Chapter 27

After Alex left, Darius continued to lay on his bed, seething in anger. Alex’s words stung him. Everything he said was true but that didn’t matter. Nothing would make him feel even a little bit of regret for killing Williams and the Fat Cop. Not after what they did to Anna. He knew, on some level, the repulsiveness of taking a human life, but it was so tiny it might as well have been non-existent. The bigger truth, and perhaps the ugliest truth, was that he had liked it. His mind jumped back to that often and each time the notion became more and more bearable. It felt good to crush the dirty cop’s throat like a paper cup. It felt even better torturing and then snapping Williams’ neck. He liked how easy it had been to take someone like Williams down and liked how easy it had been to break the asshole’s neck.

He wasn’t sadistic, however. The actual killing wasn’t what he enjoyed. He was sure of that. The joy he felt came from actually using his powers. They made him feel strong. They made him feel….unstoppable. Not only that, but he realized his powers gave him the strength to actually do the world some real good. That was how he chose to define his decision to murder anyway. As an act of good. People like that, like the fat cop and Williams, were slippery. They twisted and bent laws, perverting them so they could stay on the streets ruining every life they came in contact with. The police were a joke. They were useless and incapable of taking down people like them. Hell, one of them had been a cop himself. It wasn’t right and it sure as hell wasn’t fair. The only regret he did find himself having was that he hadn’t been able to kill Marks too. He wasn’t surprised Alex didn’t do the job. Alex was too weak for that, but it would have done the world a hell of a lot of good if he’d just killed him and been done with it.

After a while his cell phone started ringing. He grabbed it off his desk and checked who it was. Anna’s name appeared on the display.

“Hey, babe,” he said. The last of the day’s light was seeping out of the sky, the blue starting to give way to a velvety purple.

“Hey,” Anna replied, her voice heavy with grief.

“What’s the matter?” His heart skipped a beat and his blood ran cold with sudden fear. In his mind, he imagined Marks was standing over her with a gun pointed at the back of her head, somehow putting two and two together. The image was so real he almost couldn’t shake it from his mind.

“Have you seen the news?” she asked, on the verge of tears.

Darius went to the dresser that was pushed up against the wall between his and Alex’s desks. On top of it was a TV. He grabbed the remote and quickly turned it on, flipping to the local news.

“What did you do?” Anna whispered. She couldn’t hold back the tears anymore and she sobbed quietly on the other end.

Darius’ heart fluttered with nauseous panic. He finally got to the news. A man in a gray shirt held a microphone up to his mouth.

“....the scene where two murders occurred,” the man was saying. “While we are not able to release the identity of the victims at this time, we are able to disclose that one of them was a member of the Ashebrook Police Department. Chief of Police Donald Pierce has been unwilling to comment on why a member of his police force was found murdered inside an establishment with ties to a local drug cartel.”

Darius switched off the TV.

He hesitated before he spoke again.

“I had to do it,” he tried to say, but he already knew that whatever he said wasn’t going to be enough to console her. She was sobbing freely now and to Darius it sounded full of pain. “I had to stop them, Anna. I had to.”

“No!” she screamed. There was both anger and sadness in her voice. “You didn’t have to. You didn’t have to kill them, Darius. Look at what they turned you into. Look at what you let them turn you into.”

“You feel sorry for them!” he shouted. He was outraged at the thought that she could feel any pity for them. “You feel sorry for those animals. After what they did to you?”

“No. I don’t feel sorry for them,” she replied, her voice gone oddly quiet. “I feel sorry for you. They may have hurt me. They may have crushed me because they could, but what they did to you was much worse. They turned you into a monster and you let them do it. You let them.”

“They deserved it,” Darius said again, but his voice didn’t have the same level of conviction as before. He stared at the wall silently, the room seeming to get darker by the minute.

“You told me no one would get hurt,” she said, sadly. “You were just going to scare them. What happened?”

“I…,” he tried, but the word died in his throat.

“You promised me,” she accused. She was done crying now, but Darius could still hear the hurt in her voice...and the betrayal.

“I just...I lost control,” he managed to say. “All I could think about was what they did to you and after that I couldn’t stop.”

Anna didn’t answer and the silence between them grew heavy. Darius didn’t like it at all. He wanted to say something but nothing would come to mind.

“I don’t want to see you anymore,” she suddenly said. The words were full of heavy emotion. Her voice sounded thick and she was clearly having trouble talking. “Not after what you did. The Darius I knew...he wouldn’t have done that. You aren’t that man anymore.”

“Don’t say that.” His voice was urgent, frantic. “We can get past this.”

“You might be able to, but I can’t. You killed, Darius!” At some point she started crying again. It hurt him more deeply this time because he knew he was the cause. It was his fault. “You’ll never be the same to me. You’ll never be the guy I fell in love with.”

“Wait…,” he started to say but Anna had already hung up, cutting him off.

Out of hopeless frustration and anger he threw his phone at the wall and watched numbly as it shattered with pieces embedded into it. That was the second phone he’d destroyed, but he didn’t care. He barely registered what he’d done.

He fell to his knees in the middle of the floor and cried. He was angry, frustrated, and bitter, pouring more and more of the blame into the two men he had already killed. It wasn’t his fault. Not him. He did what was right. They hurt Anna so he had to protect her. Had to stop them.

He was only doing what was right!

They had pushed him to it. They had driven him to it.

He kept telling himself that over and over again as he cried on the floor of his room.