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September 24 - October 5, 2022
Every mistake. Every love. Every tragedy. Every bruise, every laugh, every hesitation, every time he’d turned left instead of right.
“We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are,”
“Haven’t you heard? Sadistic teenage psychopath beats out husband every time.”
Love for your child should be unconditional. That was a truism that he’d never thought he’d have to confront. But when you looked at your child and saw nothing but darkness crawling beneath their skin, begging to be unleashed, how could you let that out into the world?
“Did you know a high percentage of serial killers were abused as children?” He did know that. The fact that he had pored over research on violent antisocial personality disorders was no secret to anyone in this house. And it was true. Genetics loaded the gun, environment pulled the trigger.
At some point in his life, Reed had realized that being a good man, being tough, didn’t always involve fists. Sometimes it involved staying down so you could get up later and protect those even more vulnerable than you.
Assumptions made the world go round. They were easy and frivolous and dangerous and essential to operating in a society where the vast majority of people seemed to intrinsically grasp the complexities of being human.
Women wanted to be her, men wanted to sleep with her, and thirteen-year-old girls dreamed of becoming her.
Psychopaths read power the way empaths could read body language. Instinctually.
you could be good for only so long before you had to be a little bad. Otherwise, once you got a taste of something other than perfection, you’d never want to go back.
Wasn’t that funny? How one person’s earthquake went undetected by someone who should have felt the shaking the most?
He shouldn’t be surprised now that his life was consumed by fire. Their love always had been.
Life wasn’t always about making the right choices. Sometimes it was about making the wrong ones just to see what would happen.
“Love and hate, it’s two sides of the same coin, isn’t it?”
From that first time he and Claire had met, Reed had known this one, this one—well, they would burn each other to the ground.
Reed could still see her bright and laughing, fingers laced with his, challenging him and soothing him, making him burn with want so that he’d thought he was going to catch fire from it.
Maybe she’d been Viola’s first victim; maybe it had been the moment the eerily silent baby had been placed in Claire’s arms that Viola had taken her first life. And when she’d blinked up at Reed, she’d taken her second.
Any social gathering was ripe with promise for his little psychopath.
Dead bodies didn’t tell secrets. Vengeful women on the other hand? They did.
When some people came into your life, the ground shook. And it left nothing but devastation in its wake.
“I think it’s the people who pretend they’re not as ugly as the rest of us that are worse.”
“Humans are terrible creatures held together by the illusion of civility,”
