Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
King
This wasn’t how I wanted to tell her. This wasn’t how I wanted her to find out. As I showered, I’d plotted it out in my head. It was about to happen, but in a more controlled way. This is the furthest from in-control I’ve ever been.
I’m drowning, and the only person who can save me doesn’t know how to bloody swim.
She takes a seat on the bed and pulls her legs up, sitting tailor fashion. She doesn’t look at me as I go to tidy up the letters.
“Which one gave it away?” I ask.
“The one from Ezra that talked about what you said on some cliffs.”
I nod and stuff a handful of regret, memories, and vitriol back into Pandora’s box.
Then I take the box back to the closet and slide it onto the shelf.
I kick the towel toward the bathroom door on my way back to the bed, but I stop at the small couch and sit there.
Josie won’t want to sit next to me. Not now.
Maybe not even once she knows it all, but definitely not now.
“So, the experiment?” she says, her voice almost asking permission to be heard.
“It was Jim’s idea. He always wanted to know what made things tick. He wanted to understand the impact of environment versus genetics. Nature versus nurture. You see, Jim and I are brothers.”
Josie’s head whips toward me, and her eyes finally connect with mine. Her very wide eyes. “No fucking way,” she whispers.
“Same mother, different fathers, much the same as you and your brother. The difference being, Jim and I didn’t reconnect until he was a young adult and I was in my late teens.
When I discovered I had a brother and that my mother had shipped him overseas to America right after he was born, I left to find him. ”
She hoists her jaw from the floor and closes her mouth. She gathers her composure and remembers that she’s supposed to shut me out, so she looks away once more.
I do what I must, and I push on.
“Our mother was a serial killer. Think a mind like Aileen Wuornos with a speaking voice like the lovely Marianne Faithfull. She’d sleep with men for money, and if they treated her roughly, she treated them roughly right back.
Then she realized she just liked the treating-them-roughly part.
She was careful and used protection, but Jim eventually came along.
After she sent him off to America, she was more careful.
I still managed to come into the world not long after. ”
“She kept you.”
I nod. “She did. By that point, she’d gotten a job as a desk clerk at a women’s shelter. She continued killing by taking out the men who put the women in those places, but I never learned of it until much later.”
“Is that when you started killing?”
“No. That’s the interesting bit. I made my first kill as a teen. But that’s not what’s important here. What’s important is that when my mother found out, she cried and told me she was a killer too. The sickness was already inside me.”
“Is that when she told you about Jim?”
I shake my head and clear my throat. “Do you want anything to drink?”
“Stop stalling, King.”
“I’m not stalling.”
I’m just not accustomed to this level of anxiety. She may find this hard to believe, but I’m a nervous wreck. This is the first time I’ve shared this with anyone. My mouth has gone dry, and I just need to dampen my throat so that I can continue.
Even though she said she wanted nothing, I fetch a sparkling for her and a still for me. I crack it open and hand it to her, and she accepts with a scowl. Let’s see if I can change that.
I open the water and take a long swig. “Let me cut to the chase. When my mother learned she had stage-four breast cancer, she instructed me to go to America, find my older brother, and never look back. I did as she commanded, but I didn’t discover another serial killer as I suspected I would.
I found an eccentric, spoiled twenty-something who spent his days planning science experiments with his adoptive daddy’s money. ”
Josie sits a little straighter.
“When I told him I was a serial killer, he didn’t freak out. He only wanted to know why I became a murderer and he didn’t. He wanted to run an experiment to figure out if the urge to kill was genetic or learned.”
Josie’s face shifts from pensive to abject horror. “So you went around impregnating women without their consent and then spying on the fucking children? Oh my god, that’s worse than I—”
“No! Stop being a twat and let me get to that part.”
She shuts her mouth and pulls her knees to her chest. “I’m not being a twat. You’re just taking a lot of fucking words to get to the end of your story.”
“You’re right. I forget that you have the attention span of a flea.”
“Fuck this. So much for helping me understand your side of things.” She stands from the bed and tries to get around me, but I grab her hand and pull her into my lap.
When she fights out of my grasp, I jump to my feet and haul her back to the bed by her waist. I toss her onto the mattress and pin her wrists above her head as I hover over her. I mean to tell the rest of this, and I mean for her to bloody well listen.
“When Jim learned who and what I was, he asked me to do what he couldn’t.
He wanted me to kill his family, so I did.
In turn, he reaped an inheritance that we’ve turned into even more money, but before we made money, we ran more experiments.
One such experiment was a new fertility drug. Am I speaking quickly enough?”
She starts to fight, bucking against my chest. “Do you guys have a fucking breeding fetish or something? Fuck!”
“It’s not what you’re thinking! Stop jumping to bloody conclusions. We didn’t make them more fertile without their consent. We weren’t running an alien breeding encampment or whatever the fuck Quinn writes these days. We didn’t do anything without their consent. They reached out to Jim!”
She goes still beneath me.
“Four women reached out to Jim, to be exact. The first was from the bureau. As thanks for killing his family, Jim bought my position in the FBI. But one of the women on the inside wanted something in return as well. Something more than money could buy. She was lonely and wanted a child, but she was infertile and single. We presented her with a proposition. She could have the baby in exchange for joining an experiment. She was given the terms, complete with the fact that the semen would be from a notorious serial killer.”
“You mean, you didn’t—”
“I did not impregnate her naturally. Not any of them.”
For the first time, her shoulders relax.
And as I go down the line and explain each circumstance, the spines poking at me from all angles begin to retract.
After learning about Frankie’s mother, she learns of Ezra’s—a kind woman who desperately wanted a child.
The same for Bennett’s mother. All women with fertility issues who only wanted to love something more than themselves.
“What about Aven’s family? You kind of ruined them.”
My chest tightens. Maybe I have a third regret after all.
“Aven’s mother was a special circumstance.
She didn’t need the fertility drugs, only the semen, since she suspected her husband was infertile.
As we’d gone to school together and had been good friends, I agreed to help her.
She understood the risks, but it didn’t play out in her favor.
The little Scottish tyrant turned out a little too much like me, and without me to step in and warn him of where he was headed, he trudged headlong into misery. My poor boy.”
Josie puts her face in her palms. After grinding her fingertips into her forehead, she pulls her hands away.
“None of this makes any sense. Frankie’s mom treated her like shit.
Why did she so desperately want a child if she only planned to torture it?
And she thought she was in love with you.
Most of them did. Why didn’t they remember the experiment you claim they agreed to? ”
This is it. This is the part I’m not so sure she can get past.
“For the same reason you don’t remember anything about being rescued from the water that night.
” I look away from her, unable to look at her face when I next speak.
“Not all of our experiments were good. As part of Jim’s contract with my initial handlers in the bureau, we worked on government projects.
An early project could rewrite or smudge small sections of human memory.
Unfortunately, the rewrites sometimes formed false connections, which created exaggerated beliefs, which only further supported the subsequent delusions. ”
“Layman’s terms?”
“They were given a memory of how the child was conceived. A memory they chose, mind you. Frankie’s mother wanted to believe she’d fallen for a serial killer.
It was meant to be a joke on her psyche.
Well, her psyche played one right back and split into pieces.
That’s how we learned that rewrites could go horribly wrong. ”
“Are you still flashy-thinging people?”
I roll my eyes. “No, Agent J. That project was dismantled as soon as we realized, but the damage was done. We couldn’t reverse the stories we’d sewn in place.
The smudges were safer, such as blotting Ezra’s memories of his time with me in Dover.
That’s what was done to the Carter siblings. And you as well.”
“That’s disgusting, King. I didn’t consent to that.”
“You’re right to believe they didn’t. But you, Josie? You did consent.” I pull a cell phone from my pocket. It doesn’t have service, but Jim loaded some necessary files onto it for me. I pull one of them up and hit play, then sit beside her on the mattress.
“That’s me.” Josie snatches the phone from my hands. “How did I ever think I was fat back then?”
“Listen,” I tell her.
She quiets as she hears her younger self consent to having a memory wipe as part of the suicide experiment. She consents again when she’s told she also won’t recall the meeting where she agrees to have memories wiped. It would interfere with the accuracy of the final result.
She hands the phone back to me when the video ends.
“I can show you the mothers’ videos as well. We recorded everything. We might have been murderers, Josie, but we never wanted to hurt anyone.” I try to take her hand in mine, but she pulls it away. “We’ve destroyed the technology for the memory wipes. We don’t even do the smudges anymore.”
“You never should have to begin with.”
“Hindsight.” I scratch my ear and prepare to accept defeat.
I’ve lost her. “We made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve tried to make all of them right.
The biggest mistake of all was not being there for my children, and this is the last chance I have to fix it.
If I can’t . . . I’ll make it right by sacrificing myself to give them the closure they need. ”
She pushes her hand a little closer to mine on the bed. Our fingertips don’t quite touch, but at least she’s moving in the right direction. Maybe all isn’t lost yet.
“So you just planned all these trips to try to make them like you again? Ever heard of, I don’t know, grabbing a ball and glove and playing a game of catch?”
“Initially, I wanted them to find their siblings the way Jim and I did so that they’d at least have each other.
” I close my eyes. “And then the goal post shifted, and I wanted to be part of that too. Jim could sense it, and he sucked me in. Next thing I knew, we were bringing out the decommissioned simulator and plotting ways to facilitate a reconciliation.”
“I’ve heard about that thing. Quinn said you destroyed it when you caught her and Aven making more porn.”
“We did. For good this time. Like the memory alterations, it wasn’t quite what we hoped it would be at the end of the day.”
“Hindsight,” she says.
“Yes. Precisely.” I lie back on the bed and drape my forearm over my eyes. “Sometimes you can have good intentions that produce bad results. We’ve made mistakes, but we want to fix them.”
She turns toward me. “So come clean, dude. Stop the lies and the games. You can’t manipulate them into loving you any more than you can manipulate me into loving you.”
I’m glad she can’t see my eyes behind my arm. She’d see my heart shattering as she declares one of my greatest fears—that I’ve lost any chance of possessing her heart. I was entirely too hopeful.
Which means I’ve been entirely too hopeful about my children as well.
Jim was right. I lost sight of things, and now I’ve stumbled through the fog and off a cliff. There’s no point telling her my feelings for her now. I’ve bungled it properly.
“I’m sorry I’ve hurt you again,” I say. I pull my arm off my face. “It was never my intention. I’m an idiot.”
“You’re an idiot, all right.” She sighs and pulls a pillow into her lap. “I can’t say that I forgive you right now. But I also can’t say that I don’t think I ever can. I just need some time to process this.”
“Take all the time you need. I’ll be dead in a few days, though.” I scoff. “A well-deserved death at that.”
“Do not start throwing yourself a pity party, Captain Cocksure. No one feels sorry for you.” Her fingertips brush over my forehead, soft and unsure. She pulls away. “I don’t agree with some of the shit you’ve done. But I believe you want to make it right. And I want to help you.”
“Not sure how you’ll do that.”
She smiles and pats my leg. “You just leave that to me. For now, we need to get some sleep. We have an elopement to stop tomorrow.”