Page 13 of Seven+Four

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 notmorallycorrect or legal—blah, blah, blah. So, Meg taught us to direct thatdarkness toward 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—donorsbecause 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 aredeserving. I don’t have any sense or desire for revenge, I don’t actively seek it against those that havewronged others—that’s nonsense. I merely derive pleasure from seeing and inflicting pain on others.

Pure and refined sadism. Ah, yes.

This part of my life is obviously all a secret. I don’t want to be persecuted and end up inside a cage again. With my brothers, I’ve been carrying on the bloody family business for ten years now. It’s like a perfectly working machine. Each of us has a particular, useful skill to contribute. We will never stop—for each of us his own reason. The world needs us just as much as I need to cause pain.

Nevertheless, when I leave the base—and I’m back out in the world—wearing a fake mask is necessary. I’m Uriel Mahoe, billionaire, business man, investor and owner of a chain of restaurants. It’s not hard to conceal the real side of me; all of the smartest people in this world aren’t so careless as to show others their true selves. With high-functioning sociopaths like me, it’s all about appearances. I don’t usually conform to norms unless I can take advantage of them. I’m extremely skilled at faking a range of different emotions—which is essential when reaching a certain status among Chicago’s crème de la crème. Depending on the party and attendees, I can effortlessly manipulate every single one of them when invited to one of those lavish charity events. It’s all a show, and I’m the main protagonist in the storyline—just how I fucking like it.

Even though there’s an absence of certain emotions in my sociopathic brain, I can sometimes be happy…when others simply can’t, because I don’t have a conscience or feelings of remorse or guilt. The complete lack of these emotions can result in more happiness for me since I can’t really imagine or feel the emotional worlds of other people. It’s foreign to me.

I am capable of feeling euphoria, joy, and excitement, anger and sadness, but in a more blunted way than what is considered the norm—I can even cry on command. I can also form attachments to other individuals and, in general, enjoy being around other people, although that’s kind of rare. Sometimes that makes me wish I could be free from mind-numbing social niceties—it can be grating since I’m completely detached from most people’s source of happiness. All humanity could burn to ashes, and I wouldn’t give a fuck.

There’s only one person I’d run to save. My Baby Blue. I crave the hint of softness in his pale aquamarine eyes when I utter the nickname, the slight trembling of his lower lip. I like the thought of Sari all soft for me, too damn fucking much.

The first time I laid eyes on him was in a field of periwinkle flowers. They were surrounding him like an endless, silky blanket. He raised his gaze to mine—the same periwinkle shade reflected in his eyes—and the agonizing, profound desolation filling those pools bound him to me.

He actually became mine two years before that. During the first year of my imprisonment, I thought I was the only subject the scientists were experimenting on until one day I heard a cry. It was so soft and low I wasn’t sure it was real. But the profound desperation, the hurt in those hushed sobs couldn’t be a figment of my imagination.

I was only six, inside my cell in the secret facility where we were kept. I was huffing and growling with anger. Bloodthirst was running through my veins while I was shivering with cold, beaten up and aching like most nights, but that faint cry made me smile for the first time in a very long time. The quiet whimpering stopped when one of the assholes on staff had snarled, “Four, shut up!”

A slapping sound followed and then another sob before silence reigned again. Four had to be another subject like me. I was Seven. Was there a One? A Two? More? Was my brother one of them? At that time, I wasn’t sure if they had taken him as well.

Subject Four sounded pathetic. Judging by their sobs, I didn’t know how they endured and were still alive after all the torture they must have undergone. They sounded too defenseless, whimpering like a weak puppy—I liked the sound of that, though.

Over the following three years, I never heard them again. I reckoned they were dead. But I remembered Four and their murmured pain every single night. Those hushed cries became my companion in those long silent hours, my brief escape, my only pleasure. So when I saw that same level of despair in the skinny, battered kid surrounded by Baby Blue Eyes I’d known those sobs belonged to him. Four wasn’t fucking dead. He’d survived, and it all became very simple to me. He was alive because he was mine.

I walked up to him and told him exactly that. He didn’t react at all. But that was okay, I had all the time in the world to make him understand who he belongs to.

After all these years, he still smells like fucking apples and honey—that sweet scent is lodged in my brain. He let his hair grow, the thick mane cascades down his back when loose. He likes to braid all that dark silk. Some spirited wisps always get loose to frame his delicate face, heart-shaped lips, and big, expressive eyes. His cheeks turn apple red so easily from embarrassment or nervousness.

At first I didn’t care about the little changes he has undergone in the last months—caused principally by Lori—like using contactlenses, taking yoga classes, and wearing different clothes, still comfy, but higher quality, classy styles, and delicate tones. However, the way he’s interacted with me has altered as well, pushing me away while not listening to me anymore. Then Meg got poisoned, and I discovered my bio bro is still alive. And I’ve been too busy looking for him since I learned of his reappearance, creating an even bigger distance between Sari and me.

Too much fucking space.

His newfound elegant appearance, his graceful moves, and tempting purity turn him intosex on a stick,as Michael called it. It fills me with the urge to devour him. I see him, and I burn. The harder I contain myself, the wilder my obsession with him grows. Fuck being foster brothers and fuck society’s teachings of what’s acceptable. I just can’t fucking help it. I don’t want to. I want him under me, submitting to me in the most carnal way possible. We aren’t blood related, not brothers. We are connected in a way that exceeds family; it goes beyond fleeting emotions and useless feelings.

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I started wanting to turn his ordinary day-to-day, placid expression into a disheveled passionate one, filled with cries and sweat. And pain. Fuck yes! I want to fuck his hole loose and stir up his insides until I break him, until I make a mess of him.

But I fucking can’t. Not if I want to see his eyes sparkle and crinkle, those little wrinkles forming at the corners when he smiles at me. I find respite from everything surrounding me only when he’s with me. And I prefer to feel excruciating pain than not being around him at all.

I can’t have him because I can’t hurt him, no matter how much I want to. But he’s still mine.

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