His third fire took a house and two dogs trapped inside. Someone saw him, though, so the cops came, and money changed hands, and X—instead of juvenile detention—went away for six months of intensive therapy, a half year of false remorse and deception while the doctors made notes and encouraging sounds, all while X hid his painful erections and his thoughts of the dogs, and how their screams, as they’d burned, had sounded almost human.

If X had learned one lesson from his time in therapy, it was that fires were messy and hard to conceal. Plus, his dreams were no longer of fire but of screaming dogs, and the animals that came next: first a mouse or two, then the rabbits and squirrels, until his dreams were filled with red meat, and his days with expectation. X spent those days with his traps and his secret places. And though his parents kept a wary distance, things changed for real on the day he used a garden hose to freeze his sister’s cat to a winter tree. Afterward, his parents traveled more often, and when they did, they took the sister, only. On those rare occasions they came home, X’s mother seemed less lovely each time, a near stranger who sent servants at night to tuck in the covers of her only son. Even X’s father said, Better a handshake than a hug, and tried to make a joke of it.

X was thirteen when his father was given hard proof of tortured animals, first from a gamekeeper at the mountain preserve, a small, nimble man who’d discovered a mallard, still alive, with its wings nailed to a tree, and—days later—a young bobcat staked to the ground with both eyes removed and its stomach unzipped.

The looks from his parents grew more worried, but no one asked him about it.

No one said much of anything.

A month later, a foal disappeared from the stable of the equestrian estate in Wellington. It was a special foal, his sister’s. X killed it quick and messy, and left it imminently findable. Why? Because anything was better than the whispers and suspicion, or the quiet, cotton silence that filled up a room each time he entered. Part of him thought that if they’d only confront him, he might stop. If someone would say, Son, this is wrong. Or, Son, why do you have such emptiness in your soul?