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Chapter Nineteen – Gareth
Nicole knew enough to stay away from me. Granted, I spent a lot of my time in the pool house, in my studio, painting, but she never sniffed around, not like her daughter. It was like there were only three people living in this house: me, my uncle, and Brianna.
Really, it would be all too easy to get rid of Nicole. Alistair could make it look like she’d simply vanished. Maybe he could fabricate some story that she’d stolen a bunch of his money and ran, leaving her daughter with us.
What would it take for my uncle to agree to get rid of her? It wasn’t like he loved her; he’d explicitly told me he’d done it for Brianna, to give her to me. A present.
It was annoying, however, that he thought he could push Brianna toward me and I’d miraculously become good. That I’d be too distracted by her and her… feminine qualities that I’d stop killing, or at least stop killing without planning it meticulously, first.
She was addicting in the best of ways, but she could not fill the hole inside me. Something was missing in my heart, in my soul—and I was pretty sure I knew what that was.
Empathy.
Take, for instance, Erin. I shouldn’t want to get close to her, I shouldn’t want to hurt her. I should, by all means, feel bad about threatening to use Erin against Brianna in that way. She was a human being, blah, blah, blah, she had feelings, blah, blah, blah. But I didn’t care. If I had to, I would use her as a means to an end.
I wanted to corrupt Brianna. I knew there was a part of her that was just like me. I could see it in her art. Her defiance was just a show, a mask she wore to the world because she didn’t want to let her true self out. I didn’t care how long it took; I’d help her unleash her inner darkness. Without a doubt, it’d be the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I planned on moving fast, too. My uncle had done his job and cleaned up the mess I’d made, the mess Brianna had made worse. The body of that cook was gone, along with her blood. It was spick and span, as if nothing had ever happened… although the smell of bleach was strong for a few days afterward.
Anyway, it was ready for a new body. That new body, I’d decided, would be Erin, and I wasn’t going to ask permission from my uncle to do it. As if I needed to kiss my uncle’s ass. Please. He was family. He might try to curb the urges inside me, but he understood the need to kill.
Wednesday night, my uncle found me while I was painting. He had a key to the pool house as well. He strolled in, rounding the corner and spotting me standing before a large easel, a paintbrush in my hand. I didn’t look at him as he came over to me, but I could imagine he wore business slacks, scuff-free shoes, and a long-sleeve shirt neatly tucked into his pants, like he always did.
My uncle was unlike me in that he was a creature of habit. He did not take kindly to his routine getting messed up.
Which, now that I was thinking about it, made it odd he was here, so I lowered the paintbrush away from the canvas and turned to stare at him. “Are you here for a reason, or did you come by to make sure I wasn’t killing anyone else?” I sounded a bit snippier than I’d intended, but that’s because the things Brianna had told me about my uncle might’ve gotten underneath my skin.
I didn’t like anyone trying to control me. I’d thought we had a mutual, healthy respect for each other, but perhaps I’d been wrong.Plus, I couldn’t help but think there was something else he wasn’t telling me.
“I assume you’ve been particularly moody lately because Brianna told you some things,” Alistair spoke, sounding bored, as always. His blue gaze shifted to the painting, taking it in. It was abstract, full of reds. He never understood my paintings or what I was doing with them. He never knew what I was trying to get across with each one.
Still, he stared at this one awfully hard, as if he was trying, which was new.
“She’s not here as a present. She’s here to distract me, because you want me to stop killing people,” I grumbled, frowning at him. Unlike my uncle, I wasn’t afraid to wear my emotions on my face.
“And why can’t it be both?”
I ground my teeth. “Killing is in my blood, Uncle. I can’t go cold turkey all because of a girl. She’s a fun distraction, but I need to feed the beast with something else.”
“I understand that. However, you could stand to learn something from this. It is when you snap and kill without thinking of the consequences or how hard it might be to cover up that you put this family at risk. You put me at risk. You are all I have left, Gareth. I’ve tried to teach you my ways, but you—”
“Your ways are boring,” I interrupted him. “I’m not like you. I don’t have a code. Sometimes, I just need to kill. Is that what this is about? You want to take me on another one of your hunting trips to try to teach me how to control my impulses?”
Alistair had tried, on many different occasions, to teach me, to train me, but nothing ever stuck. Sometimes the urges grew too strong and I simply couldn’t resist them. Some people were good at math. I was good at killing.
“No, this isn’t about that.” Alistair held his hands behind his back, slow in drawing his gaze away from the painting. “I came to warn you.”
“Warn me?” I echoed. “Warn me about what?”
“Brianna. She is… I did not choose her lightly, Gareth. She isn’t quite like anyone in Eastcreek. She has a way of making people do things they wouldn’t normally do.” He paused, stepping closer to me, lowering his voice to a whisper as he added, “Be mindful you stay on top. If you’re not careful with her, she’ll find a way to flip the script and become your master.”
A chuckle left me. Where was this coming from? Did my uncle really think I couldn’t handle myself when it came to Brianna? “I’m starting to think there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“If there’s something I’m not telling you, it’s for your own good,” Alistair spoke. “But my warning remains. She will undoubtedly start to draw more attention to us, whether she tries to or not. You need to be better. I won’t always be here to protect you and clean up your messes.” He tilted his head at my painting, studying it harder.
I watched him with a scowl on my face, feeling something was off. I had the strangest notion that whatever Alistair wasn’t telling me involved Brianna, but that could involve a whole host of things.
What wasn’t he telling me?
