Emperor of Mayhem

86

IT TAKES A MONSTER...
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As a child, I thought I was going to live the picture-perfect life, the one my mother had drawn for me; I was to become a either doctor, an engineer, or an entrepreneur. I was supposed to marry a nice-looking man. Mom said he didn't have to carry a Bible around like a fucking handbag. She said he didn't have to go to Church every Sunday. Let him just have the fear of God and love you endlessly. 

I liked that picture. I used to think about it a lot. And I imagined my life as such; good husband, a good house, a perfect job, and maybe two kids. 

And I did find that love, the one that could have been similar to my mother's picture. He was a pastor's son which meant he could go to Church at least twice a month. He had a dream, to play basketball and then later take over his father's company. I was sure we would have lived a good life. But unfortunately, he wasn't the one for me.

Then I fell in love again, but this time, he was nothing like Mama had told me. Not even close. If anything, he was the complete opposite.

But I fell for him anyway. Maybe because there was no mother to chastise me, to pull me by my ear and drag me by the wrist until I took a step or two away from him. Into his darkness, I went like a prodigal daughter, and I fell even harder, harder in love with every impossible, maddening, and depraved part of him.

I fell in love with his anger. I fell in love with his wickedness. I fell in love with his virulence so much so that even the wicked way he treated his half-brother didn't make my heart waver even slightly.

I fell in love with a monster, and this was my utmost tragedy. There was never going to be a moment of peace in my life. There was always going to be a traveling bullet that I needed to duck or it would hit me right in the chest. My hands were going to be covered in blood, the blood of both the innocent and the callous, and I would never sleep peacefully, because my dreams would be haunted, haunted by the ghosts of my bad deeds.

I wouldn't be able to fight it. I wouldn't be able to run away from it. That was my tragedy. My love was my tragedy.

My eternal bad luck.

Alexei Takharnov's tragedy was because he was born. The young man grew up without a mother and lived a miserable life out on the farms and toiled lands at the tender age of ten. And when he finally found the people he could call family, where he was supposed to find warmth, joy, and peace, he was dealt a wicked hand. All his teenage years were spent in misery and pain and betrayal. He was always running from the monster with the faces of humans that plagued his dream and became his nightmares.

He took years of planning and planning and though he knew death was going to be his possible end, he still wanted to finally find peace by avenging all the wrongs done to him.

But before he could finally see his enemy fall just as he had fallen many years ago, his life was taken away from him, in the most drastic way he could imagine.

I stabbed him five times. Each of the stab wounds was for my father, my grandmother, my precious, precious Shiro, and Rana, Mikhail's adopted sister, then for how miserably he had treated me thus far.

Believe me, I was going to give him a more painful death. I was going to torture him slowly for one week and then kill him. But when one of his men whom he had been secretly sending to give me water, decided to change his master and handed me a knife, I saw Alexei and Shiro's lifeless body come to my mind again. The anger was my driving voice, a poison that spread through my chest to my head, coloring my eyes red and before I realized what I was doing, he was gone.

You would expect me to feel a little sense of remorse. Maybe a realization that I just killed the only brother Mikhail had in this world. But I felt nothing. Not anger, not excitement, not pain.