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An eye for an eye. Of sorts. Except what I do to him will be far worse.
He won’t be my first, nor my last, but at least I have a method to my madness. I choose them wisely. Methodically. Or they choose themselves, if I’m honest.
There’s no sense of guilt or shame for my actions, for the lives I cut short, for the demons I eradicate. I kill them because I want to. Because theyneedto die.
There’s a hunger embedded inside me, a thirst I need to quench, and this is how I do it: ridding the world of the cancer spreading through its streets. I’m the doctor who contains it, ridding them of a disease that exudes a putridness like no other. That’s what they all are. I’m doing the world a favor.
But in the same token, I’m doing myself one too. There is a deep sense of loathing and rage behind my actions, this need to extinguish. It fuels me, like oil to a flame, like heat energy strengthening a storm strong enough to wipe out cities.
But harming innocents? No. There’s no honor in that. I kill those likehim, and that’s as far as it ever goes. And I will kill him too. I just have to find him first.
I’ve hacked cameras in the areas where he’s dumped the bodies. Searched every inch for clues. He’s good. Too good.
But I’m better.
He doesn’t leave the women in the same places. And he never shows his face on camera.
Of course not. Because, like me, he knows where every one of them is. Every street. Every corner. He studied it until he knew the city like the back of his hand.
But unlike me, he doesn’t run an underground tech company. One that creates surveillance equipment for those who can afford it, among many other things. Not all of it legal, of course.
Eventually he’ll get sloppy, and that’ll be my chance to take him out and clean up my mess.
I’m good at that. The nuns at the orphanage where Mommy Dearest abandoned me made sure I learned how important cleanliness was. And those bitches loved to show us what happened when we didn’t obey.
At sixteen, after I escaped that place, I freed the children and burned it to the ground. Some of the nuns I knew from the time I was a little boy still worked there. I tied them up and made them beg before I burned them.
Hearing their screams fed my depravity. Iwantedit. Knowing they were suffering was the best revenge I could’ve asked for.
The police never did find who did it. The kids described a man with a scary mask. Because that’s what I wore. A frightening Halloween mask made to terrify little children. I was their boogeymanandtheir savior.
One good thing came out of it, though. I met a kid at that shithole about my age who taught me about computers. It was the one thing we had at the orphanage. Once he was adopted, I continued to teach myself. Got myself a job after I ran and saved enough for a crappy computer. Then I slowly built what I have today.
My work keeps me sane and focused. As sane and focused asa man like me can be. Everything I’ve grown in my business is my work alone. I don’t employ anyone. I prefer it that way. It’s a necessity, really.
This is where sinners come to die.
This is their purgatory.
Where they burn for their crimes.
And when I say burn, I mean it. The room adjacent is installed with a cremation furnace. Except when I torch them, they’re very much alive. And here, they are forgotten. Their ashes never to be traced.
I’ve killed twenty, and I’m still here to tell the tale. And I’ll kill twenty more if I have to.
Turning to another computer screen, I watch her—the woman who gave me life, with a little girl I know to be my niece, Sophia, skipping around beside her as they get ice cream at my mother’s favorite shop.
The nuns never kept it a secret. That I was left as a newborn, still wailing for a mother who didn’t want him. I grew up hating her, not knowing who she was at first. Not until I found my birth certificate that the nuns kept hidden.
I wanted to ask her why.
Why did she keep my twin, Raphael, but abandon me? What made him special? What was it about me that made me unlovable? Did she sense my depravity? Was it there from the time I climbed out of her womb? Did she hate me instantly?
I wanted to ask her all these things. When I infiltrated my brother Gio’s wedding a month ago, I was gonna take her and ask her everything, but instead, I left her a little note to remember me by. Cut off the hand of one of the guards and pinned it to the fence, along with the note, where my whole family would find it.
I still recall every detail from that day. The words I wrote areetched into my memory. It’s too bad I didn’t get to see her face as she read it.
Dear Mother,
