“It wasn’t long before one of Max’s goons showed up and led me to the study. The first thing I noticed was Edward was nowhere to be seen, and the second was a cushion on the floor next to Max’s desk. He pointed to it and told me to sit down, and once I did, he began questioning me again. This time, though, it wasn’t about Dante’s poem. This time it was about all the things he’d discussed with Edward over the last two years, which encompassed not only books but mathematics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, and language, too. My command of English was paltry at best, yet after all those endless hours spent listening while he tutored Edward, I had come to know many words and phrases in Italian and French and many more in Latin, all of which I pronounced like Max had done.

“His eyebrows rose more than once that night, and when he was finally done questioning me and sent me back to my cell, I was totally befuddled. Why had he allowed me to wash? Why had he given me clean clothes? Why the cushion? Why hadn’t he followed through on his threat? Why the endless questions?”

“I’m thinking you surprised him, or maybe impressed is a better word.”

“Right you are, except I didn’t know it then,” Bennett said, nodding. “For the next seven days, the scene was repeated. I’d go to the study. He’d question me, and then I’d go back to my cell. I know it sounds odd that I’d ever converse with him given my situation, and I suppose they’d have diagnosed me with Stockholm syndrome in today's world, but that wasn’t the case. I didn’t feel aligned with Max or his situation, not that I knew much about it at the time. I didn’t think the villagers were my enemies or that Max was right in what he was doing. Unquestionably, he wasn’t, yet over the past thousand or more days since my capture, I’d seen the man behind the monster. Other than the night I was taken, I never again saw Max turn into the beast I knew he could be. What I saw was a man with patience, a man with intelligence, and even a man with kindness. Not toward me. Until that point, I was basically invisible, but toward his people, I’d never heard him raise his voice or saw him raise his fist or…or even treat them as if they were less than him, even though most of them were.”

“It sounds like you respected him.”

“Honestly, it was hard not to,” Bennett said before taking a sip of wine. “Except the very next night, I wanted to kill him.”

“What? Why?”