Empathy by Ker Dukey

Warning!!! This is a dark adult novel with explicit sex and upsetting scenes. 18+ only please. Empathy is a standalone novel.

 

Blake:
I am a brother
I am a police detective
I am a contract killer
I don’t want to love
I don’t want to feel
I don’t want … EMPATHY.

They say some people are born with decreased activity in the front central lobe causing them a deficiency in empathy. Maybe that’s true about me but whether I was born this way or created in a moment of evil, empathy was something I didn’t possess until her green eyes met mine in the mirror and I couldn’t take her life.

I didn’t want to feel, didn’t want this woman in my life complicating how I lived but she was there at every turn. Sent to haunt me for my sins. Her light so bright she provoked a shadow from everyone she touched. When a job turns bad quickly altering my life forever I’m forced to feel. When nothing is making sense I’m forced to face truths I never would recover from. When life drowns you in its cruelty you don’t know which way the current will drag you or who you’ll become once you re-surface.

Melody:
I was a daughter
I was a student
I was a victim
Did I have his love?
Did I make him feel?
Did I have his empathy?
When the actions of a soulless killer forces sorrow into my veins I never dreamed the man healing my wounds would be the one to leave the worst scar. His love would scar my soul. Scars are permanent; I will never feel the relief from them. Will I learn to live with them, remember why I have them and learn never to let him close enough to inflict more? Will I eventually cover them… like tattoos coating them with new memories, new love and new starts? I didn’t know these answers because the pain was too suffocating, the only thing I knew was they will always be under the surface lingering. He had scars too, from his sins. There is nothing that can cover them, they were too deep, too ugly, too dark and they marked us both forever.

 

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Is it possible to be born into depravity? Can the gene that makes us feel be replaced with one that makes us crave blood, to torment and twist people until they break so beautifully before our eyes? Or is it the lies and the deceit that we are led to believe that have the ability to turn us into someone who loves the kill?

“When your story is written on a piece of paper and that paper gets crumpled up and thrown into a shredder, you can piece the tatters back together although the damage remains. So does your story, you just have to continue to write even if the paper isn’t perfect.”

The words of Empathy will own you within the first two sentences. Heavy on emotion this book will take control of your mind making you believe only what the author directs you to.

Characters that hold such incredible strength will overpower you. Characters that are so weak they will slowly shatter you. You feel with such intensity every motion, emotion and lack thereof. Connection to each and every character happens within an instant of their introduction into the story. Some you love, some you bleed for and some f**k with your mind making you question every moral you thought you had.

“She is so feisty I can’t decide if I want to squeeze her throat and watch her eyes gloss over with tears, or rip her tiny shorts off and bury my dick inside her, making her scream, making her so f**king dirty she’ll never get clean.”

 A story line that is so twisted, so beyond the scope of imagination you will spend hours wondering how the author in her utter brilliance was able to write this amazing, confusing, heart-stopping, heart-pounding, thrilling and insanely erotic story.

“Rage wasn’t an emotion in that moment, it was an entity grown from the darkest depths of my being, vibrating through my skin to be released.”

 Through the haze of sexual desire we are graced with a story of family, truths and lies. Is the path taken to protect the right one? Is the person being protected the person he seems to be. Are we really predestined to live with such hate that the need to protect at any measure is one we do without remorse? Is it possible that underneath the person we believe we are is not the person we are at all?

Empathy is brilliantly written with a solid and strong story line. The pace of this story is fast and the execution is beyond perfect. The twists, turns and the unexpected will mystify and have you holding your breath in utter disbelief. You will fall in love and gasp in shock. You will feel your pulse accelerate, your heartbeat double and you will feel the hurt so deep within yourself.

I found that once I started reading Empathy I could not put the book down. The words cast a spell and I was gone, reality slipped away as I made my decent into a world that owned me completely.