Page 9 of The Ecstasy of Sin

It’s sacred. Most people fight death, but no matter how hard they fight, they can’t avoid that final fall. The release. The disconnection from life.

A scowl takes over where a wicked grin once took up residence, remembering why we’re even here in the first place. After I bury this worthless wretch, I’ll have to get back to his house, pick up his dog, and drop it off anonymously at a rescue in the next city over.

I may be a murderer, but I happen to love animals. Their suffering never fails to bring out the worst in me.

I pull my phone from my back pocket and check the time. With about four hours until sunrise, I need to start digging. I abandon the corpse of Sebastian Jones and head back towards the factory where I left my shovel hidden.

Once I have it in hand, I jog back and start digging. By the time I hit ten feet down, my upper body is burning and aching. Six feet is enough for a cemetery, but I’m a man that loves to delve deep.

It takes some real effort to climb back out of the deep pit, but once I do, I don’t hesitate to kick and roll Sebastian into his unmarked grave.

With his body dumped, I scrape up as much blood-soaked dirt as I can and cover him with it, before beginning the difficult task of filling the grave. By the time I’m done, I’m exhausted.

I grab a small tree and transplant it over the spot, before scattering some rocks, moss and leaves from the surrounding forest floor.

Within moments, Sebastian’s unmarked grave disappears. He has become food for the Earth and all of its superior inhabitants.

I press the head of the shovel into the ground at my feet and lean against it as I wait for my breathing to even out, staring at the place my victim now lies for the rest of eternity.

Sebastian doesn’t have much in the way of family, but he has a surprising amount of friends. In a few days, someone will notice he’s not around, and then they will call the police for awellness check. Then he’ll be a missing person, a face in the news that will eventually fade into oblivion where he belongs.

Now that he’s dead and my violent itch has been scratched, I find myself turning my focus inward.

The pleasure of the kill begins to dim in the aftermath. Without release, the tension doesn’t fade—it lingers, simmering beneath my skin.

I never come when I kill someone. No matter how high I get in the moment, the orgasm never hits. The euphoria just builds and builds, but stays trapped inside of me with nowhere to go.

It took a long time to understand why I get so fucking turned on when I take someone’s life.

In the early days, I experimented; I’ve tried to jerk off before, during, and after a kill. For whatever reason, it felt mechanical and forced. Doing it only turned my stomach and ruined the rush. So I stopped trying.

With enough introspection, I eventually recognized that the connection between this intense euphoria I experience and the act of taking someone’s life has everything to do with me feeling like a fucking deity.

It was never about sex, it was always about godhood.

Death and sex have yet to collide in the middle for me, but they come from the same deranged place. On the very rare occasion that I want to fuck someone, I always bring domination, control, and a little bit of mental and physical agony to the bedroom.

It turns out that I'm not just a deranged killer, I’m a sexual deviant, too.

I guess that’s par for the course for men like me; monsters masquerading as men.

Once upon a time, I’d have blamed childhood trauma for the way I turned out, but even severe neglect and abuse in the foster system couldn’t account for all of the depravity I’ve lusted after since puberty.

Reality is, I’m just not fucking wired right.

My phone rings, the tone jolting me out of my thoughts and pulling me back into the moment. I answer the call, seeing the familiar name on the screen.

“We need you, Dom. Torin is losing it again,” Ghost snaps before I can even greet him, his deep voice tight with what I recognize as anxious dread.

Tension winds its way through my entire body, and I tilt my head towards the night sky to stare up at the bright moon above.

My three foster brothers—Ghost, Ryker, and Torin—aren’t wired right, either.

It’s outside of my skill set to figure out whether or not who we’ve become is born of trauma, or if it’s just hard-wired into our coding.

Torin got the worst of it all. He didn’t escape the hell that was our childhood unscathed. Out of the four of us, he is undoubtedly the most traumatized. He took the brunt of our foster father’s abuse, which left him with PTSD—not that he would everacknowledge it.

Torin may be a big, bad motherfucker now… but when we were kids, he was slow to develop and that meant he was the smallest and the easiest to physically manipulate.