Chapter 28
Maddox
Crash! The lamp gets swept off the table.
It slams to the floor, shatters. I kick the table out of my way, and it flies against the wall.
There’s now just a couch between me and him, and that isn’t enough to keep me away.
Nothing is enough to keep me away. I stalk towards him, rage running through my veins, my vision blurred, a pounding in my ears.
It’s taken me months to find him, this pathetic piece of shit.
He fled the country after his two equally pathetic buddies were blasted out of existence by Yasmin’s dad and his shotgun.
Disappeared to Mexico, undoubtedly using his family’s millions to cover his tracks.
Then last week, he finally crept out from under his rock—couldn’t resist posting on his fucking Facebook page that he was back.
That he was ‘partying hard’ in the Windy City before his next semester.
It wasn’t a fucking coincidence that last week Yasmin’s dad was finally convicted and sentenced for the murder of his two scumbag friends.
The judge had been sympathetic, but at the end of the day he killed two ‘upstanding young men’ in cold blood.
Upstanding? Those rapist fuckers as good as murdered Yasmin.
They might as well have forced those pills down her throat themselves.
Now, here he is. Milton Travers III. Big man on campus, a track star, majoring in law. His whole fucking life ahead of him, while she rots in her grave. She’s dead, and it’s all because of him.
He cowers behind the couch, his face bloody from the first few punches I rained down on him. It’s running red streaks over his eyes, mixing in with his tears. He holds his hands up and smells like he might have shit himself. “Please. Please, Maddox, stop!”
“Is that what she said, you fucking bastard?” I push the couch out of the way, sliding it so hard it slams into the already broken TV. I’ve thrown this asshole all over this room already. “Is that what Yasmin said when you three raped her?”
“We were acquitted,” he bleats, still sticking to the same old story.
I prowl towards him, kick him in the stomach. He doubles over, pukes on the carpet, curls up in a defensive ball like that might help him. Nothing can help him.
I grab his stupid preppy hair and pull his bloody face up to meet mine. He whimpers. “Admit what you did, Milton. Admit it, and maybe I’ll walk away. Maybe I’ll leave here and never look back.”
“Really?” his split lip quivers, and more blood spills from his mouth. “You’ll let me go?”
I shake his head so hard I hear his teeth rattle. “Yeah. But you have to admit it, Milton. You have to tell me exactly what happened. No more lies.”
“I will, I promise, I’ll tell you everything.”
I throw him down on the floor, repulsed at any physical contact with him. “Go on.”
He shuffles back up against the wall, his whole body shaking. “We…we were drunk. And high. And it wasn’t our fault. It was all Brady’s idea anyway, and maybe Lucas’s…”
The two dead boys. Yeah. How convenient. I stay silent, knowing he’s weak. He’ll blubber it all out, the useless shitbag.
“They said she wanted it, that she was so off her head that she was begging for it. You know how she was, you remember how drunk she was.”
It takes all my willpower not to kick him in the face to shut him up.
Yeah. I do remember. She’d only had two beers though, we had a row, and I left her there.
I abandoned her. I can’t get away from my part in this, and it makes the rage and fury even stronger.
I hate myself as much as I hate this evil asshole trembling at my feet.
“We, uh, no—not we, they, Lucas and Brady—they took her into one of the bedrooms. They started taking her clothes off. They…she didn’t fight us. If she hadn’t wanted it, why didn’t she fight us, or scream? I thought she wanted it.”
“If she was drunk, like you said. That means she was incapable of giving her consent. That means you raped her, whether she fought or not. But she did fight, didn’t she?
She had your skin under her fingernails.
She had bruises around her neck. And she didn’t scream because you shoved her own panties in her mouth and rammed them so deep in she almost choked. ”
He stares up at me, obviously surprised that I know so much.
I know because she told me. She shared some of her story on the stand during the trial, and she told the rest to me.
The jackasses on the jury didn’t believe her.
The fancy lawyers her attackers’ families hired tore her to shreds.
Came up with toxicology reports that showed she was smoking weed.
That her blood alcohol level was sky high.
They produced witnesses who said she was dancing ‘provocatively’, whatever the fuck that means.
They even showed pictures of what she was wearing—a little mini skirt and a crop top.
A sixteen-year-old girl at a party can’t wear a crop top without wanting to be gang-raped?
Fury courses through my veins. They showed photos of her piercings, her dyed hair.
They made her sound like a slut, a tramp from the poor part of the city who got herself into trouble.
One of the attorneys even suggested she made the whole thing up to try and extort money from them.
It was a fucking shitshow, and all the way through, the three of them sat there looking so fucking innocent.
My girl killed herself before the verdict even came back. I suspect she knew what it would be, and she was right. She was raped by three men, then raped all over again by the justice system and by public opinion. Everyone let her down, including me.
Her dad did the right thing trying to take them out. At first, I was disappointed he failed to get them all, but now I’m glad. I’m glad Milton Travers III escaped. That means he’s mine, and I can finish the job that Yasmin’s dad started.
But is it enough to just beat the shit out of him? Could I really take another human life, much as I think he might deserve to die?
“I didn’t mean it,” he whines. “I was just…it was them, the others, they made me.”
He’s desperate now. I can hear it in his voice. “Yeah? Made you how? Did they give you fucking Viagra?”
“No, but, but…I knew they’d rip the shit out of me if I didn’t go along. You don’t know what they were like. I had no choice.”
Is he actually saying that he took part in a brutal gang rape of an innocent young woman because of fucking peer pressure?
Because his buddies would laugh at him if he didn’t fuck a girl against her will.
Jesus fucking Christ. I think I have the answer to my question.
I could most definitely take another human life.
I drag him up by his collar, slam him against the wall. A framed picture falls off from the force. I get right up into his face. “I’m going to kill you now Milton. Just like you, I have no choice.”
“But you said you’d let me go. You said you’d stop if I told you the truth.”
I throw him across the room, cross the distance between us, and kick him repeatedly in the gut. “Yeah. I lied.”
It’s not much of a fight. It’s not a fight at all.
I’m bigger and stronger, and more to the point, I am fucking incandescent with rage.
I can’t see past the bloodlust, and I slam my fist repeatedly into his face, his belly, his kidneys.
He’s coughing up blood, his eyes scrolling back in his head, not even trying to fend me off anymore.
I pull him up, drag him across to the mirror.
I hold his face in front of it. He can’t focus or even hold his head up.
Even his fucking eyes are filled with blood.
“Take a good long look at yourself, you bastard. The last thing you’ll ever see is the fucked-up face of a rapist asshole. Rot in hell.”
With that, I smash him into the glass. It explodes, showering us both with shards, the blood from his ruined features spurting everywhere.
It splashes across my own face, and I do not care.
I drop him to the ground and slump beside him.
He’s gone, and the world is a better place without him in it.
If he’s this evil this young, what the fuck would he have grown into?
A monster, that’s what. I killed a monster.
And I fucking enjoyed it.
It’s that realization that bothers me. Not that I took a life, but that it was so easy.
I scramble back, lean against a wall. My hands start to tremble and my breath is labored.
I recognize it as an adrenaline comedown, a bit like after a football game.
I look around at the wrecked hotel room.
The smashed furniture. Blood, everywhere.
Glass all over us. And a dead body, crumpled in a heap in the middle of the room.
Shit! The reality of my situation crashes in on me.
I just murdered someone. I do not regret it.
I will never regret it. But I also don’t want to end up in prison because of it.
I made a lot of noise and a lot of mess.
I crawl across the room to the phone, and do the only thing I can think of, I call my big brother Nathan.
Mason would just think I was joking. Elijah would be too much.
Drake is out of the country. There’s no way I can tell my Dad.
Nathan…Nathan will understand.
He answers straight away. “Maddox? Where the fuck are you?”
“I’m in Chicago. I…Nathan. I killed him. He’s dead. I need help.”
He pauses, but only for a beat. “Stay where you are. Don’t leave. Don’t speak to anybody. Don’t use the phone again. Understand?”
“Yeah. Thank you Nathan.”
I tell him the name of the hotel, hang up, go into the bathroom and look at myself in the only mirror that isn’t shattered. Fuck, I am a mess. My face is sheened in blood. My eyes are wild. My knuckles are cut to shit from the punching and the glass. I look like a stranger.
Or maybe I look like what I really am, deep inside. Maybe this is the real me. Maybe I’m also a monster.
I go back into the living room. There’s a fridge that has miraculously escaped the wreckage.
I pull it open, find some of those little bottles of booze, screw off the lids, and gulp them all down—whiskey, vodka, gin, tequila, it doesn’t fucking matter what.
The heat sears my throat, hurts in a way I welcome. There’s wine, too.
I don’t have the patience to use the corkscrew.
I just slam the neck of the bottle against the corner and then swallow it down.
I don’t care that the glass is cutting me.
I like that the glass is cutting me. I need to drink.
To switch off and shut down. To forget how fucking easy it was to kill him.
By the time the door opens, I’m halfway to shitfaced. A tall man with dark hair takes one look at me and tugs the bottle from my hand. “I’m Lorenzo. Your brother sent me. Looks like you’ve got yourself into a bit of a situation here, kid.”
Kid? I don’t feel like a kid anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like one again.
Fuck, I miss my mom. The thought comes from nowhere and it ruins me. What would she think of this? What would she think about her baby boy not only being a murderer, but finding that it comes easy to him? She’d be fucking horrified, that’s what.
Tears fill my eyes, and Lorenzo looks at me sympathetically. “It’s tough, the first time. It should be tough.”
He thinks I’m traumatized by what I’ve done. He doesn’t understand that I’m traumatized more by how little I care. I nod.
“It’s all going to be okay. We’ll get you out of here. Get you cleaned up and on your way home. We’ll deal with all of this.”
He glances at the dead body lying in the center of the room. Nudges it with his foot, looks disgusted. “Piece of shit rapist scum. Nobody’s gonna miss this asshole.”
I look around at the carnage. “What will you do with him? How will you fix this?”
He places a firm hand on my shoulder, looks at me with intense eyes. “That’s none of your concern, son. Just know that we will.”