Chapter 1 - Alexei
I loved hurting people.
Not just with my fists, though I got off on that too. There was something satisfying about watching someone die because of me.
But death was never the part I craved.
I preferred wrecking them. Killing the body just ended the fun. Breaking their mind so completely they woke up every morning already rotting from the inside - that was pure fucking art.
It was also the closest thing I ever came to feeling anything.
For the most part, I was a void.
Emotions were things other people performed. I learned the scripts early: smile when expected, frown when the situation called for concern, nod along to stories of pain or joy as if any of it registered.
It didn’t.
The only times anything even close to stimulation reached me was when I took control of another mind and watched it fracture under my hands. Even then it was distant, like watching someone else’s hands do the work through frosted glass.
I didn’t know why I had been built this way.
The doctors tried to explain it when I was ten.
They sat me in a bright room with my parents and used clinical words: severe antisocial personality disorder with primary psychopathic features, callous-unemotional traits elevated to a degree rarely seen in children, and an emerging sadistic personality structure.
One of them had even muttered about possible dissociative elements, as if parts of me could simply switch off and let something else take the wheel. They said I had no empathy to speak of, only a void where most people kept their conscience.
My mother cried into her hands, shoulders shaking so hard the chair creaked. My father looked at me like I was already a loaded gun. I smiled at them and promised I would try harder. I never did. Instead, I learned to wear the mask more carefully.
I became the quiet kid who didn’t talk much and didn’t need to. Even my cousin Dimitri, the only person who came close to knowing me, never saw the full rot underneath. I preferred it that way. No one really knew me and I didn’t want them to.
After the diagnosis, my parents stopped trying to fix what couldn’t be fixed. My mother grew careful around me, her hugs shorter, her eyes never quite meeting mine for long, as though she were afraid of what she might see looking back. My father, however, began to see utility in me.
He never said it outright, but the way he started bringing certain problems to my attention told me enough.
When I was ten, he took me to Italy.
He had business with the Moretti family that couldn’t be handled over the phone or through intermediaries.
He decided I was old enough to watch and, if necessary, to be useful.
Dimitri had begged to come, practically vibrating with the need to prove himself, to stand among men and be counted as one.
He had been told no.
“Alexei doesn’t start fights in rooms full of armed men,” Ivan, his father, had said, not looking up from the documents on his desk. “You can’t say the same.”
So it was just the two of us on the plane, then in the black car that climbed the winding road to the villa through hills covered in olive groves and wild lavender.
I watched the countryside scroll past the tinted windows and felt the familiar emptiness settle into my bones like cold water filling a vessel.
The meetings lasted three days. I watched men negotiate. Their voices were calm and civilized, but the violence underneath was so obvious to me it might as well have been painted on their faces in blood.
I was getting irritated and bored.
I wanted to go home.
One night, I slipped out through a side door after midnight and walked down the narrow road.
It smelled like the sea even though we were inland.
I found a garden behind a low wall, attached to what looked like a groundskeeper’s cottage that served the larger estates. The gate was unlocked. I pushed through and walked until I found a bench beneath a lemon tree.
I sat on the stone steps nearby.
I didn’t know how long I had been sitting there when I heard footsteps.
Small ones.
He came around the corner of the lemon tree.
He had dark curls falling across his forehead in wild spirals.
Olive skin that seemed to hold the starlight.
A thin white shirt too large for him, one shoulder slipping down every few seconds to expose the line of his collarbone.
Brown trousers patched at one knee with fabric that didn’t quite match. Shoes worn nearly flat at the soles.
He sat with his back against the stone bench across from mine, knees pulled up to his chest, one hand pressed close to his stomach as though protecting something, or protecting himself.
For a moment I thought he was part of the garden.
Some forgotten thing left there by mistake, a piece of decoration that had somehow come alive.
Then he looked up.
His eyes were hazel, brown and gold and green all fighting for dominance, catching the light from stars that had no business being so bright. They were too alive for the hour. Too warm for the monster sitting across from him.
He smiled at me.
“Oh. Ciao,” he said softly.
I stopped breathing. My lungs simply forgot their purpose for half a second.
The word meant hello. I knew that much. My Italian was poor but not nonexistent. Still, I only looked at him. The void, usually so silent and complete, seemed to shift. Like water disturbed by a stone.
The boy tilted his head. A small movement of confusion, like an animal studying another animal through glass, trying to determine if it was predator or prey.
His smile widened, revealing a small gap between his front teeth.
“Oh,” he said, switching carefully into English. “You speak English? No Italian?”
“I speak some Italian.” My voice came out flat, as it always did, but something about the delivery felt off.
“Only some?”
“Yes.”
“That is okay.” He nodded seriously, as if forgiving me for a terrible flaw. “I speak some English. Only some.” That shouldn’t have amused me.
Nothing amused me.
But something in the way he said it, the conspiratorial tone, the little shrug, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, made the corner of my mouth move.
“You almost smiled,” he accused, pointing at my face.
“I didn’t.”
“You did.” He jabbed his finger more emphatically. “Right here. A little. I saw it.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I stared at him. Most children looked away when I stared too long.
Adults did too, eventually, sometimes within seconds.
There was something in my stillness that made people uncomfortable, something they could sense even if they couldn’t articulate it.
They felt the absence behind my eyes, the emptiness where warmth should have been.
This boy only blinked at me, unperturbed, curious, utterly unafraid. Then he patted the grass beside him.
“You can sit. If you want. Or stand like a ghost. Ghost is also fine.”
“I’m not a ghost.”
“You look like one.”
“I look alive.”
He studied me with grave concentration, his head tilting again, eyes narrowing slightly as though conducting a thorough assessment.
“No,” he said with absolute certainty. “You look like someone forgot to put the alive part in.”
That was closer to the truth than he could have known. I should have walked away. I should have returned to the villa.
Instead, I sat a few feet away, on the edge of the gravel path where the moonlight touched the tips of my shoes and no further.
The boy seemed pleased by this compromise. “My name is Marco.”
“Alexei.”
He tried the name once under his breath, rolling it around his mouth like a new flavor.
“Al-ex-ei.”
Then again, better, with more confidence. “Alexei.”
He smiled like he had accomplished something important. “You are from the big house.”
“Yes.”
“My papa works there sometimes.” He picked at a loose thread on his trousers, winding it around his finger. “My mama too. They scrape the floors.”
I looked at him. “Scrape?”
He nodded and made a small motion with his hand, dragging invisible dirt from invisible stone, miming the motion of labor.
“When the parties finish. When the rich people spill wine or throw food or walk mud inside. Papa says the floors in houses like that are never really clean because too many bad men stand on them.”
That time my mouth did move. Not enough to be a smile. Barely a twitch at the corner of my lips. But enough for him to gasp, his whole face lighting up with triumph.
“I saw it!”
“You saw nothing.”
“I saw your mouth do this.” He pinched his own lips into a tiny crooked line, demonstrating. His eyes sparkled with mischief.
I looked away, up at the stars scattered across the black velvet sky.
Marco laughed. The sound was strange.
I found it very irritating when other people laughed, but the sound he made moved something in me that had no name, something I hadn’t known existed, buried so deep beneath the void that I had never encountered it before.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
Marco’s laughter faded into a smaller smile. “Hiding.”
“From who?”
He shrugged with one shoulder, the oversized shirt slipping further down. “Everybody.”
I looked down at his hand, following an instinct I didn’t understand, and saw that he was holding something.
A needle.
Not the kind found in a sewing kit. It was a hospital needle, capped, with a small piece of tubing still attached to it that dangled against his wrist. His fingers curled around it.
“Are you sick?”
Marco followed my gaze to the needle, the bright thing in his face dimmed.
“A bit,” he said.
“How sick?”
“Only a bit,” he repeated quickly, the words tumbling over each other. “But I will get all better.” His English stumbled there, rushed and hopeful, as though saying it with enough conviction could make it true.
“I ran from the hospital.”
I studied him, cataloging details: the shadows under his eyes, the translucent quality of his skin, the way his breathing seemed slightly labored even sitting still.
“You ran from the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”