He’s so familiar…
I slip the handle of the knife into his palm.
“This will be over soon,” he assures me.
I nod, even though we both know that’s a lie we’re telling ourselves.
This won’t ever be over.
This is only the start.
Alex places a tender kiss to my forehead before he turns and starts in the direction of Addisyn.
My heart knocks painfully in my chest, adrenaline climbing. I watch as he stops right in front of her, knife cast down near his thigh. He stares into her eyes—eyes wide with fear, her cheeks blotchy and wet from tears.
As Alex rests the blade above her collarbone, I can hardly hear her high-pitched squeal over the roaring of my heart. I swear the muscle is either going to burst or stop beating.
I’m becoming lightheaded, as if I’m watching from outside myself. I’ve never experienced such an intense rush.
I can’t claim what emotion is rioting through me, maybe all of them. Like Alex’s black room, the darkest color in existence being a mixture of all colors, my soul is darkening with every emotion.
The sensation grips me, owning me before I can master control of my thoughts or actions.
I decide it’s better if we don’t think, when letting a piece of ourselves die.
As I move in close to stand beside Alex, I breathe in the remnants of his faded cologne, and the undercurrent sears my veins. His body heat singes my skin, thrilling. Then I see my hand slip along his forearm as I coast down to place my hand over his.
His heavy breaths rend the air, and I sense each one as if he’s breathing through me, into me. We stay suspended like this—the knife held to her neck; a nick of blood staining the tip—our hands locked together, until he says the one thing he can’t take back.
“Together.”
I rest my cheek against his arm, feeling the strain of his muscles. “Together.”
I’m not sure which one of us initiates the kill, but we move in tandem, the drag of the blade across her skin echos through us. Applying more force, we push the knife deeper until we feel the steel hit bone. Once we pass the artery, the gurgling sound muffles her moans.
I lace my fingers through his as the flow of red covers our hands.
I don’t look away—I stare into her desolate eyes as she begins to fade, her lids fluttering as she fights to stay conscious. I’m surprised by the numbness. Then suddenly that dull, hazy gray dissipates, and a bloom of colors unfold. So vibrant.
Alex removes the knife as her head lulls forward, but he doesn’t release my hand. He uses his other hand to cover mine, the warmth a mix of blood and his body heat. All I can do is stare at our blood-coated, entwined fingers.
The same way I stared at my blood-stained palms after I stabbed a man.
Only I was alone then.
I’m not now.
I refused to admit the truth before, but there’s no denying it now, not with Alex studying my eyes, knowing what impulses are firing to which synopses in my brain. He can read me, my emotions a simple equation to him.
Keeping our fingers threaded together, he pulls me close. He doesn’t say it; he doesn’t have to. The intoxicating combination of blood and his heady scent is an aphrodisiac, coaxing me even closer, and I meet him there, our bodies colliding together.
Lust. Comfort. Purging.
We experience it all in a secret chamber of our minds. We express what’s too overwhelming to be voiced through desperate caresses and needy kisses, taking and giving and loving until we’ve expended every energy-carrying molecule between us.
When the heightened emotions start to ebb and release us, we do what’s necessary to remain free—to remain together.
Epilogue
Malady
Blakely
Mary Shelley wrote: “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”
I once referred to Alex as Dr. Victor Frankenstein. With his makeshift mad scientist’s lab, and his medieval instruments designed to torture, he was the very essence of the fiendish scientist who sought to create life from death, to make man a god.
Alex viewed my psychopathy as a form of emotional death. To him, I was lifeless, unfeeling, wielding the ability to hurt and cause injury cruelly and without remorse. And like the doctor, he aimed to bring me to life, to give me the capacity to feel, to experience empathy, to suffer guilt.
I was already a monster in his eyes, and he would not only breathe metaphorical life into me, he would recreate me in his image.
What an obvious god complex.
Yet, for all their similarities, none drew a deeper parallel to Shelley’s sinister character than Alex subjecting his cruel experiment on the unwilling and taking lives he deemed expendable. In doing so, Alex himself became the monster.
The point of all scientific endeavors is to answer a question, to solve a problem.
Alex claimed psychopaths were the problem, that our ability to kill and cause pain mercilessly needed a solution. But I never believed this, not really.
Having recently experienced the depth of emotions, I discovered what it feels like to be alone, to feel so isolated you can’t breathe, you can’t function. Loneliness is a disease that will wither your body and mind far more ruthlessly than any physical illness.
Alex was alone.
That was the truth of his incurable malady.
In the novel, the monster demanded that Frankenstein create a soulmate for him to share in his misery, so he would not suffer alone. Even to a gruesome monster, the reality of living his life in solitude was too great to bear.
Alex was a conundrum in that he shared characteristics with both the doctor and the monster simultaneously.
After he lost his twin sister, the last of his family, I’d argue this was the true catalyst for his descent into madness. Not the desire to restore her reputation (though discovering such a horrific secret about one’s sibling could nudge one closer to the edge), but it was staring into a lonely future that catapulted the first experiment.
When Alex found me, he wasn’t trying to cure a disease, but rather, he wanted to create another monster in his likeness to share in his misery.
Even the most cruel and monstrous villains desire love.
And fiends like Alex and I are in fact detached from the larger world. We had to create an existence of our own, governed by our own logic and rules, an existence we share only with one another.
In my case, it was love that nearly destroyed me. As Victor stated himself through Shelley’s narrative: “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
I am a testament to the veracity of that statement.
It’s when I stopped fearing change and embraced my evolving nature that I was able to trust my feelings for Alex and accept us together.
As London’s advice stated: “You have to learn to embrace your emotions.”
She told me this was the only way, and for all her psychotic psychobabble, she was ultimately right when it came to this one crucial element.
The pain and fear and isolation faded into the backdrop of my past, like abstract art splattered on canvas. Disordered, chaotic, frenzied, but the colors bled together to create a beautiful harmony only we can appreciate.
Alex describes it as a closed-loop system coming into alignment. Okay, but I still tend to have a more logical outlook.