Page 111 of The Dearly Departed

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.