Page 65 of Sins and Virtue

To be a caricature of someone? To submit and erase core elements of myself? Or being authentically myself with my flaws and sins?

God was supposed to accept me the way I am, not the way others wanted me to be. Even if they didn’t like it, I wasn’t supposed to impress them; I was supposed to care.

“Alright. Alright. Just sit down first.” I signaled him to calm down and patted the empty space next to me.

He clenched his fists before he looked around the area, unsure.

“Don’t worry, the cops won’t find us. Why do you think I brought you this far? If not, I would have just let the police arrest you on sight. So stop being paranoid and sit your ass down.”

He muttered something in Russian before he slid down right next to me.

His large physique amassed the digestible air between me and him. Heat burned off from him as his musk sweat numbed the senses. Making me realize the drop in my blood pressure as a shiver passed through my shoulders.

On any other occasion, it would have been suffocating, yet he felt like an impenetrable wall keeping the rest of the world out, and for some odd reason… I liked it.

My heart lurched in my throat, and my veins throbbed from the fear of the night.

Needing everything to slow down, I closed my eyes. Breathing in the night air to calm my nerves.

“Do you think I killed them?” I asked, bringing my knees closely to my chest. Resting my chin on it, little by little opening my eyes.

He angled his head at me, his tone coaxed with lenient disbelief. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

I nodded after a second.

“You’re not a killer.”

That simple word was enough to make my eyes burn with salt and rage. Rage at myself. My decisions. “You don’t know that.” My words strained against a whisper.

All I could hear at night when I was by myself was the sound of a gunshot in the wind, and when I closed my eyes, all I saw was the blood that bled through the skull of that man. That man whose face haunted me. Who condemned me to a fate without Ollie.

“I know that you’re the first person in years to treat me like a human.”

“Well, if I’m being honest, I had my reservations… for obvious reasons.” I eyed him.

“Yet you took the gamble, kotyonok. Many people by now would have fed me to the wolves, and I would be as I was. Locked up with no hope to look forward to. You gave me that again.”

“That’s different. You can’t assume to know me after such a short time we’ve spent together. You have no idea what I'm capable of. What I would do for the people I love. How far I would go.”

“Any person with someone to fight for would do the same.”

“Yes, but you don’t understand—”

“No, you don’t understand.” He roughly interrupted me, leaving my words on the tip of my tongue. “Being a killer means you have to be defective like me.”

“Defective?” That word, the way he used it, was almost as if he was dirty or unworthy, and I didn’t like it one bit. “You’re not defective.” I stated flatly.

He forced a smile, one that held so many years of untold suffering. “You know less about me than I do you, kotyonok. Yousee, I am an illusion. I appear to people, the way I want them to see me. Not how I am.” Dark ruthlessness flashed in his eyes as he moved closer, the shadow carving around the harsh edges of his face.

Something squeezed in my chest tightly, making it a struggle to stop the blush from racing to my face.

I blinked, letting the words sit so perhaps I could understand.

“Are you a psychopath?” Was my rational response.

“Being a psychopath would be easier. They don’t feel. I, however, do, and quite intensely. All parts of me.” He chuckled, humorlessly. There was nothing funny about the question. “Ever since I was little, I had this voice inside my head. Telling me things. Always being there, never leaving my side.”

“Was he scary?”