Prologue
Dark Mind
Alex
Beauty is deceptive. Like all things in nature, one cannot trust their eyes. The brightest flower, the intricate butterfly wing, all designed to capture attention and warn:
Do not touch.
The primitive predator heeds this threat. Thousands of years of evolution and the laws of nature remain unchanged.
It is a perfect design.
But the human male is more complicated, or rather—truthfully—he’s more simple. He takes the warning as a dare, a challenge. His ego demands that he override evolution and conquer that which threatens to make him weak.
And what could render a man more helpless than a woman?
I tap a large rock against the sediment of the riverbank. Fresh water rushes past boulders, shaving down rough edges as it has done consistently over the years, making the river stones worn, smooth. Welcoming, even.
This is the process. Take the hard and jagged thing and apply pressure and consistency until it conforms. Geology. Trial by trial. The scientific method. And if that fails, there is always elimination.
Eradicate the deviation.
I place the cleaned rocks in a threadbare sack and heave it over my shoulder. I’ve marked this territory, disturbed the natural environment. I’m a part of it now. The waterfall rains down in a sheeting ruffle of blue-green translucence as it crashes into white foam. The sound of the cascade is loud in my ears as it echos through the woods. A perfect auditory conductor to conceal screams.
As we are not primitive animals, we all have a psychological weakness. One consuming desire that renders us helpless.
She is mine.
The brightest flower, the intricate butterfly wing—she was designed for me, to lure me in, to make me weak. Trying to resist her snare was vain, and ineffective.
Do not touch.
Oh, I touched. I put my hand right into her flame. Then I begged her to burn me again.
Obsession is the eighth deadly sin…and she owned me with one kiss.
She’s a deviation. A flawed design. Yet so perfectly engineered for her purpose.
Eradicate the deviation.
The stones knock together against my back as I hike up the hill, the path beat down and familiar now. The wrought iron gate squeaks open, disturbing the tranquility, a noise out of place in this isolated habitat.
I drop the sack near my feet and dig out one of the medium-sized stones. I bring out the pewter pocket watch and click it open, lay it on the hard-packed earth. The ticking reverberates against the bark of the thin pines. I watch the second hand jump, jump, jump…
I smash the rock against the glass face of the clock.
My hand trembles as I stare down at the broken timepiece. I release the rock back into the pile in the sack, flex my fingers. Sweat trickles down my temples. A bird flutters its wings too loudly.
The silence is unsettling.
I can hear my cells decaying. Membranes dissolving. Molecules splitting and devouring the necrotic matter. The stronger cells leech off the weak as they deteriorate.
Self-destruct.
When I emerge inside the chamber, I’ve been reborn. An all-new synthesis of a man. What I have to do has never been more clear.
A thousand ticking hands, a thousand glass faces peering down, reflecting her beautiful face back at me.
I empty the sack of rocks.
I am a curer of disease.
My life’s work cannot succumb to one malady—one deviation in the design.
She’s my illness…and there’s no cure.
Elimination.
Bully
Blakely
Cruelty is a disease.
My second-grade teacher told me this. It was Kyle Sellars—with his seven-year-old sausage fingers—who snatched my Malibu Barbie and stomped her into the mud. I stormed after him, tackled him to the playground dirt, and shoved his chubby face in an ant bed.
His wail silenced the playground as kids formed a circle around us.
Appalled, Mrs. Fisher sent me to the principal’s office for disciplinary actions. Mrs. Fisher was new that year. She didn’t yet understand that you do not discipline a Vaughn.
My mother was called into the office. A socialite, Vanessa Vaughn rarely made trips to her child’s preparatory school. That was the nanny’s job. But she did that day, and by the next, our class had a new teacher.
I sometimes wonder what happened to Mrs. Fisher. Although I do recall what she said to me on the playground, her eyes wide and pale face aghast. Because no one had ever spoken to me like that before.
“Cruelty is a disease, Lauraleigh. It will fester inside you like cancer.”
I was confused. Tubby Kyle was the bully. How was I the cruel one?
Mrs. Fisher had been right, though.
I have a sickness inside me, a black rot.
Infectious to anyone other than me, it’s poison.