Page 1 of Ghost Ribbon

I

Part 1

I could blame the stars for the way I fell for him.

It was beneath their sky that I first met him,

and perhaps they knew exactly what they were doing

when they gave him eyes bright enough to outshine them.

Chapter 1 - Alexei

I loved hurting people.

Not just with my fists, though I got off on that too. There was something satisfying about watching someone die because of me.

But death was never the part I craved.

I preferred wrecking them. Killing the body just ended the fun. Breaking their mind so completely they woke up every morning already rotting from the inside - that was pure fucking art.

It was also the closest thing I ever came to feeling anything.

For the most part, I was a void.

Emotions were things other people performed. I learned the scripts early: smile when expected, frown when the situation called for concern, nod along to stories of pain or joy as if any of it registered.

It didn’t.

The only times anything even close to stimulation reached me was when I took control of another mind and watched it fracture under my hands. Even then it was distant, like watching someone else’s hands do the work through frosted glass.

I didn’t know why I had been built this way. The doctors tried to explain it when I was ten. They sat me in a bright room with my parents and used clinical words: severe antisocial personality disorder with primary psychopathic features, callous-unemotional traits elevated to a degree rarely seen in children, and an emerging sadistic personality structure.

One of them had even muttered about possible dissociative elements, as if parts of me could simply switch off and let something else take the wheel. They said I had no empathy to speak of, only a void where most people kept their conscience.

My mother cried into her hands, shoulders shaking so hard the chair creaked. My father looked at me like I was already a loaded gun. I smiled at them and promised I would try harder. I never did. Instead, I learned to wear the mask more carefully.

I became the quiet kid who didn’t talk much and didn’t need to. Even my cousin Dimitri, the only person who came close to knowing me, never saw the full rot underneath. I preferred it that way. No one really knew me and I didn’t want them to.

After the diagnosis, my parents stopped trying to fix what couldn’t be fixed. My mother grew careful around me, her hugs shorter, her eyes never quite meeting mine for long, as though she were afraid of what she might see looking back. My father, however, began to see utility in me.

He never said it outright, but the way he started bringing certain problems to my attention told me enough.

When I was ten, he took me to Italy.

He had business with the Moretti family that couldn’t be handled over the phone or through intermediaries. He decided I was old enough to watch and, if necessary, to be useful. Dimitri had begged to come, practically vibrating with the need to prove himself, to stand among men and be counted as one.

He had been told no.

“Alexei doesn’t start fights in rooms full of armed men,” Ivan, his father, had said, not looking up from the documents on his desk. “You can’t say the same.”

So it was just the two of us on the plane, then in the black car that climbed the winding road to the villa through hills covered in olive groves and wild lavender. I watched the countryside scroll past the tinted windows and felt the familiar emptiness settle into my bones like cold water filling a vessel.

The meetings lasted three days. I watched men negotiate. Their voices were calm and civilized, but the violence underneath was so obvious to me it might as well have been painted on their faces in blood.

I was getting irritated and bored.

I wanted to go home.