Page 108 of Promise of Destruction
Closing the tab with her medical assessment, I navigate back to the scene that made her pissed off at me. The photos of her husband. There areso manyof them. This man didn’t just step out on her for an affair with a secretary—he’s a serial cheater.
Photos of him with blondes and brunettes and redheads, women with their heads shaved or women with blue hair. Women being subject to the whips and chains, tied with thick rope in uncomfortable positions.
Did he use those things on her? Did he tie her up with ropes like that, the mother of his child, and bend and twist her into different shapes so that he could fuck her from odd angles? Did he hit her with that riding crop he seems to have used to mark other women? Did he shock her with the stun gun he's holding in a couple of the stills? Make her wear a leather hood while he pounded her from behind over their sofa like some of the women are wearing? Did he pretend she was someone different while he did these things to her?
My blood boils as I view the photos. Vincent D'Anerio had a perfect wife, a beautiful, precious thing that he left unattended so he could go fuck other women.
But as I scroll, my anger turns to suspicion.
Suspicion turns slowly to rage as I realize the truth of these photos. Because Vincent D'Anerio didn’t just forsake his wife for the opportunity to live out his kinks with extramarital affairs. The angles of many of the photos left faces obscured when I first looked, but now that I see them, I realize something awful. Thelookson their faces. The pain. The fear. It’s too genuine, without a trace of pleasure.
I don't think his partners in these photos were willing.
In fact, when I reach ones where the women seem to be on the verge of collapse, where his hands around their throats are tight and the color is gone from their faces, I’m sure they weren’t.
Disgusted, I close out of the tab, getting rid of the images that are now going to haunt me.
I knew Tony D'Anerio was a thug, so I hadn't had high hopes for his nephew to be an upstanding gentleman. But I also didn't expect him to be involved in...this.
When I met Jonathan Boudreaux at the bequest of my best friend and college roommate, I didn't like the man. It doesn't take a psychic to see that everything about the man was sinister, despite his polished and refined look and the easy-going smile he'd learned to perfect. And when I learned what sort of things he was into, I hated him more. I wanted nothing to do with him.
I walked away, even in spite of Wes trying his hardest to make me reconsider. And I like to think that if my mother had never collapsed, if it hadn't gotten as bad as it did, that I wouldn't have done what I did. But I did. I sold my soul, right along with my software so that Jonathan could use it to sell women... or rather, to erase from existence the women that he sold.
It's been the source of my shame since the day I did it, but I knew when I created it that it was an invention that would be used to bring pain and suffering to someonesomewherein the world. I didn't expect it to weigh so heavily on me... it wasn't like I was creating an atom bomb or a nuclear warhead.
It was simply a facial recognition software, cutting edge. It can analyze footage from any video device anywhere on the earth whether on an encrypted connection and behind firewalls like IDs from the DMV or on some seedy revenge porn site or from a satellite camera a thousand miles away. Not only can it run all of those photos, but it can also grab them and analyze them for differences, calculate heat signatures, and then search the entire world wide web to bring up any file pertaining to that mark.
And then, with the press of a button and an authorization code, it could delete the entire thing... erase an entire person off the face of the planet. Or at least, delete their entire digital footprint... yearbook photos, newspaper articles they were mentioned in, court records with their name, social media profiles, even birth certificates. If it's digital, it can be deleted with the right software.
It seemed like a great tool for our military, and I built it for the purpose of selling it to someone who could use it to identify and prevent terrorism from anywhere in the world. But when the ink was still wet on the contract I signed, Jonathan asked me to demonstrate the software. It was an interactive demo... He snapped his fingers and some big thug brought a struggling woman into the bar to watch as I searched her face from the cell phone photo he snapped. I'll never forget her name.
Lily Vanacore's entire life popped up on the screen... her social media pages, her search history, photos of her in a ballet costume dancing on stage. The tape over her mouth didn't allow her to scream, but she tried as she sobbed, seeing her entire life on the computer before her.
I hesitated, and it wasn't Jonathan who pulled the gun on me. It was my own friend... who clearly wasn't a friend after all. He held it to my head and demanded I follow through.
And I did. Like a spineless fucking bitch, I did what he told me to. I wiped Lily Vanacore off the face of the earth, the little ballerina who was a former child beauty star. In five minutes, I watched her grow up through a series of photos her doting mother had posted before the tragedy that stole her life. And in a single minute, I deleted it all.
No sooner had I done it, the big man knocked her out with a blow across the face. She fell to the ground, and the big brute picked her up and walked away with her. Jonathan thanked me for my business, left me with the information for theoffshore account and my suffocating guilt. Wes was the one who explained why they did it. He was the one who explained that I had helped them get away with murder... or human trafficking at least.
They didn’t always kill people… killing them was wasteful when they could make money off of them. But I know what fate awaits the people who are erased from the system using the weapon I created. It’s eventual death, and that’s probably a fate kinder than what precedes it.
Soren called me a murderer, and she wasn’t wrong. There’s blood on my hands… rivers of it. It’s why I don’t sleep, what keeps me awake for long nights as I contemplate my place on this planet, wondering whether my useless existence warrants the effort of maintaining the illusion.
I grew up on the outskirts of the city, just another poor kid who flew under the radar most of his life, another kid with a single mom just struggling to survive because her husband died fighting someone else’s war. It wasn’t until toward the end of high school when I started to gather attention because I decided to throw a ball around on a field every Friday night.
Football was a good release for me, physical and exhausting. I did well, but I wasn’t anything special. Nobody scouted me, my name didn’t appear in articles or anything. It’s what made it so easy to disappear when I went to college, to re-invent myself. I thought I’d reinvent myself into a powerful man, independently wealthy and unassumingly heroic. So fucking naïve.
When my mother died despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars of experimental treatments and I was left with only a small sum from the initial payment, I chose to invest it in Boulder Tech… a wise investment that I luckily cashed out just before it hit the public that the CEO was running a prostitution ring. His demise was my gain, and I used the cash to createEvergreen Industries, filling the hole left in cybersecurity by their demise.
I’d feel bad about slandering him and destroying his company if he didn’t work for thugs like Jonathan Boudreaux. If anything, I did him a kindness by implying that his scheme was anything other than the human slavery it is.
Evergreen Industries is still early on the scene, which is what made Soren’s attack on me in her silly little paper feel especially raw. It’s no different than what I did to Viraj Shah, but the difference is that Shahwasa predator.
I’m simply an opportunist.
Soren Palmer put herself in my path… and now that I’ve clipped her wings, she’ll never escape me. It’s hypocritical, and I’m self-aware enough to realize that. But in the last few years of darkness, Soren is a fire that burns bright.
She burns forme… she just hasn’t figured that out yet.
