Chapter Twenty Never Tear Us Apart #2
“She wasn’t weak.” Kenny drew Aaron closer.
“She wasn’t targeted because she was vulnerable.
She was targeted because she was powerful.
Because she lived on her own terms. And people like Jonathon…
they don’t know how to exist without terms. They need boundaries.
Binaries. Hierarchies. Control. She defied that simply by existing. ”
Aaron closed his eyes, lashes tickling Kenny’s chest, but Kenny knew he was listening. Because he asked,
“Could she have been saved? Could someone have stopped him earlier?”
“Maybe.” Kenny chewed on his lip. “If the right people had been looking. If the systems built to protect the victims hadn’t already written them off.”
Aaron tensed. Chaos gave a small sigh at their feet. Lucky whimpered.
“Vulnerable victims often fall through the cracks.” Kenny exhaled, threaded with frustration, with that old, bone-deep exasperation that after all the research, all the inquiries, all the lessons written in blood, nothing had changed.
“Their records don’t always match their reality.
Names are misfiled. Pronouns ignored. Investigations stall over technicalities that wouldn’t exist for anyone else.
They get called complicated. Difficult. High risk.
Their disappearances dismissed as lifestyle choices instead of red flags.
” Kenny held Aaron closer, needing the weight of him there.
With him. “That’s queer kids on the streets.
Kids who ran from places that didn’t want them.
Girls forced into lives they never chose.
Boys picked up and used, turned into someone’s mule or worse.
And without a stable home to return to, there’s no safety net.
No one to pull them back. And more often no one asks why they ran.
No one wonders what they were running from.
They’re seen as reckless, as troubled, as disposable.
So when they go missing, or end up dead…
it’s written off. Accident. Suicide. Overdose.
Never part of a larger pattern. Never linked together.
Because they weren’t seen as connected. But individual tragedies. ”
Aaron was silent but Kenny could feel him burning with rage. He’d been one of those kids once. And while he now had a safe place to land, someone fighting for him and pulling him back when he got lost, he knew he was lucky.
“Jonathon wasn’t the first to exploit that,” Kenny went on quietly. “And he won’t be the last. But if there’s any small mercy in what’s happened, it’s that he’s forced the system to look at the victims it keeps failing to see.”
Aaron twisted to gaze up at Kenny, eyes wide with a need to know. Kenny understood that look all too well. “Why here? Why now? Was it cause of me?”
“No. Not to start. Jonathon kept away from the island until this year. He timed the killings with his Christmas holidays. I’ll assume, and perhaps you could clarify if you ever wanted to go back to the dog shelter, he’d been volunteering there a while but always took extended breaks at Christmas.
He likely has connections in Glasgow. Southampton.
Portsmouth. I guarantee there are more. Maybe through his mother.
She likely got him into volunteering spaces using her trusted connections as a religious figure and educator.
But none of them flagged because the systems didn’t connect the dots.
Because they were logged under the wrong names, the wrong causes.
Lost inside the very institutions that were supposed to protect them. ”
Silence stretched between them. Heavy. Sacred.
And in that silence, Skye’s name lingered. Unspoken but present. Not erased.
Never forgotten.
“Why he chose here this year…?” Kenny pondered the thought, flicking through his memory banks of research and behavioural analysis. “Perhaps it was because he wanted it over. He would’ve known he’d get caught here. That the dots would link eventually.”
“And I was here.”
“We still don’t know that full story.” And Kenny wasn’t sure they ever would.
Aaron rubbed his nose along Kenny’s chest. “And this whole Christmas thing? The Santa and the ritual?”
Kenny stroked though Aaron’s hair, the glow of the fire painting it in soft gold.
He could have said Margaret. Could’ve traced the whole grotesque thing back to her and her brittle, terrifying righteousness.
How she was a consequence of the same place Aaron’s mother had come from.
And how there would be a whole legacy from that torture, still waiting to manifest however it would.
A lineage of belief turned blade. A legacy of trauma, waiting to bloom in whatever shape the next shadow took.
But that wasn’t what Aaron needed tonight.
Still, he deserved the truth.
“It started the year her husband left,” Kenny said.
“Walked out at Christmas after having an affair with a young runaway he’d been counselling.
Margaret was part of a deeply conservative church.
Doctrine ruled everything. Family. Obedience.
Appearances. So when he left… it wasn’t abandonment.
It was sin. A public one. A betrayal of God.
And it happened at the most ‘holy’ time of year. ”
Kenny exhaled, dropped into a gentler cadence.
Measured, clinical, but not cold. “For her, Christmas stopped being joyful. It became judgment day. A time when sinners revealed themselves. When the mask slipped. And she passed that belief down like scripture. Especially to Jonathon. A boy raised by a mother who believed God had handed her pain as a test and saw obedience as the only reward.”
Aaron stayed still, but he gripped the fabric of Kenny’s dressing gown lapel.
“All the Christmas stories… Santa, the nativity, the carols. They became moral tools. Be good or be punished. Be righteous or be erased. That was the message. Jonathon grew up with a mother who told him the world was failing. That people were failing. And that it was his job to restore the balance.”
Kenny kissed the top of Aaron’s head. Held him tighter.
“He didn’t pick Christmas for drama. He chose it because it’s the only time of year society agrees to play pretend. We all perform goodness. Wear the costume. Tell the story. And Jonathon took that script and weaponised it. Turned the myth into judgment.”
Aaron gave a small, broken laugh. “Then killed people for not fitting the script.”
“Exactly. Especially people who lived their truth. Who stepped outside the lines he’d been raised to see as sacred.”
Aaron didn’t answer. On the screen, an ensemble of actors shouted a gleeful, “Merry Christmas!” over a swelling string section.
Kenny waited. Let the silence stretch, soft and long, and he held Aaron in the stillness, letting him melt against him.
Letting him rest. Safe. Seen. Loved. He knew Aaron was filing questions away.
As always. Tucking the hard ones behind his ribs for another time, when it wouldn’t hurt so much to touch them.
But Kenny could feel the ache beneath his skin.
The lingering fear that the past would never quite let him go.
That even now, it was waiting at the door.
So, when he felt Aaron soften enough, Kenny leaned close and brushed his lips against his ear. “Marry me.”
Aaron went completely still.
And for one wild second, Kenny wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Or passed out. Or died from the sheer audacity of the timing.
But then Aaron slowly lifted his head and gaped at him.
Kenny swallowed hard. He looked devastating. Tousled, flushed, eyes wide with disbelief. It made the question feel even more absurd. And even more necessary.
“Did you just propose to me,” Aaron blinked, “while I’m in a burrito?”
“It’s the perfect time. You can’t run away, or roll off, or pretend you didn’t hear me.”
“You think I’d do that?”
“Yes.”
Aaron let out a breathy, broken laugh then dropped his forehead onto Kenny’s chest. “Fuck.” And with his face hidden, heartbeat hammering through his ribs hard enough for Kenny to feel it, he bashed his head on Kenny’s scar with every curse, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Kenny cupped his face and lifted it back up. “If the emotional toll is too much to handle mid-burrito, I could offer some practical reasons.”
“Oh, perfect. Let’s completely ruin this sentimental moment with logic.”
Kenny smiled. “Good.” He kissed him, soft and sure. “Besides the obvious—I’m in love with you, adore you, stupid about you, and I already belong to you—I figured taking my name might help. Make it easier to start again. Bury some of what came before. Give you something solid. Something new.”
Aaron drew in a breath.
“And, as you said… if I ever end up in an accident where I can’t declare my deeply enthusiastic cock-sucking preferences, I’d at least like people to know I’m yours.”
Aaron snorted, bit his lip. “These are strangely compelling arguments.”
“They are.” Kenny kissed him again. “I’d really like you to let go of the past. And take my name.”
Aaron inhaled. Waited a beat. Then, “I’m not convinced this face suits being called Dr Kenneth Lyons.”
“Then let’s compromise. Mr Aaron Lyons has a nice ring to it.”
Aaron narrowed his eyes. “You just stripped me of my honorary doctorate without a second thought.”
“Did you spend six years earning it?”
Aaron arched a brow. “I was the study.”
Kenny sighed. Recalibrated. Then, quieter, real, “Marry me.”
Aaron cocked his head. “Shouldn’t you be on one knee?”
“Traditionally? Yes. Possibly. Depends how committed you are to ceremony over comfort. And right now, I’m honouring your burrito-based recovery process. But if you’d prefer me on one knee, I can make that happen.”
Aaron pretended to consider it. “You don’t have to.”
“Excellent. Then let’s circle back. Aaron Jones, will you marry me?”