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Chapter 9
NIKLAS
“My mother killed my family,” her small voice surprises me and her words shock me. I guess she’s not avoiding the conversation after all.
“My father, my stepmother… and my baby brother.”
I turn my gaze to her, but don’t say anything, she doesn’t need me to. She knows I’m listening. Her eyes don’t move from the fire, almost like she’s having this conversation with the flames.
“It was the middle of the night. I was seventeen and just coming back from a party where I drank quite a bit, so I was in a deep sleep. I thought I was dreaming… I was hearing noises, thuds, voices. I did not realize it was not a dream, not until I heard the baby cry.”
She sighs, but her expression doesn’t falter. Like all the emotions were already spent, all the tears cried.
“I headed straight to my baby brother’s nursery. He was three months old, an adorable thing with golden hair and blue eyes. I have never seen a more beautiful baby in my life. For me… he was hope, a new beginning. And my mother sliced his throat in front of my eyes.”
I flinch. I can’t help it. I’ve seen my share of violence. I’ve seen death, but this, this is different, a crime against purity, killing more than just one person’s innocence.
“I ran to my dad and stepmom’s bedroom, my dad was stabbed, multiple times, throat cut, but not enough to kill him. Enough for him to bleed out slowly. He was crawling on the floor… trying to get to us. My stepmom had her throat cut in bed and was dead. She came in after me, my mother, she was high as a kite, drunk and absolutely and utterly insane. She laughed at me. She told me that one day I will understand, that one day the demons will sing for me too.”
The demons… I wonder if she knows they are there, that I can see them in her eyes.
“I wanted to save my dad, but there was nothing I could do. He was coughing blood, and with the last of his strength, he was waving for me to go, so I kissed him goodbye and ran downstairs. My mother did not follow me, she did not seem like she wanted to kill me. I think she genuinely believed I was like her. Seconds later, she set the house on fire… I think she spilled petrol all over the place while we slept. The flames took no time to spread.”
I watch her beautiful, expressionless face gazing at the fire in front of her as she talks about the day that changed her life.
“She wanted to die there, in the flames. She saw them as a purification of her soul. So I stabbed her with her own blade, held by her own hand, and then used it to puncture her throat, in this sweet spot that gives you a slow, excruciating death. It wasn’t quite suicide, but for her delusional self, it felt like it. There was no purification of her soul that night.”
She killed her own mother…
“The demons did not sing for me, but they danced on heathen songs as I watched her body bleed to death.”
Then there was silence. I turn my gaze back to the fire, and everything I think I know burns away in those flames.
This is no meek woman kneeling next to me. The death she caused was no accident, no self-defense. Her demons call onto mine because they are kindred. They crave the same sort of destruction. They crave lust and chaos.
They crave each other.
She is the way she is now, broken, because of Adrien. And Adrien will pay. Not just for being on my mountain, but for breaking her.
I turn my head and look at her. She mirrors me. There’s no fear in her eyes, no worry that what she told me will shock me, no great expectation. Just a calm relief.
SUKI
I look in his gorgeous, dark blue eyes and there’s no trace of judgment or shock. Just a calm understanding, one that I expected.
I’m not sure what he understands, not sure what he sees in me, but I don’t care.
No one knows this, no one knows how I truly killed my mother. I claimed self-defense when the police came and no one questioned me. A neighbor’s camera caught her sneaking into our house. There was already a police report against her for domestic violence against her child, her drug abuse was well- known, there was a restraining order… all the evidence pointed towards her.
But now, now he knows as well and I feel… relief. Not because it was a burden I was carrying. Hell no. That feeling I had when I sank that knife into her flesh was potentially the most esoteric experience of my life. Watching the blood pool at her feet, the life leaving her body, her eyes draining of color… I will never experience anything as disturbingly satisfying as that decadent moment.
I am relieved because I was finally able to share it, with pride, and I can see the monster in his eyes, smiling at me, nodding in approval.
My monster.
I smile at him, a small smile, barely reaching my lips.
He smiles back.
