Chapter 10 #2
Watching someone fight with their bare hands is better entertainment than someone painstakingly slicing into another person's flesh to bleed them dry.
Pulling out my phone, I Google myself.
A mistake.
But maybe if I dig through my past enough, I can find the night Brigit and I met.
Cormac Fomori. My name splashes across my screen, along with the moniker they've given me.
Bás Dorcha. A monster that kills in the dead of night, never to be found out. There are more photos of the tattoo on my neck than there are of my face.
That is absolutely intentional.
Even I know a handsome face garners too much sympathy in the public eye. It's easier to paint me as the monster I am if people only see the darkest parts of me.
That's the next thing I need to find out. Who did these? When?
So many questions swirl in my mind that I'm blindly scrolling through headline after headline.
Until a familiar face freezes my thumb in place.
Brigit.
Resplendent in the dress from that night. Even hidden in the background, with Skyler and me in the foreground, she's all I can see. Every curve, the lines in her nose as she scowls down at her phone, champagne flute dangling from her other hand.
The article discusses my descent into madness, from pillar of the community, my philanthropic endeavors, a magazine cover about up-and-coming business owners, then more details about the progression of my tattoos and becoming a recluse before my arrest and subsequent trial.
But I don't care about any of that. I've heard and seen what happened over and over again.
All that matters is that photo.
Skyler Beltran and Cormac Fomori at the SOEM Benefit, October 13th, 2021.
All but throwing my phone to the side, I type in the date, hoping to god above that it'll gain me access to the part of my past I've been too afraid to look into before.
If the physical photos I have are anything to go by, the contents of this computer are going to be dastardly.
That beautiful, swirling loading rainbow appears, the first glimmer of hope I've felt in weeks.
And when it loads, the slow drawl of a sleepy electronic that hasn't been used in months drags on for ages, my fingers dancing impatiently on the desktop.
Finally.
Several browser tabs autoload all at once.
One is a mirror of something. Someone else's computer or phone, maybe?
And the others...
My stomach drops and my heart stutters.
There she is.
Sprawled across her couch, her little laptop perched on a couch cushion.
No wonder it felt so natural to let myself into her home.
I've been doing it long enough that I have three camera angles and a mirroring app installed on her personal computer.
I can see the entire living room and kitchen. There's not a single corner of her living space that isn't bared to me.
Including the decadent view of her, comfortably splayed on the dark green couch, lying on her stomach in patterned pink pajamas. The shorts are just a bit longer than I'd like them to be, almost giving me a glimpse of the crease where her plump, full ass meets those thick, strong thighs.
Her shirt rides up just to the curve of her spine, and I crave to run my tongue along the soft lines of her curves, to dig my fingers into her warm skin and grip her in place while I torment her with my tongue.
Disgusted at myself, I place my hands on the desk, hoping to push myself away from the depravity of my thoughts.
This is the work of a sick, disturbed individual.
But the excitement crawling under my skin stops me from running. Despite my own objections, I know this is who I am. This is what I've done in the quiet hours of my life when I wasn't running a business or killing and exposing the monsters in our society.
How many hours have I spent right here, just watching her exist?
How many nights have I stalked her from the shadows while she enters my world of depravity?
And why the fuck haven't I done anything about it sooner?
As her delicate fingers drift across the mousepad, my mirroring browser moves in sync.
A zip of bliss runs up my spine as she clicks on the search bar of her browser.
The last ten things she searched have all been about me.
A normal man might think that it makes perfect sense. I did just break into her home and not-so-subtly threaten her. Of course she wants to know who I am and just how dangerous I am.
But my dark instinct tells me it's something more.
My hand finds her computer history on its own with no pushing from me, and she isn't reading anything about my many crimes.
She's scrolling through who I used to be.
Researching Balor. Reading old articles. The ones that speak highly of me.
And the pictures.
She's spent all her free time since I left her house scrolling through pictures of me.
I mean, yes, there's a Google search about a security system.
But only one.
And she didn't even get to the point where she thought about ordering one. She googled and quickly abandoned that mission to search for me again.
What is she looking for?
Anything she needs to know, I would be happy to tell her.
Well, anything I remember.
A twisted, delirious pleasure fills my stomach, washing away any shame or guilt I might feel about invading her privacy.
She's doing the same thing, at the level she's capable of, anyway. She's searching for me, craving this same knowing that I have of her.
But she's an upstanding member of society, so she'll keep to searching on her side of the law.
Regardless of the way we met, there was something between us, and she's looking for more of it just as desperately as I am.
She just doesn't have the resources to find what she's craving. But I do.
As she scrolls through her previous searches, I find myself lost in the way she scours the internet for glimpses of me.
Cormac Fomori.
Cormac Fomori pictures.
Cormac Fomori images.
Bás Dorcha images.
Bás Dorcha.
Bás Dorcha tattoos.
That last one leaves me curious as well.
There are at least a dozen articles about the supposed origins of my tattoos that the public has seen.
The medusa on my hand, some see as a manifestation of my monstrous side, others believe has a deeper meaning, one that they use as justification for my crimes.
The tattoo on my neck brings more criticism than even my worst murders.
The media's vapid obsession with my namesake tattoo plagues me, yet asks many of the same questions I've wondered about myself.
What came first? The murders or the tattoo?
Touching the art on my skin in question, the first time I've dared to really do so without flinching away from the evidence of my past, the skin feels smooth, a well-done, perfectly healed piece.
Until I find a scar, likely hidden by the dark shading of a wing, tucked into the side of my neck.
Pulling up my phone camera, I look closer, running my fingers along the rough ridge.
A scar, one that existed before the tattoo, but after my memories disappear.
Curiosity gets the best of me, and I sink my hand into the collar of my shirt to the tattoo hidden there.
Sure enough, across my peck, another rough, gnarly scar, probably two inches wide, a diagonal, jagged piece of hardened skin.
And my hand. Medusa's mouth is painstakingly precise, hiding another healed wound.
I'm sure if I checked the kraken on my thigh and the smaller ones up my arms, I'd find more scars.
A strange, unfamiliar emotion clogs my throat.
Every tattoo was designed to cover the violence done to me.
I turned all the pain I faced into self-expression.
None of the images Brigit finds show any hidden scars; only the tattoos. No one has identified the artist who did them either.
I'll have to ask Skyler. Again.
When Brigit's curiosity goes unsated, she slams her computer shut, shaking her head and mumbling something to herself that I can't hear.
I can't stop the chuckle that slips from my mouth. It stands to reason that she's angry at herself for her desperation to know more about me.
The feeling is more than mutual.
But she can't find what she's looking for without me coming to her.
I just need to manufacture a way for us to see each other again. And again. And again.
Whatever reasons I had for staying away from Brigit before don't matter. I almost left this world without giving her a chance to know me back.
I won't keep making that same mistake.