CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Age Thirty-Five
Life had a way of becoming routine, even under the worst of circumstances, and no matter how strong your resistance might be against it, even torture could somehow start to feel normal.
And that was what the entirety of my life had become.
Torture.
By day, I worked at the funeral home, preparing bodies and planning arrangements the way Leonard had taught me.
Once upon a time, it had been the one place I was comfortable—my happy place, so to speak. It was where I could be most myself, and the life of a funeral director and mortician was the most natural way of living I’d found.
But Gerald Crowley ruined that for me the day he blackmailed me into killing for him. And after two years of murdering in the name of my father, The Llewellyn Family Funeral Home had become a place of secrecy and dread.
And somehow, without my permission, who I was at night felt more like me than my unmasked counterpart ever did.
I slit throats, broke necks, drowned, beat, poisoned, and burned.
I dismembered, tortured, brutalized, and fell deaf to my victims’ pleas for mercy.
I'd become desensitized to the things I was doing with my hands.
I stopped seeing the people I killed as …
well, people. Because what I learned was, they were the sinners, the robbers of innocence.
The sick plagued with an illness that would only make them bestow evil upon those undeserving, and at some point, I found that I had to thrive on their pain in order to endure my own.
Because how was it fair that children were expected to carry the weight of someone else's sins? Why were they supposed to just go on with their lives after someone else had torn the most precious of virtues from them?
Children didn't get a choice. Yet they were the future. We didn't, as a society, go on without them, and it became my opinion that they should be protected at all costs.
And if I was damned anyway, why couldn't I be the guy to stop the diseased from spreading their sickness?
I wasn’t proud of what I spent many of my nights doing, and certainly, if there was a hell, that was exactly where I was going when my suffering on this earth was over. But I thought, maybe, if I killed enough of them, I could be happy with how I’d inevitably spend my eternity.
But as damning as the murders might’ve been, as torturous as the forced distance between me and my brothers had become, nothing was quite as horrible as what awaited me after I returned to Seint Manor in Hollow Cove, painted in someone else's blood and sometimes my own.
When I went to the room I’d begun to consider mine, Virginia was often waiting in her silk robe, wearing nothing underneath.
Sometimes, I took her up on the offer to take a few shots of liquor first. A handful of times, she gave me a couple pills—ecstasy, I thought it was—and that helped, and that was when I realized Gerald had been right.
At some point, I’d do or see something where I’d require the assistance of inebriation to help me dissociate and go to sleep at night.
I just never thought being raped at gunpoint by his wife would be the tipping point for me.
She never forced me to take off the mask, and for whatever it was worth, it felt like the smallest mercy, and it helped.
I didn't have to look at her.
I could close my eyes, go somewhere far away, and imagine she was someone else.
I thought about Analise. But, oh, I thought about her all the time.
She lingered in my mind eternally, like a vengeful ghost haunting an old attic, whether I was with Virginia or not. There was nobody on this planet who consumed my mind the way Analise did, and nothing—not even the nights spent in bed with Virginia—seemed to torture me more than that.
"What the hell is going on with you?" Ike asked, throwing a slice of bread at me across the table.
I looked up from my plate to find both his and Shawn's eyes aimed at me, their expressions filled with concern and confusion.
For years, I had been living this life, and somehow, I'd managed to keep my brothers in the dark. Of course, they sensed something was going on with me. They brought it up from time to time, presented their ridiculous theories, and I'd brush them off with flippant shrugs and annoyed commentary.
"No, I'm not on fucking drugs." Not regularly anyway and only when Virginia was kind enough to offer. But I wondered how long it would be before I relied on them to cope with my day-to-day life.
"No, I don't have a girlfriend." But I was yearning desperately for a woman out of my reach, and I was being forced to have sex with the woman who was supposed to be committed to my father.
"No, I don't have another job." Which was, of course, a lie, but it wasn't a job in the conventional sense, not in the way they meant.
But the biggest lie of all was, "I'm fine."
I was anything but.
This life was killing me. Both literally and figuratively. I wasn't happy. I wasn't proud.
Every single day, I thought of new ways to put an end to it all, only to remember that, if I did, there would be nothing to stop Gerald from coming after Shawn and Ike.
It was always about protecting them.
Always.
And I was getting tired. So unbelievably fucking tired that I could barely keep my eyes open now, turning from Shawn to meet Ike's gaze.
"I'm just exhausted," I said, and that was one hundred percent true. "I didn't sleep much."
No, because instead of sleeping, I had raided the house of Zeke, a meth dealer and known rapist Gerald had decided was no longer useful to him. I broke into his bedroom while he slept naked, his arm wrapped tight around the waist of a teenage boy who’d been declared missing days before.
My plague doctor mask was the last thing Zeke had seen as I covered his gaping mouth with my gloved hand before he could manage a scream and drove the blade of my butterfly knife through his ear.
My gut clenched, and the need to be sick barreled through me at the thought of it now.
Gerald was right in calling me ruthless—but only in the moment.
Afterward, I often succumbed to the violent demand to vomit, and the visions of the things I’d done embedded themselves in my brain and came to haunt me during my sleep.
"Have you tried those sleeping pills I gave you?" Shawn asked.
He had broken up with Shelby a couple of years ago, and ever since, he struggled with a touch of depression.
It wasn't as bad as it could've been, but coupled with the loss of Leonard, he was understandably sad. He’d thought he would marry that girl, and then she turned out to be someone different. Someone he didn’t want to spend his life with.
He could've found another woman. He was a good-looking guy, honest and loyal. But he hadn't tried to date much since they'd broken up. He wasn't ready, he'd say repeatedly, and I wasn't sure he ever would be. Not without someone giving him a hearty shove.
"Nah," I replied with a shake of my head. "I don't know that I want to rely on medication." And I didn't want to be in a medically induced coma every single night and unable to hear if someone was calling me or breaking into the house to collect my soul.
"No, I understand that," Shawn replied, nodding. "But sometimes, when I'm lying awake for hours on end, it's nice to be knocked out, you know?"
"Yeah," I replied.
I did know.
I knew more than he thought I did.
Because after lying with Virginia, being used in ways that made me sick to my stomach, and after I got back to the funeral home to hopefully catch an hour or two of sleep before I had to return to my unmasked life, I would stare at the ceiling and agonize over how long I could possibly keep this life going before I met my demise.
How long until someone served as my judge and sent me barreling toward the fiery gates of Hell?
I was terrified of that day, and yet I knew with it would also come the relief of knowing this could be over.
From inside my pocket, my burner phone buzzed.
I didn't react, didn't reach for it, but silently, I cursed Gerald for not being capable of leaving me alone for more than a couple of days.
And it wasn't always because he needed someone dead.
Sometimes, he needed me to scare someone, arrange funeral plans for one of his fallen friends, or help his other hired gorillas collect what was owed to him.
But it seemed that, whatever I was needed for, I was always needed.
He couldn't just give me a fucking break.
The phone buzzed again.
"Do you hear that?" Shawn asked, lifting his phone and checking the screen.
Ike nodded. "Yeah, something's buzzin'."
My personal phone was on the counter, and I got up to grab it.
"Might be mine," I said, lifting it just in time for the burner in my pocket to buzz again.
“It’s me,” I half lied, staring at the blank screen as my brain worked quickly to come up with a diversion, a reason to leave the room.
Shawn and Ike sat unperturbed, continuing to eat their lunch without question as I stood at the counter. My fingers itched to grab the burner from my pocket, to check the messages that had come through, but I couldn't risk them seeing it.
"I have to piss. I’ll be back," I announced, already hurrying from the kitchen to lock myself in the bathroom, reaching for the burner.
Two missed calls. Three missed texts. All from the same number.
I'm sorry to text you, but I need help.
Please. I don't know what to do.
Maybe I shouldn’t have contacted you at all. I feel so stupid. I’m sorry.
I stared at the screen, unsure of what to say or what to do. If someone needed help, I wanted to help them … but I wasn’t sure I could do it from this phone. What if Gerald was watching? What if he had a way of reading these texts?
Logic told me it was likely fine, but I didn’t know, and that was the part that left me unsettled.
It could be a trap, I thought, staring at the screen. But what if it’s not and someone really needs me?
What if it’s …
Jekyll, are you there?
Analise. Nobody else called me by that name, and even though I couldn’t prove it wasn’t a trap, I refused to ignore her.