1. Chapter 1
Four Years Ago - Washington, DC
It began after I turned eight years old.
Mother had always been a drunk, and Father only cared about running his crime syndicate, which made my family extremely wealthy. But as Father was dragged away more often, committing his crimes for profit, Mother drank more.
Then the touching started. Did it come from loneliness or something more sinister? I couldn’t measure it, and I never asked. When you’re a scared child, knowing something is wrong, you make yourself silent and small. But they always see you—every single time.
Mother would start drinking in the late morning, but she spaced it out through the day enough to remain relatively coherent, but she was drunk enough to push back her morals and boundaries, if she ever had any. I doubted she cared. She married a criminal, after all. I was conceived from evil.
I rarely saw Father, so I was only around my mother, tutor, nanny, and two servants who lived in the house with me. They all knew. They had to have known. How could they not?
Her touches started simply, and I made no note of them at first. I never thought of them as anything more than a mother’s touch.
She started with a kiss on my throat. Or I would sit on her lap, and her hand would be nestled too closely between my legs.
At the time, I assumed she simply loved me.
She told me as much. No warning bells sounded in my brain when it all began.
After I turned nine, she stumbled into my room one night as I slept. She claimed she had a nightmare and needed her little boy to comfort her. After crawling under the covers with me, her hand slid into my pajama bottoms, and she touched me down there.
That was when I knew the wrongness of it. But I trusted her. I believed she was allowed to touch me, being my mother. Deep down, the alarm bells sounded as I tried to convince myself that what she was doing was right.
That night, she passed out and nothing more happened, but as time went on, she grew bolder. She also grew angrier when I stopped complying.
I still felt the sting on my face when I wouldn’t let her touch me.
I’d been previously diagnosed with high-functioning autism.
While I could learn my studies just fine, my father insisted that he hire a special tutor for me.
He was the only one I trusted. He was kind.
It was him I told of my discomfort about my mother.
He confronted her, but she immediately fired him and threatened legal action.
Then she beat me for it enough so that I never dared speak out again.
I lost track of how long I’d been bedridden.
When I complied, the beatings stopped for the most part. But sometimes compliance wasn’t enough. Mother loved marking and touching me. She grew obsessed with it. No one stopped her, so she grew bolder and bolder.
If Father were around and saw my bruised face, she would lie smoothly, and I would eagerly agree with her lies.
Over the years, I withdrew. Any sense of love or happiness had long since vanished. Eventually, I just stopped caring when she came to my room and did things. I let her in my silence, getting lost in my mind.
Eventually, it escalated to me touching her in return and fucking her. My dick got hard, but I felt nothing. She became just a vessel—an object.
Seven years later, I stood naked, bathed in my mother’s blood as I stared at her corpse.
I didn’t know what finally triggered me.
What was the final line in the sand? All I felt was this bubbling rage when she finished with me, like the anger had built and built, growing into an unstable nuclear reactor, until it finally exploded.
When she passed out, I headed to the kitchen, grabbed our sharpest knife, and killed her.
Thirty-seven.
That was how many times I stabbed her, the last one being a long cut across her throat. I watched her gurgle and convulse as the life went out of her.
I’d never seen so much blood in my life.
For the first time in years, I experienced pleasure.
Joy. My hand ran through her pool of blood, and I stamped it on my face.
The stench of copper was almost nauseating, but I took a deep breath of it.
I would never forget the smell and gore, and I would forever relish in my mother’s demise.
Still naked and covered in blood, I headed downstairs to slaughter the servants and my nanny. They knew. Of course they did. They chose their jobs over me.
Perhaps Father shouldn’t have taught me to use knives, a bow, and martial arts. He wanted me to protect myself since the people he dealt with were shady at best. So much for his protection. He never protected me from her .
Once I’d killed everyone in the house, I headed to my room and walked into my ensuite. The blood covering my body filled me with a strange sort of pleasure. All those who harmed me or were complicit were dead.
All but one.
He would pay soon enough.
I took a long shower, scrubbing off all the blood, which took a long time because some of it had dried, and some of it was sticky. When the water finally ran clear, I stepped out and dried off.
I opened the door to my walk-in closet and pulled out my favorite suit in charcoal gray. I paired it with a crisp white button-up, a burgundy-colored tie, and leather shoes, also in a dark burgundy.
After I got dressed, I straightened my tie and smoothed out the jacket with my hands as I stared into the mirror. With a quick fix of my hair, I sat on the edge of my bed and waited until it was seven in the morning, three hours away .
I glanced at my watch, and when it read seven, I pulled out my phone and called for the family driver. Then I stood on the stoop of the house and awaited his arrival.
He promptly drove up the long driveway at seven thirty, got out of the vehicle, and opened up the door for me, allowing me to slide into the back seat.
“Where would you like to go, Mr. Easton?” he asked.
The driver had always been kind and polite to me, so he got to live.
“To Father’s office, please.”
The building Father worked in was nondescript—a warehouse, so to speak. It was large, housing contraband, sex-trafficked slaves, and weapons. He was very open about his job whenever he came home. He’d also begun training me to take over the business one day.
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my slacks, fingering the small daggers there, as I walked through the corridors, passing offices and staff with guns. At the end of the hall, Father’s office stood with the door closed. I rapped on the wood until he told me to enter.
“Easton? What are you doing here?”
I looked a lot like him, though I was shorter. We had matching honey-wheat hair, fair skin, and an aristocratic nose. He was also broader than I was. My body was built more like my mother’s. Then again, I was only fifteen .
His office contrasted with the outside. It was elegant, full of books, old wood, expensive rugs, and stolen artifacts.
I sat on a leather club chair in front of his desk and folded my hands in my lap, my leg resting over my knee, fingers tapping out a rhythm in my head.
He sighed and scanned over some files on his desk. “I asked you a question.”
“That depends on you.”
He looked up with pale, tawny-brown eyes that matched mine, his brow raised in question. “That’s brazen of you. Explain yourself and be quick about it. I’m busy and have no time for sullen boys.”
“I killed Mother and the staff. I stabbed her repeatedly. Thirty-seven times, to be exact. I was quicker about it with the servants and my nanny.”
His eyes widened, and he abruptly stood. “Tell me you’re joking. I don’t have fucking time for this!”
“You know I never joke.”
His face turned red, about to blow, before I raised a hand to silence him. “Did you know?”
“Know the fuck what? You and I will deal with this. Sit there while I call some of my men to go over to the house.”
“Did. You. Know.”
The rage within me started building again. It festered like acid in my soul. And it felt… strangely good. It made me feel alive, as if I had been asleep my entire life, and suddenly I was wide awake, ready to face my greatest triumph .
After he made the call, he barked out his orders and then hung up. He sat back in his leather chair, breathing back his composure.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His eyes flashed as if a memory surfaced, and I knew in that moment he had lied.
I stood and fisted my hands on his desk. “Did you know?!” The burning through my body was like fire, and I wanted to bathe in it. God, to feel again. To feel something other than indifference. Nothingness. “She has molested me since I was eight!”
He looked away, maintaining his calm, before he glanced back at me and scoffed. Then his eyes flashed in doubt, but just for a second. He may not have known for sure, but he had wondered, and yet he still did nothing.
My hand pulled out the dagger without his notice as the burning rage fueled me and pushed me over the edge toward murder. I couldn’t let him live.
Thanks to my stature and build, and years of kung fu, I leaped onto his desk, straddled his lap, and pressed the dagger deep enough into his jugular that some blood leaked out. One wrong move, and he would bleed out.
“Move and die. I just killed four people. I won’t hesitate to kill you. I can’t tell you the pleasure it brought me. This is what you and Mother created. This is the end result of your parenting.”
“Now, Easton…”
“You knew something was wrong. You knew she was doing something to me. Maybe you didn’t know exactly what it was, but you had some idea.
I read it in your eyes that look too much like mine.
I can see into your soul. Yet you did nothing to save me from her, even with all your training of me, no one could protect me from my own drunken mother late at night. ”
“I… didn’t know, son.”
“Son? Son?!”