Empathy (26 page)

A whimper leaves my constricted voice box when I see Blake standing there, soaking in the scene.

“Oh, brother. Just in time for the good bit.” Ryan appears in my eye line, blocking me from Blake’s view. “He became a killer that night, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t think I knew he kills for money. So when I came across your…” he lifts his hands to air quote, “brother, planting the idea of hiring someone to kill your folks, he ate it up. I gave him Blake’s contact info and boom. Done.”

I can’t breathe. He’s lying. My entire life freezes as cold as the ice beneath my feet. He is lying, right? Oh God. The air in my lungs ceases completely, my world once again tilting on the edge of shattering. My sight blurs as the tightening of the rope depletes me of oxygen.

“It was perfect. I even drove him to the airport and text you while you drove home to meet him.”

Every word he spews cuts into me, embedding their truth into my soul, adding more scars to the already wounded essence that’s slowly dying.

SHE’S HANGING FROM THE CEILING, a rope around her neck. Her hands are bound and her legs struggle to keep balance in a bucket filled with ice. He’s so far gone I know I’ll never find him. I’m so lost in my own skin, I’m not sure if I’ll ever find me again. My heart is bleeding with fear for Melody and conflicting choices for Ryan. Hearing him say he set that scene with my step dad. He’s been playing me from childhood.

“Whenever I found a bruise on you, I blamed myself for having to go to school or for getting out of that house and being with my friends so I could breathe. Every mark on you, every tear you shed when you showed me, I shared them. God, you killed me slowly, piece by piece. Every night of my life I prayed for the strength to protect you but it cost me. Hell answered the call, my soul was the penance and I vanished little by little, fading into the drag of his corrupted lure, dissolving me of humanity until Melody woke the good in me. The boy who gave up his life for the love of his brother was betrayed by that same brother. It’s painful.”

His almost black eyes are like looking down the barrel of a gun.

“I know you want me to care, Blake. For you, probably only you, sometimes I wish I could but I just don’t. I’m a void. I crave destruction. It’s the only thing that gives me any type of feeling.”

“Why play with my life so ruthlessly?”

He shrugs. “Because I like the power. Humanity is weak. Love is a weakness, Blake, it was yours. You played at embracing the beast but it was never really yours. You’re only the monster I made you.”

Melody is losing consciousness; I need to get her down. He knows what I’m thinking; he can read people better than I can. “Cut her down.”

I reach for the blade I keep in my boot, studying Ryan for trickery. The blood from Markus’ body taints the air with death. Gripping Melody’s wrists in one hand, I cut the binds there, reaching up to cut the one at her neck. I feel him come at me but cutting her down is worth the blade scorching my ribs as it punctures my lung. The pain is extreme but not as agonising as the fact my kid brother just stabbed me.

I collapse to the floor, Melody landing in a heap on top of me, arousing from her semi-conscious state. The bucket tips and spills its freezing contents to the floor. She’s being pulled from me. I’m losing her, losing everything. I can’t bear to watch what we built burn. I can’t crawl around in the ashes fighting to put out the embers threatening to change me irrevocably. I won’t survive her death at his hand, if I survive at all. The ooze of my warm blood saturates my shirt. I can’t believe this is how I’m losing her. She’s mine. I’m the creator of nightmares yet here I am living my own. My world is ending right in front of me and at the hands of the only other person I loved my whole life.

They say you know when you meet the one. Melody impacted me so forcibly, she tattooed her soul onto mine and I can’t let my darkness take her from the world. He’s my responsibility. I let him shape me into what I am. I should have seen through the smokescreen.

I need her to wake up. I need her to fight but she can’t. Damn, my sun is betraying me, her light fading into the shadows of my brother’s demons. How did I allow him to become this far gone?

“Did I fuck you up this bad?” I choke out, the blood coming up my throat; that’s a real bad sign. I have to keep asking myself if this is real, if this scene is actually happening. I was trying to grapple with the air to fill my lungs.

He appears over me, shaking his head. “You just aren’t getting it, Blake. You murdering and treating people like meat sacks could fuck up any sibling.”

My breath wheezes in and out of me in a whistle. “Listing my sins can’t redeem you of yours, Ry.”

His teeth grind together. “I don’t want to be redeemed, you’re missing the point! You didn’t do anything. I was born this way. I have always felt a sense of incurable and absolute restlessness and boredom in my own skin. Everyone around me was different to me but the same as each other. You are all an undifferentiated mass of weakness ruled by love and loyalty. I never understood but wanted to govern.” He rolls his neck, inhales through his teeth, the sound hissing into the room. I see a flicker of movement from Melody but I don’t want to draw his attention to it. I need to keep him talking so she can get out.

“Did my love for you not mean anything? I’m your brother.”

His head tilts to the side as he studies me with pity. “I like that you love me and I used it. I craved manipulation. Changing someone’s life is a powerful thing. Watching people unravel, pushing them so far into my depravity, making them question if it’s their own is an insatiable need. I have an appetite for harm, and I only really feel like I exist when I’m superior. The only thing that drives me is possessing and destroying others inside and out, body and soul. I want to strip them bare so they’re empty like me.” He kicks at my legs. “You should be thanking me, Blake, for putting you out of your misery. I want to watch Mel’s face as the last breath leaves your lungs. I want her to think you killed her parents.”

I’m crying for the first time in countless years. Tears burn a trail down my cheeks. My brother was just an illusion. This person standing over me is not of this world. He is the definition of evil. I assumed Markus had hired another guy as well as me when I entered the house that night to find the massacre. I was just leaving when she walked in.

“You killed them?”

My life is diminishing, white vapour clouding my eyesight.

“I was just going to come and watch you. I arrived the night before and couldn’t resist introducing myself as a friend of Mel’s just visiting the area and they were so hospitable, inviting me to stay for dinner.” He grins over at Markus’ corpse practically in the same position as her mother’s.

“I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m sorry, Blake.” Melody’s cries pierce the air. I hear the entry, the swoosh of the air against the blade, the hiccup sound as it plunders in. “Argh, I’m sorry! God forgive me.” Her strangled screams are more agonising than the night she found her parents.

Ryan’s utter disbelief shows all over his face. She was guided by an invisible force giving her strength because the blade goes all the way through his back, the tip appearing through his stomach. He falls forward, tipping to the side, to land with a thud beside me. Black orbs of a soulless boy look back at me. No matter how much my brain tells me the brother I loved was never even in here, my heart still bleeds as I watch him die. Puffs of air in short sharp bursts escape his lips before he stills. No movement. Nothing. I succumb to beckoning sleep pulling me under.

BLAKE WAS IN A COMA for six weeks; internal injuries nearly took his life. I had nearly taken a life with my own two hands. Ryan needed to die. He was put together like us but is the furthest thing from human. He played the role, deceived, manipulated and corrupted souls. He is the master of sin, wielded by the devil’s hands but I’m not God. I didn’t get to decide his fate. Once they found a heartbeat, they took away his life, imprisoning him in a hospital for the clinically insane. He took everything from me and although Blake didn’t kill my parents, he still came to my house to do just that. How can I let myself be with someone capable of that? How can I love him so deeply that I want to curl up and die from the ache of not being with him?

I waited by his bedside day in day out for him to wake up. Six weeks of not knowing. You can do a lot in six weeks. Quitting college. Investing in the newspaper company. Having that house demolished; there was no way I could keep it after so much darkness took place there. I’ll keep the land, let it grow wild and give it back to nature.

Starting over is a scary prospect but one I need. I kept what I learned about Blake a secret which was an internal battle with my morals. My love for him overpowered them. He has been a victim in such a big way. It doesn’t excuse him of his sins but I won’t divulge them either. I’ll just try and forget I ever came to that town. I’ll ignore the suffocating vice wrapped around my ever shrinking heart and try to live. Try to move on.

Three weeks have passed since I left him in the hospital and my mind can’t concentrate on Sean as he orders our coffees. He came to see me about Ryan. Told me things I wished he hadn’t. It was by Ryan’s hand that Sean ended up in front of the car that nearly took his life. He’s fully recovered health wise, but the emotional scars are imprinted on him, just like they are on me.

“So you went to stay with your ex?” His raised brow is playfully accusing.

I take my coffee from his hand. “It’s not like that. I just needed some normalcy. He offers me that.” I’d spent a week with Zane after leaving Blake awake in the hospital. I needed his comfort.

We walk from the shop; the cooler nights are a welcome reprieve from the humidity of the passing heatwave.

“You’re the strongest person I know, Mel. I don’t know how you survive. I struggle to get out of bed every day. I feel so betrayed by myself, by my own inability to not see the wicked amongst the good.”

I slip my hand into his. “I’m dying inside little by little. I have days when I think I conquered the war he created in me but I’m still fighting every day to find peace. He took so much from me but he didn’t break me completely like he wanted. I’m breathing, I’m living. I fought too hard to save my life to let him defeat me without even being here. He’s gone Sean.”