14. Callum
CALLUM
I ’ve only ever been good at one thing, and that’s killing.
I could’ve been an artist or a doctor with a better upbringing, but fate had other plans.
I was born to a charming woman addicted to poison.
At least my mother tried her best to protect me.
I wasn’t harmed to supply her addiction or wound up on drugs—something unheard of with heroin addiction.
No, the issue of growing up where I did, surrounded by certain types of people, schooled me in crime and survival rather than mathematics and science.
From the age of seven, I did what I needed to do.
I stole a loaf of bread to fill my belly.
I slipped a diamond ring off the finger of a tourist in Edinburgh when I was twelve.
As I filled out, I took on odd jobs shaking down rich geeks who owed money to loan sharks.
Despite those crimes, I never imagined killing anyone.
Not until I was sixteen and walked in on a man raping my mother.
Bashing his brains in with a frying pan felt good. Too good.
The pent-up energy festering in my blood was released in a storm of rage and retribution.
I should’ve served jail time for what I did to that man, but my mother grabbed the pan and told me to burn my clothes and leave the house.
Once she knew I was in the clear, she called the cops and spent three years in jail.
The good news? She got clean while locked up.
The bad news? I discovered I had a taste for killing.
Three years of surviving on the streets alone forced me into situations that no one should have to endure.
One thing led to another, and I found myself face-to-face with Marcus Meyer.
He took a scared punk-ass kid and turned him into a meticulous cold killer.
I committed a string of murders in his name.
I’d like to say that meeting Marcus was the lowest point in my life, but it brought me my first taste of happiness with Atlas.
“Where are you going?” Atlas asks, walking toward me with a beer bottle in his hand. His eyes narrow as he takes a sip.
Atlas isn’t a fan of my extracurricular activities.
He seems to think that leaving his father’s perverse lifestyle means we should put the past in the rearview.
He’s tried to convince me to leave it be, to move on, but I can’t.
He loves me and craves her, so he bends easily, but a part of me hates that I’ve turned his already dark existence to pitch black.
Atlas has always struggled with the darkness that resides within him.
Constantly running from it, contriving an image that allows him to delude himself and those he comes in contact with into believing he’s upstanding.
Didn’t hurt that he landed a trust fund from his rich mother.
Money his father couldn’t squander. That wealth allowed him to set us up.
“Where are you going, Callum?” Atlas asks again.
“For a walk,” I lie.
Atlas squints, removing his light gray suit jacket and throwing it on the sofa. “It’s a lovely night for it. Let me get out of this monkey suit, and I’ll come with you.”
Two years ago, we started a security company.
It’s rather amusing when I think about it: two criminals setting up the cops and government institutions with all their surveillance needs.
It’s also come in handy with my other seedy activities pertaining to a certain girl who’s been consuming my thoughts.
“No, that’s okay. I’m sure you’re tired.” I tap on the earphones. “Thought I’d listen to some music and decompress.”
Atlas stalks me like a predator cornering his prey, his lips tilting up in a smirk. “Decompress by staring into a certain woman’s window?”
This is where I bend so that Atlas doesn’t break. Our little game soothes his resentment and allows me to feel like I’m taking care of him.
I back up until I hit the wall, allowing Atlas to see that I’m trapped. Shrugging, I flash him my most sincere smile. It won’t work on him because he knows what I truly am, but he enjoys these games where he has the upper hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s probably still at work.”
Atlas’s body covers mine as he reaches for his tie and tugs it off his neck. He doesn’t say a word as he wraps the silk around my throat. I cough, and my hand automatically moves to the restrictive silk.
Atlas shoves two fingers between the silk and my flesh. “Not too tight, but tight enough to make sure you know your place.”
My lips twitch at his brazen words—words I’ve said to him in the past. I never thought I’d bend for someone like this, allow them to control me, but here we are.
It didn’t start like this. Atlas and I found each other amid violence and resentment. Two broken people, abandoned and alone, needing a place to feel safe and angry.
“Will you ever say no to him?” Atlas asked as he plopped down beside me on the concrete steps, puffing away on his cigarette.
Fuckin’ entitled jerk.
While sneering at his father’s underlings, the kingdom’s prince refused to soil his delicate hands. I knew what I was—a soldier for Marcus Meyer. I knew I was serving the devil, but I resented his son sitting at our table when he knew nothing of the life we led.
I glanced at the green pasture before me, relishing the serenity of the Meyer country estate. “It’s a job. Gotta eat.”
“Plenty of jobs out there that don’t require getting your hands bloody.”
“None that pay as well.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
I laughed. “The only people who say that are those who have it.”
That seemed to shut Atlas up. He didn’t have a quick answer to deny a fundamental truth.
I appreciated that he wasn’t trying to deny our stations in life to feel better.
So many times, people wanted to believe they were better.
They cozied up to the lesser mortals to improve their reflection when they gazed into the mirror.
Atlas wasn’t trying to pull that shit on me.
Good thing for him he didn’t because it would be the quickest way to get his pretty boy face bashed in.
We sat in silence—it unnerved me how comfortable it was. I couldn’t do this with others. I would need to fill the void of silence with mindless chatter.
“I hate my life,” Atlas whispered, but those four words were so loud that they shattered the silence. “All the money, top-tier education, and villas in the Riviera are worthless when all you can think about is burning it all down.”
“What’s so horrible about your life, Atlas? Did Daddy not buy you the car you wanted?”
“My father is a monster, Callum. A vicious, selfish piece of human trash. He’s a weak man.
A small man. A man who knows he can’t wield power of any value, so he cheats, lies, manipulates, abuses, and kills to feel.
My life, the life you covet and see as some sort of fairytale, is nothing but a simmering nightmare, ready to pull me under and suffocate me. ”
I chuckle. “I slit the throats of people who trash talk Marcus Meyer.”
Atlas’s warm hand enveloped my cold one, and he pressed a wooden handle into my palm, pulling my arm toward his throat. “That’s why I told you.”
A vast emptiness spread through my chest at the broken plea in his voice. Each word he uttered was a piercing shard of glass cutting into my already mangled heart. Sadness saturated Atlas’s eyes, a bone-deep pain encapsulating his soul in a fiery inferno destined for destruction.
“Atlas,” I said, my voice low and steady, “I might be a murderer, but I’m not killing you.”
“You’d be providing me with mercy.” Atlas pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons before showing me the screen. “It’s fifty million. My mother left it to me. It’s all yours. You could leave here. Start a life. A good life free from all this insanity. It’s all yours if you do this one thing.”
I let his words linger between us, allowing their poison to fester and suffocate me as they permeate my ears.
Fifty million was a lot of money. But a small voice in my mind was shouting at me, repeating the same two words on a loop.
Save him. At that moment, I understood my purpose in life.
My reason for being there was to save Atlas Meyer.
“What are you thinking about, Callum?”
Atlas’s voice pulls me back from the past. I stare into his eyes and feel the sense of peace that always overcomes me when I’m with him. Then the guilt hits. The guilt that I can’t give him what he wants. What he craves. Stability.
“How I’ve betrayed all the things I promised to give you.”
Atlas smiles, and I swear all the air abandons my lungs at his sheer beauty.
Atlas puts up with a lot from me. More than any other man would.
When we met, I thought he’d be my world, the only thing I’d ever need.
For years, Atlas was my only reason for breathing.
The day I refused to kill him was the day he saved me.
He gave me back a shred of humanity when all I knew was brutality.
Atlas leans forward and brushes his lips to the tip of my nose. “Why are you still hiding from me? I’ll never turn my back on you, Cal.”
Atlas yanks at the tie around my neck, and I tumble to my knees. “I like you like this, Callum. A fuckin’ bitch who knows his rightful place. How many more years do I need to do this? How much longer do I have to wait for you to realize I’ll do anything for you?”
His words are sharp with their precision.
To an outsider, his words might seem cruel, but the reality is that we give each other what we need.
Through our relationship, we have found solace—a balm to heal the brutality of the marks inflicted upon us.
The complicated and confusing parts that no one has seen.
The fragmented parts of ourselves that no one knew about until we found each other.
Through these games, we remain level—as level as two disturbed people with fragmented minds can be.