Stella was visiting Max for the second time since his uncle Erik’s pet had been rather carelessly and hastily gifted to him. Max, who was always very tightlipped and private about delicate matters such as this hadn’t spoken of it yet to anyone but Simon, and him only a little. Simon didn’t have the stomach for it, and Max wouldn’t impose. 

Stella minded not at all. In fact, she found herself listening raptly to anything Max would tell her about the last few weeks. In truth, anything about Max’s uncle Erik and the hand me down pet was fascinating, morbid and salacious as any gossip she’d heard in a long time.

“My uncle’s employee’s were the worst of it, I think,” Max said darkly.

She itched with the intrigue of that statement, like a scratchy turtleneck sweater at her throat. She recrossed her legs and sat back as if she weren’t really all that interested, picking one of her own long hairs off her sleeve—  as starkly red as the leaves on the November trees outside. 

“How so?” she said mildly. 

Max frowned at the fireplace, lost in thought. He looked like his father in profile, especially as he got older, the set of his eyebrows and the dark stubble that trailed over his jaw like a shadow. Those seaglass gray eyes were his mother’s, though, and so was his tendency to do a hard turn into the introspective. His father would never give a second thought about that pet. He’d leave it outside and forget it until it was frostbitten and whimpering on the stoop.

“The stories those guys would tell the poor kid to scare him, out in that warehouse… I’ve pieced most of it together from Keith. Keith’s the boss of my uncle’s day to day operations. The foreman, for lack of a better word.” Max raised an eyebrow. “He’s a real piece of work. The type you wouldn’t brush shoulders with unless you got thrown in the county drunk tank some night.”

Goodness no, not you, Max. Stella thought, half teasing. Not one of the Holstrom men mixing with riffraff. Her mother had once asked her if Max was studying medicine, and sniffed rather pointedly when Stella had told her no, mum, he was not. 

“He and these guys… petty criminals, most of them, some of them are just there for an honest paycheck… but they would have Carlo out there most days with them.”

“Why?”

“Erik said to keep him from losing his mind. Solitary confinement, you know.”

Stella nodded. “Inhumane.”

Max huffed. “I don’t know that the warehouse option was much more humane than keeping him in that crate all day would have been. They told him…” Max trailed off, his eyes flicking up as if his pet would be standing in the doorway, which in the old house were tall and narrow as coffins. But there was only the dark, cold hallway.

“What?” Stella pressed. “Told him what?”

Max lowered his voice and she scooted closer to him, leaning in like when they were conspiratorial, secretive teenagers. 

“They told him there was a pet before him,” Max said. “Another boy. They told him the other pet tried to run off, that he managed to scale the fence but some cops picked him up on ‘75 trying to hitchhike.”

Stella nodded along. The old wrought iron fireplace hissed and popped and she flinched involuntarily. The firelight cast weird shadows on the lofty ceiling, stretching and shrinking as they danced.

“They told him the cops knew he was a pet immediately. They said the cops are all friends with Erik anyway, these two in particular had even been at a dinner party or two of his.”

“Not a stretch,” Stella drawled. 

“So the cops take him right back to my uncle’s. And my uncle took the escape attempt as a total betrayal. He was livid. That quiet sort of livid, the scary kind. You know, like my father can get.”

Stella feigned a shiver. The Holstrom men were not people she got too close to, or went out of her way to be alone with. There was something stately and aloof but militant about them, unsmiling except for a flicker of glee she had seen from time to time only ever brought on by cruelty, like boys who had once shot at cats with BB guns, grown influential and powerful. 

Max was the only Holstrom she felt any sort of affinity for. He was the only one she considered anywhere near normal, and her feelings about his family didn’t extend to him. She’d known him half her life. 

Max was a part of this place for her, like the valleys and wooded hills, downtown’s brick-lined streets with lamp posts wrapped in white lights in December, her aging family members and smattering of remaining childhood friends.

This grand, drafty house in the foothills like a manor in a storybook was a character from her girlhood, too. She used to sneak arm in arm with Max up the ancient staircase, knowing every creak and groan. She would stay the night without telling any of their parents. Even so, Max’s father always knew. The wolfish look he gave her across the chilly kitchen early one morning made her feel as if she’d come downstiars naked, the patrilineal family name written in red all over her flushing skin. She’d hurried back up to Max’s bed, his flannel sheets and plaid comforter, the morning-smell of their sleep and the heat of his body.

“So Keith tells Carlo over and over about the last pet’s punishment for escaping,” Max told her. “And honestly, it’s so grotesque it’s ridiculous. But if you have reason to believe it… or reason to believe that it could ever happen to you, it’s…” he spread his hands and shook his head. He didn’t have words. 

“What did they do?” 

Max gave her a look. She tilted her head. “Tell me.”

“They uh.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “They broke his fingers. The first pet. One by one. Then they called in the doctor. A guy my uncle Erik knows, that keeps company with them. The doctor surgically removes the pet’s hands and feet. Without anesthetic. But he can keep the pet alive, because he’s… well, he’s a surgeon.”

Stella pursed her lips. 

“And then they decide that isn’t enough so they go up to the knees and elbows. They like that better. Then they destroy its… his hearing. Then they blind him with a soldering iron and hang him in the doorway. Like a mounted animal head.”

“Alive?” she whispered.

“Presumably.”

For a moment she was quiet, her mind working to put this information into an accurate mental picture. The idea of being operated on while awake, on purpose, was almost too much for her to wrap her mind around on its own. Not operated on. Butchered. The sadistic brutality of it was somehow even more grotesque alongside the expertise and prestige that usually came to mind when she thought of a surgeon. She got to the deliberate blinding and deafening and her imagination began to fail her.

“Did this…?” She hesitated. She knew Max had looked up to his uncle, once. He still might. “How do we know this was something that Erik’s employees made up to scare Carlo?”

Max didn’t recoil, or narrow his eyes at her. He looked as if he’d known she might ask it. “I wonder that myself.”

She touched her fingertips to her lips, eyes drifting over the floor in thought. “No wonder he was so damn afraid of you. If your uncle is capable of allowing a thing like that done to an innocent pet, why wouldn’t you be?”

“I know,” Max said, briefly checking his phone when it vibrated. “And that’s only one story they told him. I took it sort of personally, at first, that he was so skittish around me, and I shouldn’t have. I didn’t know how fucking depraved—”

Stella widened her eyes quickly to alert him the boy was truly in the doorway this time. Max turned to look, causing Carlo to shrink back like he had intruded and was having second thoughts about presuming to exist in his master’s house at all.

Stella couldn’t help but imagine all those horror movie things being done to a strapped down, shrieking-and-crying Carlo. Her heart flipped unpleasantly in her chest.

“It’s okay,” Max called to him, holding out one long arm and curling his fingers in a come-hither gesture. “Come here, sweetheart.”

The boy padded in silently, tall and somber, just this side of too thin for his long legs, his bony shoulders. She wondered if Max was paying enough attention to that, if he was feeding him richly and often like a spoiled kitten. He went to Max’s side easily enough, even took his hand and let Max pull him closer.

“Sit with us,” Max said, and the boy folded his legs with no hesitation, obedient to Max’s every word. He was easy on the eyes, Stella thought. Of course he was. For Erik Holstrom to bother, he had to be one in a million. His hair looked soft and clean now, buoyant waves of rich brown that nearly matched the doe-eyes beneath it. The too-big button up Max had given him to wear showed his neck and a sliver of collarbone as coyly as any girl’s, and Stella had to wonder at Erik Holstrom’s intent, to what end he kept this sort of tender creature around like a caged bird. 

Her heart soared unexpectedly when Max wrapped his arm around the forlorn little pet and in turn Carlo laid his cheek against his new master’s shoulder. Max kissed the crown of his head chastely and squeezed him. He muttered something Stella didn’t catch and lo! an actual smile, or the rumor of one, played across Carlo’s mouth. She found herself smiling back, though she had not been invited in on the joke. 

“This is Stella,” Max introduced them again, though they’d met before when the poor thing was trembling and too miserable and terrified to make eye contact with her. “Stella has been one of my very best friends for many, many years.”

“Max speaks very highly of you,” she said in her best woman-with-a-graduate-degree-from-Colby voice she felt inspired the most confidence, without any of the girlishness from her higher registers. “He says you are an exemplary pet.”

The boy was wary of the compliment, but he flushed pink and gave her a polite nod with his temple still pressed into Max’s shoulder. “It’s nice to meet you, Stella,” he said in a well-trained voice, and she was pleased to hear it did not wobble or shake, as it had the first time she’d seen him.

Max held him warmly, as if he had been his very own pet for some time, and they had not just met two weeks ago. Mine, the embrace said, and even from five feet away Stella felt herself melting a little with her sheer proximity to it. Max Holstrom could always make her feel deliriously looked after and safe, even when they were forty miles from the lights of the nearest country gas station and the car was broken down on a deadly cold night. She felt a surge of old intimacy toward him. It was no small thing to be allowed to see him with his guard down like this, being so gentle with a pet. 

“You two have come a rather long way in two weeks,” she said slyly. 

Carlo could no longer bear her gaze and lowered his eyes. She clicked her tongue. She hadn’t meant to embarrass him. But Max was laughing, and tilting Carlo’s chin up with a finger, and smiling at him approvingly. Though he seemed like he might simply melt at any moment, the pet withstood the intensity of the attention and even got a little dreamy eyed, as if he were pleasantly drunk on it.

“It’s just Stella,” Max was saying. “You’ll see a lot of her. She loves you, too, don’t you Stel?” he was nearly cooing, brushing the boy’s hair back from his face in a way that was making Stella’s eyelids sleepy and jealous, and the boy was glancing at her again with those doe eyes. The statue silent look pets often had about them in mixed company was melting away and his shoulders were relaxing with Max’s loving words and touches. 

He must know Max would never allow anything to happen to him by now. Or perhaps he didn’t know, and only hoped it was the case. Maybe she would find a moment alone with him to vouch for Max, help put the poor thing more truly at ease. 

It’s not a show. He will take most excellent care of you always. I promise. You can put those crazy stories they told you right out of your head.