#fourthshot

“I grew up in a town called Chiltenham, in England, as… well, for the sake of the story I might as well tell you. I was born as Arthur Grosvenor, the son of Reginald Grosvenor and an actress from Mumbad called Riya Patel. I was told my mother abandoned me, so I lived with my father, who thankfully was an extraordinarily wealthy man from an extremely privileged family.

He remarried soon after, to my stepmother, Eleanor Cadogan. Two wealthy people from the most well-connected families in England. It was like a match made in heaven… except Eleanor couldn’t conceive. Which meant that much of my life was spent being groomed to inherit, bastard child that I was, which my stepmother never failed to remind me of whether in word or deed every single day.

There was no joy, no solace in my life barring the companionship of my nursemaid, Sai. A kindly if simple creature, considering that she was a clone imported from Jinteki’s Mumbad stock to watch over me, she nevertheless did the best in her limited and stunted mental capacity to watch over me. Before you think I’m slighting her, I’m not. She was engineered to function and do exactly what she was meant to, no more.

I grew in solitude, attended to in my studies by a revolving suite of tutors and Sai. I wandered the mansion a lot in the knowledge I was not allowed to be let free. It was on one of these wanderings I discovered the sensie. The… film, I suppose is the traditional name for it. But what was more important was the woman on the cover.

Later on, when the police arrived to investigate the murder, I told them I had completely blanked out. That’s not true.

I remember… I remember picking up a candlestick. Opening the door to my room. Sai smiling up at me, innocently. Smiling with my mother’s face. Vacant and dead-eyed. And I knew, I knew that bastard had… he must have had her killed and somewhere in the back of his mind he’d thought “Wouldn’t it be nice if my son had his mother” and gave her back to me as this… thing. Less than human. I remember the screams as I beat her, again and again and again like I was always beaten until she… it… stopped moving.