Page 7

URIEL

I toe the corpse with the tip of my leather boot as I wait for Rami to pick up my call.

“Bro, fuck, it’s too early to bother me again with your Sari obsession. Don’t you have even a smidge of common sense?”

“Common sense is the most uncommon thing ever,” I counter.

He lets out a low growl. “Uri, I’ve been looking for Phoenix all fucking night, don’t you?—”

Hearing that fucking name makes bile rush up my throat. That fucker needs to die, after poisoning Meg and sending her into a coma. I don’t like feeling like I’m on the losing side, because I never lose…ever.

My eyes are caught by the dead body at my feet once again. I cut Rami’s morning-raspy blabbing off. “Got another little gift on my doorstep.”

I hear the rustling of sheets just before he says, “Are they alive and stabbed with an arrow this time as well?”

He’s referring to a few weeks ago when I found a tied-up and wounded donor near my front door.

“We are all corpses who haven’t yet begun to decay,” I taunt him.

“I’m too exhausted for this shit, Ariel!” I fucking hate that nickname, and he knows it.

“Unless he can grow his head back, he’s fucking dead,” I grumble. “No arrows in sight, but there’s a red stain on his shirt and two small tears in the fabric, heart level caused by a sharp point.” Probably an arrowhead.

“Headless?” I hear Hunter’s voice, my conversation with Rami must have woken his boyfriend up. “Is the head missing or just detached?”

I give another quick look around. “Missing. The gaping wound has no ragged edges; it looks clean and neat, well-executed by a sharp blade. The blood still fresh.” It turned the pure white snow crimson red and ruined—well and truly—the front wooden steps of my deck.

I curl my lips. “This is becoming irksome.”

“Serena is checking the area now. No sign of him, but it has to be your fucking bio bro again. He’s the only one who can slip through Serena’s security alarm without any problem.”

If that’s the case, he’s like a wild cat leaving gifts on my front steps.

The fresh blood means he couldn’t have gotten too far.

How the fuck did he disappear so fast? The metal gates at the end of the long driveway are closed, the high electrical fence still working.

So where did he come from? I need to do a perimeter assessment.

If this was my biological brother again he must have found a way inside my lake house somehow.

The driveway is clear since I had someone plow it yesterday, and it didn’t snow during the night, so no footprints in sight.

“It was him,” Rami declares. “Sent you the video feed.”

I move the phone down and watch as a hooded man wearing a fucking white mask suddenly appears from the path around the back of my house, pushing a man—the soon to be corpse—with a machete, poking his back toward my front porch.

. He makes the man turn around before abruptly cutting off his head, which flies over the porch rail as the body drops on the wooden steps.

He then looks straight at the camera. I can’t see his face, but I know he’s smiling behind that plain white mask. Why is he here, and why now?

“That’s rather bold and brutal,” I hear Hunter. “Are we sure it was your biological brother?”

Ty. That’s his birth name. But I have no ties left to my old life, not even my name—Meg changed it after she found me— and I don’t want any, so bio bro it is.

“Serena calculated his height, weight, and compared his gait with Uri’s…he’s definitely related to him.”

I knew it was him already. I just can’t explain how, but I do.

“Focus on the corpse and find the head while I’ll try to find out where the fuck he came from. I’ll send one of the bros your way to collect the corpse.”

I hum and end the call.

Dealing with these gifts gives life to a blazing fury inside my gut. It enrages me how easily my biological brother trespassed on my property once again, even more the thought that he’s always a few steps ahead of me.

I grit my teeth as I look down at the dead body again.

There’s nothing to determine his identity.

Average size, on the hairy side, covered in a fancy suit and a gray shirt, no shoes—his bare feet are covered with blood and dirt like he was forced to walk quite a while.

All I can tell is that he’s male and headless.

My bio bro couldn’t have killed him somewhere else and waited until he finished bleeding out before dumping him on my deck?

I don’t feel sufficiently caffeinated for this, but as I turn to go back inside the house, I see a tuft of blond hair peeking between the white lavender bushes at the edge of the porch.

“Got the head,” I mutter. It might be strange, but this isn’t the first time I’ve uttered those words.

A smirk forms on my lips as I lean against the wooden rail and bend down until my fingers grab the damp locks.

I pull the severed head up as I straighten and study its features.

Definitely male, probably in his thirties—I shift the head closer—brown eyes, a crooked nose sporting some caked blood and a bruise on his cheek. I have no previous memory of his face.

A mystery to be solved. I’d enjoy this type of situation—since I like detective stories—if my bio bro wasn’t involved. I don’t like to be fucked with, and I’ve got the feeling that this is precisely what he’s doing.

I take a picture and send it to Rami so he can search for the dead man’s identity in one of his databases. I also forward it to Raph. If the corpse had any contact with our family, my brother will remember it, thanks to his eidetic memory.

I place the head near the body and then crouch down to pat his fancy suit and pants pockets, finding an opened soft pack of Marlboro, a magnetic Ritz hotel card, and an expensive wallet—there’s a thousand dollars inside—all hundred-dollar bills—and a valet ticket.

I look at the tips of some of the fingers on his left hand, they’re yellow with nicotine.

The pretentious diamond ring on his middle finger seems real, with the letters JP engraved on one side.

I take a picture of it as well and send it to Rami.

No ID or credit cards. They must have been removed for some reason.

Everything about this man screams wealth and tackiness—my usual type of target.

I kill people who are above the law thanks to their status or riches.

Not that I really care about what they have done or how they hid it.

I am a sociopath—the proper diagnostic name is Antisocial Personality Disorder or ASPD.

This disorder has quite a lot of negative stigmas around it.

No conscience, no empathy, no regard for right and wrong, no remorse, a tendency to act impulsively and erratically.

Smiling, smirking, or laughing out loud while witnessing another’s pain.

Not giving a flying fuck about anyone else—unless they screw with something of mine. Like my family.

My foster family. I became part of it after my foster mothers, Meg and Linda, saved me and the others from being tortured and experimented on when we were kids.

I was five when I was taken from our shitty trailer park in the middle of the night to be the subject of an unauthorized government project.

It allowed coldblooded scientists to experiment on me with the excuse of turning me into an emotionless assassin.

Those motherfuckers didn’t turn me into a sociopath, they actually chose me and the others for our psychopathic traits, which eventually disappeared in almost all the others—except me, Raph, and my bio bro —because they believed criminality and violent behavior were predispositions.

The unsanctioned project was eventually discovered and stopped, and any evidence of it buried under a pile of political bullshit while most of us—six subjects ended up with Meg and Linda, an eminent psychologist and the secret agent who’d busted us out.

The people involved in the project were eliminated, but the damage was done and those torturous years made us crave blood and death.

Still, going on a killing spree while venting our anger was not morally correct or legal—blah, blah, blah.

So, Meg taught us to direct that darkness t oward people who actually didn’t deserve to breathe.

We built a base for our bloody family business.

It’s there that we take the evil donors— donors because before they die they unwillingly donate their DNA and organs for research or to save others.

Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I do more than is expected of me, but I’m no good man and never fucking will be.

I sort of follow the “ an eye for an eye” principle—the law of equal punishment.

Even though is not really about the killing or the justice.

It’s all about causing pain and enjoying their screams, their suffering, witnessing all hope leaving their eyes while desperation and anguish replace it.

I live for this shit. Torture is…a compulsive act for me—much like arson for Rague or being a psycho asshole horny for blood is for Raph.

A sadist sociopath is not rare, and I’m not talking about situational sadism.

I don’t gain pleasure or satisfaction out of hurting those who are deserving .

I don’t have any sense or desire for revenge, I don’t actively seek it against those that have wronged others—that’s nonsense.

I merely derive pleasure from seeing and inflicting pain on others.

Pure and refined sadism. Ah, yes.