8 | Mike
Mike
After our shower, Nate had decided to take a nap.
And even though I felt as alive as ever and refused to sleep, I am well aware that my man needs his beauty sleep.
While he is busy playing in the sequel to Sleeping Beauty, I find myself on the couch with my laptop on my lap, scrolling through the local church’s social media, looking for our next victim.
Because I refuse to accept that the five-victim limit is doing us any good.
I want to hunt again tonight, and Liam’s stupid rules are not going to stand against my desire.
I have always been the one to locate our victims. Liam is in charge of cleaning up afterward and doing the background check, making sure their disappearance will go unnoticed until we leave town.
Nate is the one who keeps our bank accounts full, running the family business while we travel.
In addition to all this, Liam usually stalks them for a few days prior to kidnapping them.
I personally think this is a bit unnecessary, but he is a control freak, and it gives him a sense of security.
And honestly, who am I to deny my cousin a hobby?
If he wants to stalk people, let him stalk people.
They are dead people anyway, or rather, soon-to-be dead people.
Either way, it doesn’t matter what he does with his free time. Not to me, anyway.
My process of finding a victim is usually simple.
In a way, you could say I am as detail-oriented as my cousin, although instead of looking for all the minor things that could get us caught, I look for what will make us legends.
Because if you get caught killing one woman, you are just a stupid man who killed, driven by insanity or passion.
If you get caught with a couple of victims under your metaphorical serial killer belt, you are a man who caused some horror, but still nothing to note, really.
Just small letters in a history of horror caused by killers with more skill than yours.
But if you get caught when the list of victims is in the three digits, and no one has suspected you?
Then, you become a legend. Documentaries are written about you.
Stories circle the places you visited. People suddenly remember knowing you.
They report on you as if they actually knew anything other than your name, at best. They tell reporters how shocking it was to learn their good-boy neighbor was a serial killer hiding bodies under the floorboards, or that they would never have suspected you of luring women to their deaths.
And that’s the type of murderer I need to be—the one who’s going to go undetected forever, or be written into history through blood. Either way, I am fine with it.
I am not too eager for the fact that my downfall will have my cousin and boyfriend following me, but I guess we all have to sacrifice something in order to make history—or they are right and I am just insane.
My process is almost as detailed as Liam’s process of elimination when I locate the next victim.
While he focuses on everything that could spare them—because let’s face it, my cousin hates killing people, even though he participates in the hunts—I instead focus on finding women who fit the type we hunt.
Well, my type. It’s a specific one that, even though I think the boys suspect the reason behind it, I have never truly shared myself.
I look through the websites of local businesses and check their feeds for a woman fitting the description I need for the hunt.
Because I don’t think anyone else but me cares what they look like.
I am pretty sure if it weren’t for me, they wouldn't even play the game anyway.
I am sure my cousin suspects it, though—maybe Nathan, too. My man is a smart one, after all.
The only one who knows the reason is Jax, Nathan’s cousin from his mother’s Greek side.
He and his brother, Xander, participated in one of the hunts a year ago.
They are professional killers who work for someone—killing people is in their job description.
So when we happened to pass through their town, they decided to join in.
Despite Liam’s objections, we chose the forest that spread behind their house as our hunting ground, and Xander was in charge of hiding the body this time.
Liam wasn’t a fan of that. However, being a professional and all, he allowed Alexander to take the lead on that one, with the compromise that we would stick to one victim. I personally didn’t like that, but since their city is quite large, it made sense not to cause too much trouble.
While I was searching for our victim, Jax asked the one question no one had asked before.
He asked the reason behind the looks of the women we hunt.
Since it was late at night and our glasses were full of whiskey, I thought there wasn’t much damage in allowing him the knowledge.
When I finished explaining, Jax just nodded.
He didn’t say a word. He filled his glass and mine and said something in Greek that I couldn’t understand.
He later explained that some secrets are meant to be just that: secrets.
He would never utter a word about it—not unless I wanted to.
At the time, I had no desire to let the boys know about my reasons.
I was grateful for Jax’s secretive nature.
This time, all the places where I would usually locate a new victim have appeared to be of no use.
So, I find myself looking through the local church’s events.
Usually, those are not the best way to go about it, since the women who hang around these events are older than our age range.
They also tend to have families, and even if they don’t, they have communities that would notice them gone.
However, this time I allow myself to just take a look.
I can already hear the lecture coming from Liam if I actually locate a victim in one of the image folders from past church events on their website.
I have already checked the old ones with no success.
So, when I open the post for a recent event they hosted, I am expecting the same results.
Instead, what my eyes see makes me pause.
I am looking at one of the pictures; there are a bunch of people in it, but one particular woman stands out.
Her jade-green eyes are so bright, practically glowing.
Those are eyes I am well familiar with. Those eyes that I used to feel would protect me from everything bad in the world—the same ones that caused me so much pain.
I can’t believe what I am seeing. The woman is the spitting image of my mother.
The laptop slips from my hands and lands on the floor, making enough noise for Nate to come running.
“What happened?” he asks, his eyes traveling between me and the shattered screen. He is still half-asleep, clearly jolted awake by the sound.
I don’t answer him. I sit here, frozen in place, trying to make sense of what I saw. I can’t form words. I am not sure if I am even breathing.
“I saw her die. That woman is not her. I saw her die,” I repeat to myself over and over again, like it will make everything okay again. It’s the sound of a broken record playing my horror on repeat. It’s the pain behind the words, surfacing by force. This can’t be true.... I saw her die.
My mother was a cruel woman. She used to punish me, starve me, and hit me for the fact that her husband liked the little boy in his house more than his own wife. And when she died, I didn’t mourn her. I celebrated her death. I was the reason for her demise, and for that, I am fucking proud.
She was a monster. She looked the other way when he came to my room at night, and afterward, she would punish me for it, as if it were my fault.
It was only a couple of years before their accident.
I was only a child. And even if it was a handful of times over a handful of years, it was still enough to haunt me for a lifetime.
He created demons I have never quite found a way to satisfy since.
And even though he was the one responsible for that, I hated her just as much for turning the other way and punishing me instead of protecting me.
Because that’s a mother’s job: to protect her child. Yet mine seemed to have missed the memo. And for that, I will never forgive her.