Chapter 16 #2
Like a falling angel.
“Fuck.” I toss the scope aside. Collins may be able to string enough psych jargon together to craft a diagnosis that explains my evolution into a deviant, serial-killing psychopath. But I wonder if that will bring her any sort of comfort in her final moments, to offer some excuse.
Or if the horror of what I am will only make her despise me all the more.
In truth, I wasn’t born with this deficient lack of empathy. Although I experience a rush of endorphins every time the oscillating blade slices into bone, the high is a consequence of the act, not the attraction to it.
My transformation wasn’t immediate. It took time, a process. The first kill was a brutal battle with my conscience. I can still taste the bile at the back of my throat as I drilled through the skull.
The second, I gave in a bit more easily. My resistance a degree weaker. My revulsion a fraction more desensitized.
The shadow a shade darker.
By the third, I understood my morality wasn’t just being eroded—it was being overwritten. Replaced by something violent, insidious.
Wrong.
These psychological voids have a pull, a force with its own gravity. At the moment of death, of conscious collapse, something passes through me. Call it awareness…consciousness… Memories. But these gravitational echoes leave a stain, a residue.
Killers. Rapists. The most vile dregs of humanity. How can I not be tainted?
Where I used to fear pain, my neuropathways worn to avoid it, a deep fault has cracked. Connections crossed, rewired. Pain brings pleasure.
And inflicting it is fucking orgasmic.
“Since we have all this time,” I say, reaching into my pack. I remove my gloves before I uncap a syringe and plunge the needle into the crook of his arm. “Let’s talk, Cassian.”
He gasps in a cool shot of air as the stimulant hits his bloodstream. “Oh, fuck… You fucking—”
I trap his mouth with the syringe. “Don’t waste the breath you’ve got.” Slowly, I lower the barrel.
“Hell. At least…cover my dick, man.”
My gaze wanders to the flaccid dick in question. His exposed skin is blotchy, covered in dirt and blood from where his arms and legs have been skewered to the earth.
“You’re minutes away from death, and that’s your concern.”
Tears leak into his filthy hair. A sob shudders through his chest. From the collarbone down, he’s immobile.
I make all my victims immobile.
The way I’ll make her—
A flash of Collins pinned helplessly beneath me surfaces, and I slam my eyes shut against the intrusive assault, forcing it back into the dark, thrashing abyss.
“The thing is,” I say through gritted teeth, “you might be able to help me figure something out.” I rarely have the chance to question them, and I never want more of the vile details than necessary.
He swallows, Adam’s apple hitching with effort. “Figure out that you’re sick?”
I let the corner of my mouth turn up. “There’s nothing I can do to stop what’s going to happen,” I tell him honestly. “You’re going to die. I can’t prevent that.”
“Shit…” he stutters out.
“But before you do, I’m going to take that drill”—I tic my chin toward the compact cranial drill next to his head—“and open your skull.”
He whimpers, and I drape my arm over my knee, counting the staggered rise and fall of his chest. I hold up a clear vial, flicking my finger against the glass to call his attention.
“You’ll be awake to feel everything.” I pause, waiting to feel even a small measure of remorse.
I shrug. “This right here is a potent pain reliever. I can administer it before I start burring into your skull. And you might be telling yourself it will be quick. But I promise, time is relative, and pain slows time considerably. Fractions of a second can stretch out like eternity.”
“Jesus, I’ll pay you,” he says, clipped breath fogging the air. “I have money.”
I stare down at him, knowing what he sees, the void in my eyes. “I don’t need money.”
He manages a hard blink. “What the hell, then?”
I drag a hand over my jaw. “Answers.”
I stab the needle into the vial and fill the barrel before setting the syringe aside. “Tell me the truth, Cassian. Don’t lie. I want to know the exact moment you made the choice to kill your own flesh and blood, someone you loved.” I swallow the raw ache. “Tell me every fucking detail.”
After a minute of him uselessly groveling and slinging threats, he finally relents. There’s this phenomena that happens when a person accepts their death, that the end is unavoidable. A kind of detachment from reality.
Cassian divulges his sordid history in this calm state of detachment. Devoid of emotion, he recounts his brother’s murder like he’s reading from a manual. Maybe he believes this confession will cleanse his soul. Pardon his heinous sins in death.
I should tell him I’m no fucking priest. In the end, I’m not surprised by how uninspired his reason was. Two brothers, partners in sick, twisted crime, stalking the same woman. One takes her for himself, the other devolves into a deplorable state of jealousy and rage.
Repulsion twists my mouth. “A woman can tempt the sanest man mad,” I whisper roughly as the memory of her beside me on the bench is dredged from the depths of my mind, a vision of her eyes glimmering with early stars.
Looking up, I drag in a tight breath, reaching for the awe I once felt at seeing the Milky Way stretched across an expanse of dark sky.
“You know,” I say, voice lowering, “the myth of the Gemini twins was one of sacrifice. Two brothers who loved each other so deeply that when one died, the other begged the gods, offering his own life in exchange. That’s why they were placed among the heavens.
” My gaze traces that collection of stars. “So they’d never be separated again.”
Yet here, beneath the constellation, Cassian’s hand clasped to Julian’s cold, lifeless grip, I find no symmetry. Only violence and ruin.
And he’s answered none of my questions.
I’ve spent all this time gazing at her, observing her like a distant star, dreading the moment she’ll go dark. For the fucking instant her light will flicker out, and she’ll collapse into a void before my eyes.
A flame of fury licks through me, and I shove to my feet. “I know I’m sick,” I say as I start to pace. “It’s a sickness. A twisted, consuming sickness, falling for the woman you have no control over killing.”
“Christ, man. You have it bad—”
“At least give me a goddamn clue,” I grind out, choking back a bitter laugh, teetering on the verge of manic. “She’s a star.” My gaze lifts toward the night sky. “A fucking star. Brilliant and beautiful, and god, so fucking terrifying. I wasn’t expecting her.”
And I didn’t just search her background—I scoured it. Fed every shred of data through my algorithm, trying to find a single damnable act that would mark her like this vile piece of filth at my feet.
There’s nothing—nothing but the hidden fury I sometimes catch burning behind her eyes. The fragile pain she guards so fiercely, desperate not to let it crack through.
My dark anomaly.
Hit with a spicy floral fragrance, I come to an abrupt halt. My gaze lowers to the flower near my boot, finally able to name the elusive, seductive scent that clings to her skin. Dropping to my haunches, I pluck the snapdragon from the earth, bring its silky pink petals to my nose.
A groan wrenches free, muscles strained against the turmoil clawing under my sinew. It’s an agitation I can’t bear, the simmer before the eruption.
“I can’t lose her,” I mutter, voice drained as I drop down near Cassian.
“Naw, you want to kill her.” A dark flicker catches behind his dead eyes.
“I can see it, that same crazed look Julian got when the need became too much.” Breath labored, a knowing smile struggles to tip his mouth.
“Some girls, they like the fight. They want it, hiding a little darkness in them.” He licks his dry lips, becoming revoltingly aroused by his own victims.
Rage kindles and snaps, a vehement denial on the cusp of my tongue—but his words strike like a punch to my gut, provoking the memory of Collins as I held her pinned against the speaker.
Her muscles gathering tight, nails raking for purchase.
Her desire to fight swelling beneath her surface like a wave.
That same fierce undercurrent I’ve glimpsed swirling behind her captivating eyes. A dark vein of fury lit, sparked, like a sharp note rising in her tune, before the sudden crash. Banged like a D minor.
My fingers curl around the brittle stem of the flower. As if he can read my deviant thoughts, Cassian’s smile stretches. “Oh yeah, you think about it all the time. Strangling her pretty throat, hearing her cries. Her warm blood flowing over your hands as you take her raw—”
Making him bloody is barely a formed thought before my fist meets the hard bone of his jaw.
“You understand nothing,” I seethe, more snarl than rebuke. The pink petals crushed in my palm, I cast the flower away, cleaving a piece of my insides with it.
His chuckle is mocking, getting the reaction he wanted.
His tongue collects the blood from his bottom lip.
“I understand you won’t be able to help yourself.
The temptation will drive you mad. I lied a little—” his dark eyes gleam—“for the reason I killed my brother. He was out of control, getting sloppy. I couldn’t allow that, for him to get us caught.
I need to do what I do, man. There’s no other feeling like it.
Nothing else compares. That’s how I know you’ll give in, no matter how hard you fight it.
” A glint of smug satisfaction lights his gaze. “And you’ll savor it.”
My nostrils flare, a flood of wrath ripping through my bloodstream. I flex my fingers, welcoming the painful throb. Red smears my bare knuckles. Bruises still shadow my skin from when I had to all but demolish the speaker to stop from losing control—from violently taking her.
“But hey, listen. I can help you.” He says this like we’re conspirators, pals. Like he’s bestowing the secret of his trade. “I can teach you how to be careful, to control it. Even how to make peace with it.”
Beneath the roar of bloodlust, Cassian’s muttered words taper off.
I can no longer hear his scratchy voice past the rising torrent in my head, a tidal surge that drowns out everything but the snapping sinew and bone.
A shadow edges into my vision, deepening until the deafening, empty chaos of the void pulses black.
“Because I know”—he won’t shut up—“how good it’s going to feel—”
“Enough.” My tone is a lethal command. The wet feel of his blood on my skin—sinking into me, infecting—rattles with a deranged anger through my bones. Rage clutches my throat, igniting the vicious need to draw more.
As a tremble of fear breaks across his sweaty face, dark amusement curls my mouth. “Fuck, I didn’t realize you were so damn insightful, Cassian.”
I bring out the astrolabe. My bare thumb traces the grooved plate, the missing rule strumming a panged chord against my ribs. The compulsion to check my astronomical watch grips me, but I can feel the approach in my marrow. I’m fine-tuned.
“It’s time,” I say, voice hollow.
Neck tendons strained, I reach for the drill, bypassing the syringe.
“Wait—” Cassian’s eyes track me, wide, frantic. “Hey—fucking wait. You said you’d give me the stuff for pain.”
Relinquishing a tense breath, I clutch the handle and depress the button. The whine of the spinning bit starts his protests all over again.
“You lied,” he shouts, breath ragged. “You fucking lied.”
“Did I.” Casually, I set the tool on the steel case and grab the syringe, moving to hover over the corpse. I lift Julian’s limp wrist and stick the needle into his arm. “I didn’t say who I’d administer it to.” I tap his brother’s cold cheek. “Guess that makes us both liars.”
I don’t usually take sadistic pleasure in the ritual. But right now, there’s an insidious impulse gnawing inside me—a visceral need to punish, to inflict immeasurable pain to somehow offset this gaping ache ripping a hole through my goddamn chest.
Staring down into Cassian’s glassy eyes, his blown pupils reflecting the faint glow of stars, I let the empty syringe fall to the earth. Wondering, when the time comes, if I’ll be coherent enough to ease her pain. Whether she’ll suffer less at my hands than the universe’s.
My only solace is that, after tonight, maybe I’ll finally be too far gone to care. Sunk beyond even the reach of her haunting notes.
And you’ll savor it.
The echo of his words summons something despairing from my depths—something dense and final that settles in the core of my chest. Molars gnashed, I fist my hand, dry blood cracking against skin, and whatever lies at the shadowed boundary of me thirsts for more.
The tide will keep rising before it recedes.
I take hold of the bone saw.
Time fractures, a lost interlude filled with the whir of steel screaming against bone. The sound is a shrill discord crashing off boulders and pines, drowning the last of his cries. Bone dust chokes the air. Blood spatters my skin.
Before long, I’m bathed in it.
Like a melody pulled into a riptide, eternally echoing deep under the surface where no one can hear.
It’s her refrain, caught on an endless loop beneath pounding dark waves, that reaches me below the abyss. Where it will become both my refuge and my torment.
For what I’m bound to do, I hope it destroys me in the end.
I don’t resurface tonight. As silence rings in my ears, I stand frozen, gaze cast on the endless dark sky. My drill lies untouched, forgotten. The astrolabe abandoned.
The echoes lost.
Above, the comet suddenly brightens. A teal halo flares in a luminous outburst between the Gemini twins, crossing the path of gravitational waves from an ancient, violent event.
When a star dies, its core collapses under its own gravity. Once it burns through its nuclear fuel, the heart becomes so heavy, so dense, it’s crushed, unleashing a stellar explosion.
The more beautiful and radiant the star, the darker its annihilation.
In its final beats, a star’s life is beautiful, brilliant. Immensely powerful. It’s also destructive, violently imploding as its energy is cut short before it darkens into a black hole.
A cataclysm beautiful in its devastation.
Light swallowed by shadow.
I know the exact month, the day, hour, minute—the goddamn second her heart will stop beating.
And I know there is nothing I can do to stop it.
Her light will burn out.