daughter.

All too suddenly, he had lost the two people that he'd cherished the most in this world. Glaringly alone and terribly distraught, he was left on his own to face the most fearsome form of sadness that a person could feel. Before he had even made sense of the nightmarish turn that his life had taken, he was pulled from school and forced to move thousands of kilometres across the country to where some apparent relatives lived in the lakeside city of Cochrane, along the southern coasts of northeastern Ontario.

"Look at this mess," came a vicious voice from beyond the closed door, which he was still leaning up against while pinching his nose. "And it leads all the way down..."

Kaiden sighed as he stepped back, locked the door, and then fell onto his bed with a rush of vertigo. Somebody tried the handle, but the door didn't budge.

"Kaiden! Unlock the door."

He ignored her and gazed at the aged, heavyset desk that sat next to his bed, the only two pieces of furniture in the otherwise bleak room aside from the thin rug that failed to keep the cold from his feet whenever he walked around without shoes or slippers.

"Do you forget what happened last time you did this?"

He only had a few sets of clothes, which were jammed into the drawers of the desk, atop which sat a few old textbooks that he'd brought along from his previous home on a whim. These were the only belongings of his that hadn't mysteriously disappeared from his room during his first week at the estate, which was a far-cry from the middle-class home that he'd expected to arrive at. Since they had refused to enroll him in school and he no longer had any way to access the internet, he'd had to rely on these limited materials to teach himself whatever he could, whenever he finished up with his daily shifts of doing chores.

His aunt pounded on the door as if she were being swarmed by zombies, her voice filled with venom. "Open. This. Door!"

He waited for the expected click as she tried her key, since she and his grandfather each had a key to his room for some unknown reason.

"Don't say I didn't warn you, you little..." She barged in with a storm of fury, which died down as soon as she saw him feigning unconsciousness on the bed, which was covered with blood from his still bleeding nose.

"W-what is this?"

Her heels clapped against the floor as she scuttled over and began to shake him with worry.

"Kaiden! Kaiden, wake up!" She stood up, and he chanced a tight-lidded peak at her pale face. She had clasped a hand over her mouth, and was now stepping backwards in horror.

Serves you right, he thought, though he soon began to question her reaction. Why was she so affected? She hated him more than anybody, and spoke poorly of his mother on a daily basis. Did she really care for him after all? The notion made him sick.

His aunt ran out of the room, her black night gown smearing some of the bloodstains that he'd trailed inside. He felt very dizzy, and was alarmed when he had a tough time opening his eyes for real. Had he really lost so much blood? He must have drifted off, because it wasn't long before he heard Brent's irritated and slightly regretful voice from the hallway.

"I didn't know this would happen. I barely even hit him. It's not my fault he's such a pussy."

He heard a smack and then angry grumbling, followed by his aunt's panicked hisses.

"Why do you always have to be such a brute? You know how important he is. If he dies, how will you compensate the rest of us?"

"Wow, Mom. He's just knocked out. You don't have to be so dramatic."

"Dramatic? What if he has to go to the hospital because of this?"

"He won't tell them anything, Mom. He knows what'll happen, so he'll just sit there like a good little boy and come back whenever he's feeling better. Besides, why should I feel bad? They stole all that money from the family, so he's got no right to complain."

By they, did he mean Kaiden and his mom? She, who had been the type of person to donate a toonie to the Red Cross even if she only had a few dollars in her purse?

"He turns sixteen in two days. Two days, Brent! Once that happens, he doesn't have to come back if he doesn't want to."

"Then we can just track him down and make him sign the papers."

"That won't mean anything if your grandfather isn't his legal guardian anymore!"

"Shit. Okay, well, just call a doctor over here, then. I don't know."

Another slapping sound echoed throughout the hallway, followed by another, and then a third.

"Why can't you just be like your older brothers?"

The two left the room with hurried steps, deciding on which maid they would send to clean Kaiden up and wash his bedding.

As he lay there, he was seized by a strong surge of anger that he didn't quite understand until his mind was frozen by an icy thought. Kaiden knew that his mother would never have stolen from these people, no matter how awful they were. But they seemed to think that she did.

Then we can just track him down and make him sign the papers.

For the first time since her death, Kaiden became suspicious that his mother's passing wasn't caused by something so simple as an accident.

These people...these...

The stars abruptly returned to his vision, but he was too angry for worry. He was aware of his consciousness as it faded away, his mind a cesspool of rage and swimming lights.