24. ‘K’
‘K’
I wasn’t born a psychopath.
Not like so many others out there.
The damage to my psyche came later, shaped by something sharp and final. I was ten years old when it happened. A flash of metal. Screams. Blood on asphalt. And then the world went quiet.
The doctors said it was a miracle I survived, and for a while, no one realized that something else didn’t .
A traumatic brain injury, they called it in the end.
What it meant was that something inside me had shifted.
Permanently. I could still speak, walk, read, comprehend, and function like nothing had happened at all.
But the part of me that felt what others felt?
That little string that ties most people together?
It had snapped clean in two.
My sense of empathy was gone, along with my ability to feel fear. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything anymore. I wanted to, and I could recognize the shape of what I should’ve felt in certain moments, but it was like looking at it through thick, dirty glass. Dull. Muted.
That was the thing no one ever told you about this disorder. Not all of us were wide-eyed maniacs or sadistic serial killers. Some of us just learned to function and live. To study ‘normal’ people like textbooks. To mimic the right expressions, the right reactions.
I learned fast. Faster than anyone expected once they finally realized that part of my mind was missing.
By the time I hit my teens, I had the masking down to an art.
Smiles. Nods. Shoulder squeezes. Perfect eye contact.
All the little social flourishes that made people believe they were safe with you.
And make no mistake: there were definite benefits to being this way.
I never wasted time wringing my hands over tough decisions. I didn’t drown in guilt or second-guess myself. I knew how to be charming. How to manipulate. How to lead. I didn’t even have to try all that hard, because the world bent a little easier when you didn’t blink in the face of darkness.
Only a few people ever saw glimpses of my inner monster.
Slivers of truth, bleeding out from behind the cracks in my mask on the rare occasions when I dropped my guard.
I made sure those people didn’t stay in my life long.
Either they left on their own, uncomfortable and unsure, or I found ways to push them out.
Until her.
Kennedy Campbell, the one woman outside my family who actually meant something to me.
That was another myth I’d always hated: that psychopaths were totally incapable of caring about others or loving them.
That was total fucking bullshit. I remembered what care and love felt like before the accident.
Soft and warm and anchoring. Sure, I didn’t feel it the same way now, but I still felt something .
I felt loyalty, obsession, and a deep, primal need to protect what was mine. I’d kill for the people I cared about. Already had, more than once.
Wasn’t that kind of fierce devotion basically the same as love?
According to the last psychiatrist I anonymously consulted… no, it wasn’t the same. There was some other element to love. Some emotional resonance. Some innate selflessness.
Apparently, it required the ability to feel another person’s joy or pain as if it were your own. To empathize so deeply that you’d suffer just to spare them discomfort. That was the missing piece in me. The gap I couldn’t fill, no matter how well I mimicked it.
The closest I ever came to feeling those missing pieces was when I saw Kennedy.
Smelled her sweet-scented hair. Watched her gray-blue eyes widen with fear, and then flicker with something else. Curiosity. Defiance. Wonder.
It hit me like a tidal wave the first time; something raw and undeniable. I didn’t feel her pain, not exactly, but I wanted to protect her from it anyway. I wanted to own every part of it. Twist it into something that tied her to me forever.
The way she always looked at me, like she was struggling to decide whether to scream for help or reach for me instead…
I lived for that. It wasn’t empathy I felt for her, and it wasn’t altruism.
It was obsession wrapped in reverence. So if true love wasn’t in my wiring, maybe this was my makeshift version of it.
But it didn’t matter in the end. Love or not, I had her now, and I was never, ever going to let her go.