Page 118 of Sinners Reunion

Chapter Thirty-Seven

King

This wasn’t how I wanted to tell her. This wasn’t how I wanted her to find out. As I showered, I’d plotted it out in my head. It was about to happen, but in a more controlled way. This is the furthest from in-control I’ve ever been.

I’m drowning, and the only person who can save me doesn’t know how to bloody swim.

She takes a seat on the bed and pulls her legs up, sitting tailor fashion. She doesn’t look at me as I go to tidy up the letters.

“Which one gave it away?” I ask.

“The one from Ezra that talked about what you said on some cliffs.”

I nod and stuff a handful of regret, memories, and vitriol back into Pandora’s box. Then I take the box back to the closet and slide it onto the shelf. I kick the towel toward the bathroom door on my way back to the bed, but I stop at the small couch and sit there. Josie won’t want to sit next to me. Not now. Maybe not even once she knows it all, but definitely not now.

“So, the experiment?” she says, her voice almost asking permission to be heard.

“It was Jim’s idea. He always wanted to know what made things tick. He wanted to understand the impact of environment versus genetics. Nature versus nurture. You see, Jim and I are brothers.”

Josie’s head whips toward me, and her eyes finally connect with mine. Her very wide eyes. “No fucking way,” she whispers.

“Same mother, different fathers, much the same as you and your brother. The difference being, Jim and I didn’t reconnect until he was a young adult and I was in my late teens. When I discovered I had a brother and that my mother had shipped him overseas to America right after he was born, I left to find him.”

She hoists her jaw from the floor and closes her mouth. She gathers her composure and remembers that she’s supposed to shut me out, so she looks away once more.

I do what I must, and I push on.

“Our mother was a serial killer. Think a mind like Aileen Wuornos with a speaking voice like the lovely Marianne Faithfull. She’d sleep with men for money, and if they treated her roughly, she treated them roughly right back. Then she realized she just liked the treating-them-roughly part. She was careful and used protection, but Jim eventually came along. After she sent him off to America, she was more careful. I still managed to come into the world not long after.”

“She kept you.”

I nod. “She did. By that point, she’d gotten a job as a desk clerk at a women’s shelter. She continued killing by taking out the men who put the women in those places, but I never learned of it until much later.”

“Is that when you started killing?”

“No. That’s the interesting bit. I made my first kill as a teen. But that’s not what’s important here. What’s important is that when my mother found out, she cried and told me she was a killer too. The sickness was already inside me.”

“Is that when she told you about Jim?”

I shake my head and clear my throat. “Do you want anything to drink?”

“Stop stalling, King.”

“I’m not stalling.”

I’m just not accustomed to this level of anxiety. She may find this hard to believe, but I’m a nervous wreck. This is the first time I’ve shared this with anyone. My mouth has gone dry, and I just need to dampen my throat so that I can continue.

Even though she said she wanted nothing, I fetch a sparkling for her and a still for me. I crack it open and hand it to her, and she accepts with a scowl. Let’s see if I can change that.

I open the water and take a long swig. “Let me cut to the chase. When my mother learned she had stage-four breast cancer, she instructed me to go to America, find my older brother, and never look back. I did as she commanded, but I didn’t discover another serial killer as I suspected I would. I found an eccentric, spoiled twenty-something who spent his days planning science experiments with his adoptive daddy’s money.”

Josie sits a little straighter.

“When I told him I was a serial killer, he didn’t freak out. He only wanted to know why I became a murderer and he didn’t. He wanted to run an experiment to figure out if the urge to kill was genetic or learned.”

Josie’s face shifts from pensive to abject horror. “So you went around impregnating women without their consent and then spying on the fucking children? Oh my god, that’s worse than I⁠—”

“No! Stop being a twat and let me get to that part.”