I watched the life begin to leave her body. The blood vessel in her left eye burst and her pale skin turned blue. Just when she was about to pass out, I let her go.

“Please…stop,” she gasped for air, wheezing out a plea for a life that was now mine to get rid of.

“But what if I don’t want to stop?” I smiled down at her and wrapped my hand back around her throat, squeezing harder. Her eyes turned glassy before mine; her lips open and closed until she went limp.

“Katie seems nice,” Declan commented from his spot on the sofa across the room, propping one arm behind his head. Now that my concentration was broken, I gave him a withering glare that he laughed off.

“She’s more than nice.” She’s mine.

I picked up a pair of scissors from my metal trolley and started cutting the brunette’s hair off her head in thick, uneven snips.

“Calm down, killer, don’t go pissin’ on the girl to mark your territory,” he laughed.

“Did you move Annie?” I asked him, trying to determine the best way to remove an eyelid.

“Yeah; how do you think that’s going to go?” He stood up and made his way over to watch me work.

I shrugged, not all that concerned about it. The little reunion had to happen. It was the least I could do for Katie, even if her sister did hate her. I couldn’t reunite her with her parents; all I had left of them were their skulls.

“Are you going to tell her the truth?” he asked, handing me a scalpel.

“I’m going to let her discover the truth on her own.” I took the scalpel and cut into the right upper eyelid, exposing the pink fleshy tendons underneath.

“Katie…is young. She’ll be fine.” I flicked the piece of flesh through the air and repeated my actions on the left eye.

“We were young once. I guess we didn’t turn out to fucked up,” he sighed, sarcasm dripping from his every word.

If he wasn’t my cousin, he wouldn’t feel comfortable joking with me the way he was. Declan was the brother I never had, my uncle Luca’s first son.

We grew up the same, inseparable from the beginning. I just happened to love women, and he liked to switch sides every now and then. I saw nothing wrong with it, I just wanted him to find someone for himself so he could stop bothering me twenty-four seven.

“My father is entrusting us to run his business. I want Katie by my side. I…need her.” I told him, pulling the brunette’s ear forward and slicing into it. Blood ran over my fingers, drizzling onto the floor.

Should I remove her lips? Her nose? I finished cutting the ear off and tossed it to the side, staring at the place it used to be.

“What is it about her?” Declan walked to where the ear had landed and picked it up, holding it in the air to study it.

“Do you know we’ve technically known her for her whole life? She was at our house for four months before her dad and Glenda decided to raise her as their own,” I reminisced.

“I remember the little fucker never stopped crying,” he grinned. “Does she know anything?”

“She knows I own her house. Knows her mother owed me money. She doesn’t know the debt started with her father. Not yet, at least. The money doesn’t matter to me at this point; I have Katie.”

Declan shook his head and smirked at me. I knew what he was thinking. How the fuck did I decide to settle down before him? I wasn’t a relationship kind of man. I was a fuck ’em and kill ’em kind of man.

An odd twist of fate had Katie coming back in my life. I watched her grow and I watched her fall. It took a lot to move me in terms of imagery, and the one of her naked in a tub of bloody water always did just that. She was ready to do it again before I stepped in and took her. If I could slay the demons inside her head, I’d do it in a heartbeat. At this point though, they were my closest ally.

I knew what it was like to feel trapped by your own mind. I’d overcome that long ago, thanks to my father. I still had small slivers of empathy, though. Sometimes, I felt as broken as the corpses I decapitated. The art I created helped me pretend I was doing something to fix it. Each swirl of a paintbrush dipped in a new color and swiped across my canvas filled an invisible crack and made me feel better.

I looked at the blood staining my hands and pooling on the floor.

The mirror hanging on the far wall caught my eye and I looked up, taking in my put-together appearance. There was no changing who I was, and I didn’t really see a need to. There was no eradicating the evil from my soul. I was my father’s son.

Katie would one day be my wife and help me extend the Andreou bloodline, which was why I had to do whatever was necessary to break her down so I could rebuild her again.

If the voices in her head won, then Katie would become like my mother. I refused to lose her like that. As my father kept saying: history couldn’t repeat itself.