His Ruin

1. Kaden

Chapter one

Kaden

There are only a few times in my life that I can recall shedding tears. Crying is a normal reflex, an automatic spillover of anger, sadness, and even joy. It’s biology’s way of forcing your body to confess what your mouth refuses.

And it’s solid proof that you can form a reaction.

It’s humanity in its own cruel and humbling way.

Having missed the chemical compound required to experience those strong emotions is simply like connecting a puzzle piece.

You’re told calmly and clinically that everything will forever remain muted in your eyes.

You nod along with the doctor, not because you believe him, but because you have no need to argue his diagnosis.

At least you know there was never anything to lose to begin with.

While your mom and dad cry in the leather chairs of the sterile waiting room, you simply exist, an onlooker observing a scene that should provoke something inside of you.

But all you can think of is how to make them shut up.

It’s been my struggle since I was told at the young age of eight that I would be evaluated later at eighteen for Antisocial Personality Disorder. Until then, I have a conduct disorder.

It’s hard to stir up any extreme emotion in me.

Even when Mom died a few short months later due to a car accident, I didn’t shed a single tear as I stood over her casket.

While my family wailed and mourned, I was enraptured by the eternal slumber of my mother.

Her skin was ice-cold to the touch and firm.

Death looked like something untouchable—a state that preserved everything while the Earth got to feast on flesh.

It was fascinating and sparked my interest for the first time.

While my dad spent his endless nights grieving, I was always trying to find something to replicate what I had seen in the casket of the funeral home.

It became an unrelenting itch, gnawing away at any drive I had to pretend to be normal for my old man’s sake.

I was already an outcast at school, sticking with the few friends from lower places who were also looked at like freaks. My inner circle didn’t budge when I told them I started collecting dead things—trophies, as I like to call them.

That’s what I liked about my friends. Ivan was used to that sort of thing. Raised as the future Pakhan of his father’s crime family, very little could shock him. Least of all my tendencies.

Saint has never been right in the head. He doesn’t appreciate death as I do, but he enjoys his own hot-headed tendencies. He likes getting into fights with anyone who looks at him for a moment too long. He’s like a beacon of carnage, constantly tearing up those in his path.

Together, we’ve created our own fucked up kind of stability. At only eleven years old, everything still seems bleak, but I have something to cling to. Those grey colored glasses are still firmly in place, but I couldn’t care less about anything being vibrant.

Until she came along.