Chapter 11
ELEVEN
LIAM
Ashworth’s place is as well covered with cameras as the fucking red carpet.
The one above the porch turns in a slow, mechanical motion as a cat walks by, following its path across the garden.
I’ve circled the house twice from a distance and identified one potential blind spot, but that assumes he doesn’t have anything hidden. Why did we have to have a cop as a douchebag? The fucking worst.
Tugging my balaclava down, I reposition my eyeholes. This one is fully black because I don’t need his cameras catching anything that gives him info on Kat and me. It itches like mad, and I’m desperate to tear it off. One hand rests lightly in my pocket, gloved fingers on my knife handle.
I haven’t come here to kill old Dick today, but if the opportunity hands itself to me, I’ll take it.
Moving bush to bush, I work my way closer to his sitting room window, careful to stay out of view.
Yellow light spread over his neatly cut grass, drawing a perfect square of green.
The rest of the garden stays out of sight.
I trip over a mound of dirt and swallow a curse, glancing up to make sure I haven’t been spotted.
Richard is in an armchair, eating from a tray in his lap while looking perfectly harmless. Just like you’d expect a retired widower to be.
He’s not the only one who’s been investigating.
His wife tripped and fell down the stairs and died.
Allegedly. The thought that perhaps she discovered her husband’s horrific desires—and was pushed—digs into my brain.
Seeing as he favours male children, I was surprised to learn he had a wife at all.
Poor woman. Assuming she was kept in the dark, that is.
Wiping his face with a napkin, he sets his tray aside and puts on his reading glasses, peering at a folder. To his left, I see a huge stack of folders. Police documents, if I had to guess.
Another man who appears utterly normal. In his quiet, rural home. With his old man cardigan and lap meal.
It’s all a fabrication. A careful disguise to hide what lies beneath.
You could end it now.
Feel the crunch of his cartilage and hear his death rattles. Feel the life draining from him with each spurt of jugular emission.
End him.
I look over my shoulder, half expecting to see Kat. The soft voice sounds so much like hers that it sends chills up my spine. Kat’s not here. I didn’t tell her I was coming.
Gripping my knife, I take a step forward.
Only to see a car come into view. I duck back, watching until it pulls into the driveway.
The guy who gets out is around my age, maybe a few years older.
Pausing to grab a satchel from the passenger seat, he stops, fitting an official-looking badge into his pocket. A policeman? No, I don’t think so.
Curious, I edge through the bushes to get within earshot as the guy knocks on Richard’s front door.
Richard opens the door only a crack, chains visible crossing to the doorframe.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Sorry to bother you so late in the evening. I’m Freddie Baker, a journalist with—’ Freddie doesn’t get to finish his sentence; the door slams in his face.
Poor shit probably didn’t even want to come. Sent by some higher-up to bother Ashworth to get a lead on the story.
Richard clearly has little time for journalists behind his little news appearance.
‘Please, Mr Ashworth,’ Freddie laments, moving around to the window. ‘I was hoping I could verify some information potentially linkin—’
The curtains are promptly closed.
Freddie’s shoulders drop as he looks to the inky sky. ‘Blew that, didn’t you?’
He mutters to himself all the way to the car, and I work to memorise his number plate, because what does Freddie think he knows?
Richard might not want to know, but I sure do.
Freddie doesn’t leave, sitting in the car and probably hoping that Richard might change his mind, or maybe hoping he can root through his bins or something.
Stepping carefully, I head back to my car, parked half a mile away, over two fields.
Each step fills me with a new level of ire. Rage and tension coil around me until my head aches. Great aching throbs have me wincing by the time I tumble into the front seat, and I have to breathe through the pain. It feels like my head’s going to explode with it all.
There aren’t supposed to be leaks, so what the hell did the journalist find?
By the time I get out of the shower, my head is pounding hard enough that I’m seeing stars.
Steam swirls around the small bathroom, and I stumble to the sink, looking at myself in the mirror. I almost wish it had steamed up, but the glass is made not to. Fogging myself would be a kindness I’m not afforded. Kat loves it, but I hate it.
I stare at my reflection, seeing what I always do when forced to look at myself. Scars. Marks inflicted on my flesh by others. Whether for money or for their pleasure. Ugly pink notches cover me, maybe not head to toe, but there’s no part of my body without one.
When Kat looks at me, she sees a survivor. I nearly believed it with the way she loves me. Nearly. But I see broken. Defective.
Undeserving, mostly.
The tattoos do what they can, but the black ink can’t hide the knotted skin. At points, I think it makes it worse.
I feel guilty that Kat has to fuck this.
Kat is soft flesh and a sweet face. She lights up a room. I’m like a stain that only looks worse when her light shines on it. She might not see it, but her parents do. The people who stare when we walk through the supermarket do. I might not hear their thoughts, but I feel them.
What’s someone like her doing with someone like him?
She’s so pretty; look at his scars.
I hate it most, because I think the same. If I hadn’t stalked her, she’d be at work now, not up to her tits in corpses. The well and my dad’s body would be a footnote in her past and not the thing that might upend her whole future.
My breath is too fast. My reflection blurs ahead of me.
Gripping the white ceramic hard, I try to let the crushing pain of what I am pass. Kat’s due home, and I can’t let her see me struggle. I need to stay solid so she doesn’t fall apart.
Ashworth sits in his house, eating dinner like he doesn’t have a worry in the world. Like he hasn’t caused scars, both visible and hidden, that follow people like me into their future and wreck everything.
The world feels like it’s crushing my skull. Like it’s all pushing in until something splinters.
I can’t protect Kat like this.
But I can’t stop either. Ashworth and the others will haunt me until they’re all gone. Or Sam will.
I’m gasping for air when Kat comes home, her voice raised as she talks on the phone.
Fuck, I don’t want her to see me like this, but I can’t move. It’s like my body’s made of stone.
‘I just need time,’ Kat says, frustration tainting her words from the other room.
Her keys drop onto the counter, and I hear her kick off her shoes.
‘I don’t care what you think of him. Or me. You’re my parents; this is something you can do for me. Just hold on a little longer. And if you can drop from the asking price just a little and maybe take it off any inheritance—’
There’s a pause, and my knuckles turn nearly as white as the sink. If it weren’t for the well, we could tell them to take a flying jump off a short cliff.
Another sign of my failure.
I can’t even protect us from them.
‘I love him.’ Kat’s voice is loud and harsh.
It’s all too much. A wave of pain rolls over me, and I clench my teeth until I can’t take it any more.
My fist meets the mirror with a loud crash, pain searing my knuckles. Pain that surprisingly releases the pressure in my skull.
I can breathe again, and gulp in deep lungfuls of steamy air.
‘I have to go,’ Kat says, appearing a moment later at the doorway, silhouetted by the hallway light. ‘Oh, Liam.’
Her eyes meet mine in the spider-webbed mirror, and that’s when I notice the scarlet. Shards of glass stick out from my knuckles, blood dripping into the sink.
The thing that snaps me into reality is Kat’s face. Not just worried. But scared.
I’ve experienced enough violent men to know how she’s feeling.
And I hate myself even more for making her feel that.