Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
Zayne
Istood before a narrow brick house tucked in the middle of New York. Behind me, distant traffic and voices faded the longer I stared at the house. This was the first time I had ever left Eureka Springs.
The nurse who had pulled me from the fire showed up in Ozark Woods a week later and took me with her.
She taught me how to exist outside asylum walls, how to eat without watching the exits, how to sleep without flinching and thinking someone was coming to get me.
Somewhere along the way, she learned about my mother and gave me this address.
I wanted answers.
The brown wooden door stared back at me. I knocked twice, holding a gold-engraved lion doorknob.
I had turned twenty-two two days earlier, yet my chest felt like a child waiting to be claimed by its mother. In my leather jacket, I carried two cassette tapes that the nurse pressed into my hand before I left, instructing me to give them to her.
She claimed they held the truth, but I didn’t ask what she meant. I just wanted to see Mom for the first time.
The door opened.
A man stood there, my age.
He stared at me, his mouth parting. “What the hell?”
I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes, convinced exhaustion was playing tricks on me. When I looked again, he was still there. I felt like staring into a mirror. We had the same face, the same body, but we were two different people.
He laughed under his breath and stepped closer. His fingers touched my cheek as he smiled.
“Fuck me standing,” he said. “Am I dreaming?”
I shook my head.
He circled me slowly, studying every angle.
“How is this even possible?”
“Can I come in?” I asked, stopping him as he passed.
“Yeah.” He stepped back and pulled the door open wider.
Inside, the house opened up more than it looked from the street. A hallway stretched ahead with a staircase climbing upward. To the left, there was a living room with a fireplace. To the right, there was a kitchen. I didn’t need to see upstairs to know bedrooms were on the next floor.
He led me into the living room and gestured to a white sofa. I sat. He lowered himself into a cushioned chair across from me, never taking his eyes off my face.
“Is Lena Cermer Morrell here?” I asked.
I pulled a yellow envelope from my leather jacket and held it out.
He shook his head.
“She died last year. Car accident.”
My lips twitched. Nothing inside me shifted. No grief came. Whatever I was supposed to feel didn’t come, and I didn’t know how to explain it, so I chose the words that fit the moment.
“I am sorry for your loss.”
He nodded once. His face stayed still—no grief there either. We sat across from each other, our faces too identical for this to be a coincidence.
“Our father, Alistar Cermer Morrell, left this just before he died,” I said.
I placed the yellow envelope on the table that looked like a wooden chest with a flat top. He grabbed the envelope almost as soon as I set it down, then pulled out two cassette tapes.
One had a tape from the year 1981.The other read 1998.
“What’s on them?” he asked.
He didn’t ask who I was. He didn’t ask how I had found him, or why we shared the same face. It felt like he already knew the truth and was waiting to hear which version I created.
“I didn’t listen,” I said, lifting one shoulder.
He stood and walked to the bookshelf. Beside a framed family photo sat a voice recorder.
“Dad gave me this just before Mom, and I moved to the UK,” he said. “I never saw him again.”
He returned and sat beside me. He picked up one of the tapes and slid it into the recorder. His eyes met mine, asking permission with his eyes, and as I nodded, he pressed play.
“In March 1980, patient Ezra Zane was experiencing pain in his lower abdomen. We discovered he had stage four cancer. Due to this diagnosis, I will no longer be able to treat him. He will not survive the winter. At most, we believe he may live until 1981.”
There was a pause. Papers shifted.
“My colleague, Dr. Haiko Wong, discovered that cells from treated patients can be used when placed into a fertilized female egg. Within two weeks, the cell transplant proved successful. It can form a fetus.”
Silence followed, then a soft laugh.
“I did it,” the voice said, breathless with pride. “I successfully transplanted two cells from Ezra Zane. Twins.”
Another laugh.
“They will be born in May this year.”
His tone sharpened.
“I will find a cure for what we call the killer instinct. Patients who experience trauma, whether in childhood or adulthood, develop urges to kill as a means of control. If they can’t control their own life, they seek control over another’s, including death.”
A throat cleared.
“God complex develops. They believe themselves invincible. When that illusion fades, the urge returns. Again and again.”
A pause.
“We discovered that the prefrontal cortex in Ezra Zane showed impaired judgment. The temporal lobes were overdeveloped, increasing aggression. By focusing on the right side of the brain, we can build a new environment and remove aggressive traits.”
The voice slowed.
“To do this, the mind must be reset. Start from zero. This is why I gave life to Ezra Zane again. From day one, we can control his surroundings. We can raise not a serial killer, but a good man. A successful man. A family man.”
The tape clicked off.
I turned my head. My eyes locked with his.
“He told my mom you died in childbirth,” he said. His voice roughened. “She always called it a miracle pregnancy because Dad couldn’t have kids. They tried for years.”
The recorder sat between us. My palms slapped against my face as I dragged them down until they caught on my jaw.
“I was raised in a lab,” I said. My voice shook despite my effort to steady it. “He was doing things.” I sighed. “I thought I was sick, but turns out he was the sick one.”
He pushed up his sleeve. Scars lined his arm, round white circles all over his skin.
“Mom was sick too,” he said.
He swallowed once before continuing.
“When I turned nine, she started drinking. When I felt like shit, I played with a ball inside the house. That was enough.” His jaw tightened. “And when she lost her shit, she took a cigarette and pressed it into my arm. Over and over again.”
He rolled the sleeve back down.
“Believe me,” he said. “The childhood I had was no better than the one you had in that lab.”
“Are we…” I cleared my throat. “Are we monsters?”
He scoffed softly.
“No,” he said. “They were.”
I took the voice recorder from his hand. My fingers hesitated before pulling out the tape. I slid in the second one—the one with the year 1998. And I pressed play.
Loud laughter burst through the recorder, then complete silence.
“I failed,” the voice said.
A breath. Another laugh, strained this time.
“Turns out when you take cells, you take their traits. Their diseases, too.”
He laughed again.
“Both twins will die by 2019. Same way as Ezra Zane.”
The tape clicked, stopped, then continued.
“I gave life to two monsters,” he said. “Soon, they will start to kill.”
A tired sigh followed.
“It doesn’t matter what environment you raise them in. It doesn’t matter how isolated you keep them. They will always have the mind of a man who left behind nothing but tragedy. Just because he could.”
I stopped the tape.
“We were not like that,” I said. “I am not the monster he wanted me to be.”
My brother looked at me. Really looked.
“No,” he said. “We are not.”
2008.
Zeke called me in the middle of the night.
He sent an address and nothing else.
We were both back in Eureka Springs, and the address he sent was where everything began.
It was almost two a.m. when I entered the house. The door stood open.
The moment I crossed the threshold, a cold crawled up my spine. The air tasted metallic, and it was sharp on my tongue with every breath I took.
I closed the door behind me and moved deeper inside.
Zeke sat on the floor, rocking back and forth as a woman with dark hair hung limp in his arms. His hands supported her neck while his sobs racked his shoulders.
Her eyes stared wide at nothing.
He drowned in regret. I could see it in his eyes.
“It was an accident,” he kept saying, over and over.
But no accidents leave five stab wounds.
My father was right. We can’t escape who we were, or the mind he left behind.
I stepped closer and pulled Zeke’s hands away from the body. I crouched in front of him and slapped his face. The sound cracked him awake, leaving a red trail on his cheek.
“Shut the fuck up,” I whispered. “Clean this mess.”
He wiped his tears and looked at me. Something shifted behind his eyes. They darkened in an instant.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
And there it was. The act was gone.
I stood. “Do you even know who she is?”
“I met her at a bar. I think her name started with a V.”
“Anyone see you?”
“No.” He let out a short chuckle. “I left before she did and followed her here.”
I closed my eyes and drew in a slow breath.
“You clean her,” I said. “Wash her body, her hair, swipe under her nails. And use gloves, for Christ’s sake.” I gestured around the room. “I’ll take care of this.”
He stood and headed for the kitchen. He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and pulled out a pair of pink rubber gloves. He slipped them on, then clicked his tongue.
“Pink goes well with my eyes.”
I rolled my eyes and walked to the windows, lowering the shades with my sleeve to protect the plastic from fingerprints.
“You have another pair,” he said, winking as he knelt and started dragging the body toward the bathroom.
I moved to the sink, grabbed the remaining gloves, and pulled them on. I took the bleach and poured it over every bloodstain on the tiled floor. The sharp scent burned my nose, but I didn’t have time to cover it.
Water ran in the bathroom as Zeke washed her body, and I stayed on my knees, scrubbing the mess he left behind.
I promised myself that if I ever felt the urge to kill, I would make sure the person deserved it. Sometimes, even when something was wrong, the mind searched for something good to justify it.
The water shut off.
I knew he was finished with her.
The living room was almost clean. I dragged the table off the carpet.
Zeke entered, carrying the woman in his arms again.
I pointed to the carpet that covered the floor near the sofa. He lowered her, and together we rolled the carpet tight around her body.
The woman lived right next to the Ozark woods. Burying her there would have been easy. Clean. Logical.
But the moment Zeke picked up a single puzzle piece from the pile on the table, I knew he would leave something behind.
He always did.
“What’s the number for V?” he asked, twisting the piece between his fingers through the rubber gloves.
“Twenty-two,” I said.
He took a pen and wrote the number on the puzzle piece.
“Like a tombstone.”
I rolled my eyes as I finished cleaning the last of the mess.
“We have to go before sunrise.”
He nodded. He slipped the piece into his pocket, then grabbed one end of the carpet, and I took the other.
She had a terrace with no fence, facing the Ozark woods. It made everything easier. We slid through the terrace door and stepped straight onto the narrow path leading away from the house.
We said nothing.
We just kept walking until the trees swallowed the trail and the woods thickened around us. The spot sat just off the path, tucked near a wide tree with roots breaking through the dirt. We unwrapped the carpet and laid her body down.
But before we left, Zeke knelt beside her. He took the puzzle piece from his pocket and placed it carefully on her back.
“I’ll always remember you, Twenty-two,” he said.
He looked at me when he stood.
I folded the carpet.
We had to take it with us and burn it later.
We couldn’t leave anything behind.
As we walked back toward our small cottage on the other side of town, Zeke laughed and squeezed my shoulder hard.
“Brothers who kill together stay together.”
I nodded. I didn’t say a word.
This was only the beginning.