Someday it’ll make a hell of a story.” He was right.

It made a hell of a story.

He just wasn’t there to see the ending, and that is the one thing about all of it I cannot forgive — not my father, my father I can leave to the wreckage of his own choices — but that.

That Niko took the small daily humiliations of the cover for twelve years, cheerfully, for people who never earned it, and did not live long enough to watch, even once, the moment they finally understood what he was.

Chapter 8 — What They Didn’t Know

They knew Niko was dead.