He would never get tired of it. Of the fact that it was his. Of the fact that he now owned a place he possessed total control over. Back in the compound, everything had been shared. Perhaps share was too generous a word. It had been fought over. There had been a serf class in the compound. The women, the security guards. And the security guards had had guns, which put the women square on the bottom rung. And beneath that... The children of those women. Many of them had been given away by their mothers. Sold, Alex now realized, for drugs. He had spent many years feeling astonished, grateful, that his mother hadn’t done so. That she’d put some sort of value on him. That he’d stayed safe. A miracle, it had seemed. But then he’d found out the truth. And the truth hadn’t been rainbows and a mother’s love. No. The truth had been poison. He was the monster he’d always despised.
