Revenge11 min read
The Monster in My Brother's Suit
ButterPicks15 views
I was told I would not live past eighteen.
I was told I carried a curse that would drag everyone close to me into ruin.
I am Gillian Robinson, and I lived to learn the meaning of that last sentence.
My childhood is a line of missing faces.
"My wife won't wake up," my father said once, in a way that meant the rest of the house had already died.
Then my mother was gone.
Then my older brother drowned.
Then my father's business collapsed and the debts came like claws.
Then he left a scribbled note about "doing what I must," and vanished.
After that, the town shepherded me toward the social home.
"I can't take care of her," they said over the phone, ashamed.
When the van left in rain, I watched it vanish in a curtain of salt water and believed for a long time that I was all I had.
Then the van reversed.
Someone had called my name.
"He said he would come back for you," the welfare worker said, breathless.
A week later a man in black walked into my life with a stack of papers and an air like cold glass.
"I am your brother," he said. "Calloway gave me his permission years ago. I have your adoption papers."
I stared at his suit, at the pale face, at the black hair that fell like a curtain, and my mouth closed.
"You are not my brother," I said. "My real brother drowned when we were fifteen."
He smiled like someone pleased at a new puzzle.
"Then you must have met the wrong body," he said. "Bodies move. Rivers move. Memory fogs."
He had proof. He had photos, IDs, old receipts with our names. He had a way of saying things that fit into the holes of what people already wanted to believe.
So I went with him.
We lived in a white villa.
"Looks expensive," I said the first afternoon.
"It is ours now," he said, lifting me like I was both fragile and precious.
He called himself my brother and he filled the role so completely my suspicion softened into something else—unease wrapped with gratitude.
He never let me sleep at school.
"Brother can bring you home," he would say. "You can sleep in my car."
He stayed up at night to tutor me when finals came, tracing geometry like prayer.
When I broke a lamp in a nightmare, the housekeeper picked up the shards and it was as if nothing had happened.
There were small mercies and strange boundaries.
"You cannot live in the school dorm," he said.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Everyone will sleep better knowing your brother brings you every night," he said, smiling as if that were simple kindness.
He forbade me from entering one room: the downstairs door with the iron lock that led under the house.
"Basements hold things," he said once, light as a leaf, and that was the end of it.
I tried to hate him the way I had been taught to hate: he had come into my life, he had replaced my dead brother, he had a master's skill at being kind and calculating.
But when the world hurt me, he became a shelter, and I became a creature who divided the world into the safe and the unsafe with him at the center.
Then I hit fifteen and the past bit back.
A boy named Chester Daugherty wandered cruelly into our classroom like a grey storm.
He hurt my friend Xia—he thought it a joke.
So I lured him into a dark alley and beat him badly.
Two days later the principal called our parents.
My "brother" walked into the office, then struck me fifteen times with a cane, his face cold as if the sun had never touched him.
I called him a bastard.
His face went dark.
"You called me what?" he asked.
"You don't have the right," he said, quiet as a threat.
I was small then. I meant my words. I meant everything in them.
After that, his careful patience frayed.
Weeks passed with his eyes turned inward and something like a fox in the cage.
When a boy named Leigh—small and desperate—grabbed me and pinched my neck on the street, I came home blue with bruises.
"Who did this?" he asked, his voice low and then sharp.
"Leigh," I said. "He'll stay away."
He touched my neck like someone measuring the distance to a wound.
"Drink this," he said later, pressing milk into my hand.
"Sleep."
He read to me each night. He corrected my hands on math problems like someone translating a new language. He forbade me only one thing: friends who were old enough to care.
My heart, already thick with grief, learned to store new resentments: the candy of his attention and the thorn of his possession.
When I found a box hidden in the attic with hundreds—no, thousands—of photographs, it felt like peeling back wallpaper to find a darker room.
They were all me, in every age and outfit, sleeping, eating, crying, smiling. Someone had watched me grow like a collection. Photos labeled with dates, with odd notes on the margins. Each face in those photos wore a shadow of his smile.
At fifteen, when I tried to demand the truth, he smiled and said, "You should be grateful you were chosen."
He said that I had been born unwell, that the world would have been kinder if I were gone, and that he had been the one to rescue me.
"Why would you do that?" I asked one night, in a house that smelled like lemon oil.
"Because you belong to me," he said. "Because you always have."
He wrapped his fingers around my jaw and said it like it was an answer, not a confession.
I hated him in a new dimension. I loved him in a new one too. That was the curse the "seer" always forgot to mention: love is a mirror, and when you look into it too long you begin to see yourself as someone else.
Then the town's newspeople started to whisper of anomalies in the mountains where my father had once prospected.
A girl named Francesca Kristensen, who worked for a company called New BioTech, came with a card and eyes like ice.
"You shouldn't have come here," she told me the first night she stood in my kitchen. "Not like this."
"Not like what?" I asked.
"Not like someone's favorite," she answered with that dry grin. "Do you know who you live with?"
"He's my brother," I said.
"He's a pollutant," she said, and handed me a file. "DL-009. A local mountain thing. It can take form. It can bind people to it. It crept into your home a long time ago."
My head made a soft sound like an animal that had been picked up and turned around.
"You're saying...what? He's a monster?" I asked.
Francesca showed me the old records, the ancient temple photos, the black coffin, the carved symbols. She showed me a video of men and women—her colleagues—smiling, then later staring hollow-eyed in a ward.
"They call it a contamination," she said. "We call it a killer. He is not your brother."
"But he died," I said. "He drowned."
"Not him," Francesca said. "The body in the river. Someone wore it afterward. Pollutant DL-009 doesn't always stay in one form. It can think. It can be patient. It learns how to be human."
I laughed and then I did not. I thought of the attic photos and his hands and the way he would never let me live alone. The way my father had left me with a bottle of apologies. I thought of a thousand small strange things that fit together like teeth in a jaw.
"There is a way to stop it," Francesca said. "We can weaken it if we get it far from home, then inject its eyes with a special agent. You're the one closest. You get it to the place we choose and you insert the dose. We will be there to cover the rest."
"Why me?" I asked.
"Because it trusts you, or thinks it does," she said. "Only you can get within arm's reach."
Brody Kelley, a friend from university who had become a kind and steady presence, offered to help.
"Come to the park with me," he said one afternoon. "We'll talk."
He had a sister, Francesca, who worked in the field. He was simple in the way that makes people trust him. I wanted that softness like a blanket.
"Please be careful," Brody said. "If this man—if he truly is dangerous, we will be there."
He came the day they needed another witness. Francesca's team tested distance, drew diagrams, and set three ambush points across a small old town called Mosswater—by the river, in a bamboo grove, and on a boat on Lantern Lake. Each position was to be ready to fire a dart loaded with a sedative at the exact moment Francesca signaled.
"Remember," she told me, handing me something that looked like lipstick but held a sharp, fine needle disguised inside. "If you get close and the first dart slows him, inject the eye. That will buy time."
"I will," I said. "But I will not—" My voice cracked on the next word. "I will not stab him in the eyes for the pleasure of it."
"You won't be doing it for pleasure," Francesca said without softness. "You will be doing it because he killed our people and because he is a thing that eats lives."
The trip to Mosswater was quiet. He agreed to go. He said he wanted a holiday, to breathe air away from the house that smelled of the kind of memories built in sterile rooms.
"I planned the big bed," he said, the way he always phrased commands into jokes. "We will share it. It will be cozy."
I swallowed a rage like black bile and agreed.
At the little riverside tavern—its sign swinging like a tired clock—he smiled at me and poured wine.
"You drink?" he asked.
"Not much," I lied.
We clinked cups. He told me some story about a childhood misstep and laughed, and for the briefest second I saw the boy who had once sat in a temple and listened to me count stars. I put my hand on the small needle in my sleeve and waited.
Then the signal came: a flick of light from the roof.
"Now," Francesca's hand in my ear via the comms.
A dart sliced the night. It hit him in the shoulder.
He staggered, eyes clearing for a second. He looked at me the way someone sees a friend through fog: bright, searching, and suddenly young.
"Are you with me?" I whispered.
"Always," he mouthed. He moved for my hand, as if unaware I was the one with the plan.
I pulled the disguised pen from my pocket. The building swayed like the inside of a glass.
He tried to take it. I moved my hand to his face. He pushed my arm away.
"Why are you doing this?" he said, voice a rasp. "Why would you betray me? I have been your keeper."
"Because you are not a keeper," I said, and my voice steadied like a cracked bell. "You are a killer."
He laughed, then a smile like glassing cut the air. "You always were cruel," he said. "You always hated me."
"Do you think I asked for this life?" I shot back. "Do you think I wanted a father who left, a mother who died, hands that kept me bound?"
"Then love me." He said it as if ordering a coat. "Love me and I will be gentle."
The bamboo grove breathed around us. Lanterns winked. Men in uniforms were already in motion. A second dart struck him in the thigh like a soft thunderclap.
He slumped. Francesca's voice tightened in my ear: "He's unstable. Get to his eyes."
I moved. The world was a thin thing then, like paper held near a flame. My hand shook as I pressed the point to his lower eyelid.
"Don't," he whispered. "Don't make me hurt you."
"I won't," I lied. "Just hold still."
He stared at me. For a minute there was only us.
Then he seized my wrist with a strength that was sickening and animal. I felt the bone creak. He laughed, a small sound like broken wind.
"I will give you everything," he said. "Be my wife. Be my—"
"I am not your property," I gasped.
"I am already patient," he said. "I can wait one life, two lives."
I lunged. The needle slid. Pain like a hot star burst in his eye. He made a sound that was animal and old, a sound that was not human sorrow but a shuddering death's laugh. He staggered backward.
"Not that one," I heard a man shout in the crowd—someone from Francesca's team. "Take its hands. Cover its head."
The rest was a blur of men in crisp coats, of comms fussing, of light knives that tried to pin him while he moved like a tree struck by lightning.
When they finally had him under the tarps, his body began to change. The skin peeled like film from a bulb. Blue oil seeped and spiderwebbed across the floorboards. The men who had held him let go and staggered a step back as the shape collapsed into something that dripped and pooled.
I watched a box of shiny black lacquer be produced, and someone in a voice like a bell said, "Collect the eyes."
A woman in a protective suit knelt and carefully removed the two soft black orbs. She wrapped them in cloth. Behind her, a crowd had gathered. People recorded, people shouted. A child in the crowd cried out, "Is that the man from the news?"
"He loved her," someone whispered. "He looked like he loved her."
"He killed people," Francesca answered. "He ate them like a sickness."
He did not beg. He was shocked in a way that rippled from confidence to disbelief to denial and then slow collapse. In the last stages his voice shrank to the size of a child's, a tiny needle voice.
"Do you remember..." he breathed, bewildered, "the bridge? The stone? You pushed me—"
"I remember everything," I said. "I pushed you. You lived."
He stared at me like someone who had woken into the wrong century. He fumbled through words trying every defense he could find. "You betrayed me," he said. "You used them. You used me. You sold me."
Around us the crowd fractured into reaction: cameras lifted, a hundred small white screens flashing. "Karma," someone shouted. "He got what he deserved," said another. A woman dropped to her knees and prayed.
He tried denial, then anger. He tried to demand pity. He tried to scream and then could not make noise that matched his eyes. In the space between breaths his composure broke into choked sobs. He folded inward and made confession without meaning to.
"Please," he said, voice dissolving under the streetlights. "I did what I had to do. You do not understand. They hurt me first."
"They hurt you first," Francesca repeated. "Then you did worse."
Men in uniforms gently took the lacquer box and carried the eyes away. Someone snapped photographs of the black globes as evidence. The crowd leaned forward like a wave. Someone near me cheered.
"How does it feel?" Brody asked quietly. "Seeing him like this."
"Like the end," I said. "Like a chapter closed. Like the man who kept me now lies naked and small."
"Will it be enough?" he asked.
"It has to be," I said. "There are other graves. There are other faces like his."
They draped a cloth. They carted the pool into a rubbish wagon. They washed the ground. They took statements. They asked me to repeat the story until the words became raw and dull.
I told them the truth: that I had pushed him away once, that he had come back wearing the memory of a brother, that he had loved me with a hunger that used blood like a currency.
Then Francesca turned to me, her eyes softer than when the battle began.
"You did what you had to," she said. "You were brave."
"I did what I had to because I had nothing left to lose," I said. "I had nothing left until him and then him took that last thing too."
Later, when the crowd had thinned to whispers and the cameras took the evidence away, someone recorded the last words he managed to croak before the change consumed him.
"Don't...stain your hands," he said, and then his mouth fell open into silence as his body unspooled.
Those three sentences stayed with me like a curse reversed: "Don't stain your hands."
I had stained them anyway.
After the clean-up, Francesca sat beside me and handed me back the needle like a small relic.
"You cannot keep this," she said. "But you can keep the memory of what you chose."
"Will they find the rest?" I asked.
She nodded. "We found other traces. We will go after them. But for now—go home. Try to sleep. You have a life to rebuild."
My hands trembled. The villa seemed both smaller and worse. I locked myself in the room and threw up until nothing came. Then I lay on the floor and listened to the rain that sounded like washing stones.
The verdict came without court. The lacquer box became case evidence. The eyes were sealed in a vault. The papers called it an eradication of DL-009. The news called it justice.
But the way the crowd had watched—so many faces like mirrors—terrified me. There was a hunger in the watchers too. They had come to see a monster be undone like a trick. They wanted spectacle. They wanted a finality that life rarely gives.
I had wanted finality. I had wanted the man who had been a promise and then a prison to be gone.
He was gone.
I was left with the taste of blue blood and the echo in my ears of a childhood ache.
Months later, I married Brody Kelley in a simple ceremony.
"Do you love me?" he asked the night before the wedding, when fireworks were distant and the world felt less sharp.
"I think I will learn to," I said. "I think I will try."
He gave me a ring that glittered like a small law. I wore it and we built a life with small, honest duties. I told the truth at times—some of it—and left the rest locked in the attic where the photos had been.
Years passed. I did news stories, traveled, grew older, taught my children that the world is not kind, and that sometimes you must be the hand that shuts the door. I told them little truths and folded the rest into stories.
There were nights, years later, when the edges of memory would ripple and a face would fill my eyes—a pale man with black hair who had once loved me like a god and hated me like a curse. The memory of his last words haunted me.
"Don't stain your hands," he had said.
I once asked Brody, many winters later, "Do you ever believe someone is born wrong?"
He shook his head. "No," he said. "People are taught to be monsters."
I still dreamed sometimes, and in those dreams there was an old temple and a coffin and a child with small fingers who pushed. I knew, in the quiet that followed, that the only true sentence about that night was mine to speak, and that I had spoken it.
I had survived the prophecy. The price was a ledger that never closes.
The End
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