His existence was called into further question at the reading of the will, an awful three-hour affair in the solemn offices of the family attorney, René squirming in an itchy tweed suit, the lawyer stroking his fulsome mustache. Father parceled out the family estate to countless veteran causes, leaving René with a measly couple hundred grand. He would no longer be able to live in the fashion he was accustomed to.

For six months he withdrew entirely from the world, holed up in a summer home that had yet to fall under the auctioneer’s gavel. He knew he was a failure in the eyes of his family and the world, but hearing this fact confirmed so starkly by the walrus-mustachioed attorney was almost too much to bear. René had been deemed not worthy of sharing in a Cassaroy fortune that dated back to the 1600s. A two-inch curve of the spine had been enough to bring four centuries of prestige and affluence to a halt.

His father had unwritten him from history.

Perhaps the only benefit of being made nonexistent was that he was able to write a new story for himself. Play by new rules, ones that favored his strengths.

Using nothing more than a lifetime’s education in pitilessness, he had assembled a fortune of his own. He now lived in a manner befitting a Cassaroy, but rather than being bound by convention or tradition, he did exactly what he fucking wanted.

He could control everything. Even—quite possibly—nature and time.

He had received only one noteworthy inheritance from his long, proud lineage of hale forebears, and yet it would prove more valuable than all the family jewels and dusty paintings put together: an AB blood type, present in a mere 4-percent sliver of the population. In this, René was exceptional. No—perhaps not exceptional yet. But it would make him so.

It would precipitate his transformation into something worth looking at again.

Standing before the mirror, droplets from the shower clinging dewlike to the hairs that furred his sloped shoulders, he saw his deficiencies on display. The sea-lion bulge of his pale belly. The half-moons of skin sagging beneath his eyes. The fineness of his hair such that the overhead light shone straight through to the dome of his skull.

Now was the hard part. Bracing himself, he thumbed the light switch to high.

There he was in all his starkness, every flaw captured in the unforgiving glare.

He began his evening restorative process.

Cover-up for his crow’s-feet. A little concealer applied with a cotton disk to take the dark off the bags beneath his eyes. Color corrector for the sun spot staining his left cheek in front of his ear. He’d tattooed on a hint of eyeliner to make his chocolate brown irises pop, but it had been a few years, the ink fading. He made a note to have it redone.