It had been a long time since he’d worn any face beside his own to dinner. Brand stared at the mirror as illusion after illusion flickered by. He hated them all. He hated the memories they brought back, trying to please one girl with this face, seduce another girl with that. He kept flipping through them, because as much as he hated those faces, he hated his own even more.

“I never promised you anything,” he yelled to his mirror. “I told you I wasn’t going to change. I act according to my desire. I desire revenge. Don’t look as me as though you had any hopes for me being a better man. You’re the one who said I was never any good to begin with.”

Consequences.

This is what happens when you tell a girl you like her.

Brand put on the face of the man he hated most. A young man, maybe sixteen, with brown hair and brown eyes, soft skin and a perfect smile. A handsome face, women said, though Brand had always thought the eyes too beady, the nose too sneering. It was the face of the man who had stolen his lover away.

“You’re no fun anymore,” Lady Genoveve had told him. “All you want to do is cry and talk about your dead mother. I’ve found someone else. I don’t want you anymore.”

He’d seen them together. Brand never knew he could hate someone that much.

There was a moment, when he had the boy tied and dangling over the river that Brand really thought he’d kill him. And maybe Lady Genoveve as well. He thought of their bodies washing up on the shore, all pale and bloated, their limbs tangled together. A romantic notion.

He decided against it. Brand did not want his mother, now an angel in heaven, looking down on earth to see her son had become a murderer. So he only knocked the boy out and wore his face over his own. He used the illusion to break into Lady Genoveve’s bedchamber, where he proceeded to break, rip, and burn every pretty thing she owned.

But that wasn’t enough. Her husband would just replace it. Everything was replaceable to her. Instead, he broke into their vault, ripped up their spell books, shattered the magical orbs, and set fire to the ruins. He wanted them to lose their power, their history—everything. He wanted them to suffer the way he had suffered.

Looking at the face now, Brand thought it seemed a fitting one to wear it to dinner.

A lump of lead sat in his stomach. It jostled as he climbed down the stairs to appear before the girls at the stroke of seven. Gretchen wore a pale blue dress that was too big and sagging at the shoulders. She had bruises up her arms. Brand hadn’t given her those. Seri held Gretchen’s hand. She wore her red velvet dress, and her jaw was clenched tight. Her eyes blazed with fury.

“Good evening, ladies,” Brand said. “Shall we go to dinner?”