But it’s not for my enjoyment—breaking people. No one does it for that. They do it for another reason, a deeper reason. They break them in an attempt to have someone who understands them.
“I was wrong.”
I thought it was hate driving me to ruin Delilah. All that hate, anger, fucking bone-deep loathing wasn’t enough to drown out the need I had for her.
It wasn’t hate though.
It was fear.
Fear of being alone.
Fear of being misunderstood.
Fear of her leaving me behind while she was normal.
So fear controlled me. It made me confident and powerful because as long as I was hurting her, I didn’t have to do it to myself. I wasn’t alone in my misery then.
“I was sharing it,” I tell him.
She knew what it felt like to be broken, afraid—tormented to the extent she couldn’t trust herself. We were both the same. I wasn’t isolated in my pain. After all, companionship and conversation are a basic human need.
That’s why I’m here.
“That’s why you’re here,” I whisper.
To find some comfort in the dark, a bigger monster so the other monsters—the ones everyone has—can be rationalized.
I prod his cheek again. “So you can tell yourself you’re not weird. You’re not broken. No, you can’t be when there’s someone the same as you.”
“But they’re worse.”
“They’re worse,” I repeat. “Worse than you. Worse than me. We’re redeemed.”
“Comforted.”
But someone worse…Who do they look at to humanize themselves? Who could they be if they weren’t forced to become a monster? Who could be worse than the monster who makesmehuman?
“You,”my reflection whispers in the rippling water of the partially frozen lake.“You are worse every day and you can’t even recognize yourself.”
Slowly stretching my fingers out, I cover his face as I breach the thin layer of ice surrounding features like my own. My skin instantly turns red, yet I can’t feel the cold after so many years of working to get back in Rowan’s favor, being his right hand, turning myself into thisthingwith no name, no reflection, no shadow. No wife or Kid.
“Will you drag me away?” I ask Asher as I push him deeper under the icy surface. “Or will I bury you?”
“Ghost!” Sasha shouts from behind me. “Do you want one?”
This is why she wears a mask, so at the end of each day, she can compartmentalize who she is. Sasha unmasked is vulnerable. Sasha in the mask is protected.
I smile so my muscles remember the movement as I raise to my full height to look at her. Her knee is pressed on 1349’s chest as she delicately traces a deep line across his hairline. “You can have that one,” she gestures to 1350 with her elbow, “but you messed the mask up.”
Two deep lines run down the length of 1350’s face.
I don’t want anyone to look at me again.
They don’t have any lips or a tongue.
Or laugh at me again.
The bloody splatter against the snow shows the trajectory of where I threw their hands.
