In just two short months, I had Leonardo dancing in the palm of my hand.
To him, I was nothing more than a quiet, broken teenage boy—an orphan clinging to the warmth of his twisted protection. A stray he'd taken in out of guilt or pride. Oh, but he was so very, very wrong.
He thought I needed him. But I was studying him—every word, every twitch, every weakness. And one night, when the whiskey drowned his caution and the shadows felt safer than they were, he told me everything.
It was the fire.
That night, he said, something inside him died—but something else woke up. He had fallen into a coma, left to rot in a hospital bed with third-degree burns and no one to visit. When he finally opened his eyes, he wasn't Leonardo anymore. Not really.
He flinched at heat, couldn't bear to look at flame. Just the flick of a lighter could send him into a spiral. He tried to rebuild, to open his beloved restaurant again—but the fire had taken more than flesh. It had gutted his soul.
So he sought help.
That was his final mistake.
His therapist, Dr. Alben, was no healer. He was a sadist with a license. A man obsessed with unlocking the "true self" through pain. He saw Leonardo not as a patient—but a project. An experiment.
He fed him pills. Not the kind that calmed, but ones that stirred something feral. He told Leonardo they were for "emotional regulation," but what they really did was sharpen the rage, twist the fear into violence, feed the thing inside him that the fire hadn't killed—only awakened.
And I watched it all. I watched Leonardo unravel.
Every time his hands shook, every time he screamed at shadows or flinched from the stove's heat, I saw the cracks widening.
And I smiled.
Because this wasn't just about survival anymore.
This was about control
The deeper Leonardo sank, the more he clung to me.
He didn't realize it, but I had become his anchor. His confessional. He would rant to me about the blood on his hands, cry about the dreams where the fire spoke to him in voices that weren't his. He thought I was his comfort, his lifeline.
But I was the one holding the blade.
Every time he broke down, I nodded. I soothed. I told him it wasn't his fault. I slipped the pills into his drink when he started resisting them. I watched him unravel one layer at a time until he was barely more than a twitching, glass-eyed shell in a man's skin.
And that's when I started planning my fire.
Not a literal one. Not yet.
The fire I was going to set would burn through his mind first. I began leaving matches where he could see them. Small things—accidents, he thought. A burner left on. A candle still lit when he knew he blew it out. Once, I set a pot of water to boil until it hissed dry and smoked. He woke up screaming that night, sweat pouring down his face, fists bloody from clawing at the wall.
I told him it was just a dream.
But it wasn't. It was a test.
And he was failing beautifully.
By the end of the third month, he was barely human—paranoid, violent, afraid of his own reflection. He trusted no one but me.
Exactly where I wanted him.
Because soon, I'd stop being the sidekick.
I'd become the flame that made him.
Or broke him.
And either way, I'd win.