6. Dahlia
After getting cleanedup and redressed, Drake and I headed to one of the two dining options on the boat for lunch. One was more or less a counter with pre-packaged sandwiches and snacks. The other was an actual restaurant. Not luxurious by any means, but it had tables and a server. We ordered a few small plates of rice stuffed grape leaves, spanakopita, sardines, a few dips made of chickpeas or eggplant, and flatbread.
While we waited for the food, we sat, sipping at our drinks. My typical pastime was people watching, but the ship was apparently less than full and the options were limited. An older couple sat talking softly on the far side of the room, peppering their meal with a few quick words between bites. A man sat at the bar, nursing a beer while watching a soccer match on the small TV behind the bartender. The only other person in the room was a single diner in the far corner.
The lighting was low, probably to give a bit of ambiance to the dining room, but that meant I couldn’t get a good look at them. The body was slim and somewhat feminine, but they wore a hoodie with the hood pulled low, covering their forehead while they ate. I couldn’t see their face, but I had the strangest feeling that they kept looking at us. Glancing our way. When their eyes grazed across us, I had the disturbing sensation that icy fingers were trailing along my spine.
Our food came, and Drake and I talked about what to do when we got off the boat in a few hours, but throughout the meal, I couldn’t stop glancing at the stranger in the shadows. Eventually, whether they were actually done, or they were tired of me staring at them, they left.
“Did you see that person?” I asked Drake, pointing to the back corner. “The one sitting back there?”
He turned, finding the table empty, and looked back at me, his eyes hooded with suspicion. “Who was it? What were they doing?” His voice was tense and worried.
I shrugged and made a waving gesture. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m being silly.”
“It’s not silly.” Reaching over and taking my hand, he said, “Trust your instincts, Dahlia. What was it?”
Popping one of the stuffed grape leaves in my mouth, I shrugged. “It sort of felt like they might have been watching us. But, they may have just been people watching. I do it all the time.” I rolled my eyes. “Seriously, it’s probably nothing.”
Regardless of what I said, Drake became more tense and watchful as we finished our meal. He ate nothing else, instead spending his time eyeing all the entrances and exits.
“Are you done?” he asked when I’d tossed my napkin on the table.
“Yeah. Stuffed. Do you want to go try and take a nap? It’s still a few hours until we get to port.”
He nodded but didn’t look at me. Instead, he continued checking the hallways and corners as we stood. “Maybe we take turns.”
“Take turns sleeping?”
“Yeah. I don’t like the thought of us both being unconscious if someone tries to get into our bunk. Come on.”
Rather than pushing my fears aside, the way Drake was acting made me more tense. Could that person have really been watching us? Sam—or some minion of Sam’s that had followed us onto the damned ship? Suddenly the boat was much less cozy and fun and now appeared terrifying and unknown.
The walk back to our bunk room was more fraught with anxiety than our trip to dinner. Every shadow, each noise, and all the stewards and attendants now had a sinister quality to them. By the time we got back into our room, I was stressed out beyond belief, jumping at every little sound.
Drake locked the door, shoved the chair under the knob and let out a sigh. “Okay. Let’s rest. You nap first, I’ll take a watch.” He glanced at his phone for the time. “We should dock in about six hours. Three hours each should be enough to recharge.”
I lay on the bed, thinking there’d be no way I could sleep. The afternoon sunlight was still shining through the porthole window. Thoughts of Sam skulking around the ship flooded my mind, but despite that, my eyes slipped closed and blessed darkness swarmed my mind, dragging me into sleep.
The next thing I knew, Drake was gently rocking me, hand on my shoulder. “Dahlia? Are you awake?”
My eyes snapped open. “What’s wrong?” I gasped. “Is he here?”
“Calm down,” Drake said, rubbing my back. “It’s been three hours. Time to switch.”
“Three hours?” I asked, confusion rattling through my sleep-addled brain. It seemed like I’d just closed my eyes. The sleep had been dreamless and relaxing but had gone by in a flash.
I rubbed my eyes and sat up. “Okay. Sounds good. Did anything happen?”
“Not a peep. I think we’ll be all right. Maybe I was being paranoid.”
Drake lay on the bed, and I took a seat on the floor facing the door. I turned the small flatscreen TV on with the volume on silent in order to give me something to occupy my eyes and mind while he slept. In minutes, the faint sound of gentle snoring filled the bunk.
While he rested, I watched reruns of an old 90s sitcom on the silent TV with English subtitles running along the bottom of the screen. After three episodes, I went into the small stall bathroom to pee. When I came out, what I saw caused me to flinch and then freeze in place. The door to our bunk was mostly wood and plastic, but there was an eighteen-inch square window built into the door. The glass was heavily frosted so no one could see in or out. That didn’t stop me from seeing the shadowy outline that stood outside. There was no way they were simply standing in the hall, the shadow was too close. They were right outside our door.
Kneeling down as silently as I could, I nudged Drake awake. He sat up immediately, but I clamped a hand onto his mouth before he could say anything. His eyes darted around, finding mine, surprise and confusion written all over his face. I nodded my head toward the door, and his gaze slid to the window. His eyes widened further at the sight of the shadowy form outside.
Before either of us could move, the owner of the shadow turned and slid out of sight, moving fast. Drake pushed my hand away, clambering to his feet. The only thing close to a weapon we had was a small set of silverware in the cabin. The knife was only a dull butter knife, but Drake grabbed it anyway and moved toward the door. In a few quick movements he had the chair out of the way, and the knob unlocked. With a flick of his wrist, he yanked the door wide and lunged into the hallway, looking first one way then the other.
“Nothing,” he said. “They’re gone.”
“Could it have been a housekeeper or something?”
“Maybe,” he said, closing and locking the door.
Drake pulled his phone out and began swiping and typing.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“When we get to port, I want to go ahead and get tickets somewhere else.”
“I thought we were staying in this Brindisi place.”
He looked up and gave me a meaningful look. “We were but,” he glanced at the door, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
His true meaning was unspoken. He thought we were being followed. Whether by police or Sam, or someone Sam hired, we didn’t know. Too much had happened for it to all be a coincidence.
“I’ll purchase tickets on an additional ferry ride with my card. Then I think we’ll take a train but pay for that in cash. It might throw off whoever might be following us if our accounts are being tracked somehow,” Drake went on then under his breath added, “though I don’t know how.”
We gathered our items and headed for a more public area of the ship. He decided to hang out at the small bar. There were a couple of people there enjoying cocktails and wine, along with the bartender. If Sam or one of his people were on the ship with us, the extra eyes would prevent them from acting. If it was the authorities…well…we were fucked. They’d simply wait until we were disembarking and slap cuffs on us as we stepped off the boat.
When it finally came time to depart, my heart was in my throat. I kept looking around, ready to hear a policeman scream at us to put our hands up, or worse, a gunshot to ring out. Would they shoot us first and ask questions later? Or would Sam appear out of the shadows at the last second, slipping a blade between Drake’s ribs before drawing it across my throat?
“Do you see anything?” Drake whispered as we walked down the boarding ramp.
Ahead of us, I saw the same figure wearing a hoodie. They strolled away from the ship and never looked back. They walked in a carefree gait, wholly unconcerned with whatever we were doing. That fact alone made me feel like an idiot for freaking out like I had. Maybe we were just overthinking all of this.
Regardless, Drake was still set on trying to lose whatever tail we may or may not have had. We immediately went to the ticket kiosk and purchased a new set of tickets for a second ferry. Afterward, Drake checked into the ride electronically, and then led me to the curb where we hailed a cab and departed. We waited until we were well away from the dock before he even told the driver where we were going.
“Train station please,” Drake said. “The nearest one.”
Ten minutes later, Drake and I were on a boarding platform buying tickets to Naples with cash. Forty minutes after that, we were seated in the first-class section of the train as it made its slow departure from Brindisi.
“How do you feel?” Drake asked, still craning his neck around, searching for anyone who looked suspicious.
“Fine. I guess. Do you think we’re safe now? Do you really think someone is following us?”
Drake, finding nothing of note, finally settled back in his seat, relaxing somewhat. “Not sure. Though we can’t be too careful.”
The train cruised through the countryside somewhat parallelling the coast before proceeding deep into the country and angling west toward Naples. At any other moment, I’d have been having the time of my life. All the years of living in a fucking trash apartment and thinking I’d never get out seemed so far away. I was in god damned Italy. Still, that was only secondary to staying alive. One plus was that it appeared as though the police weren’t around to do anything. At least not yet. We hadn’t been tackled coming off the ship, so we probably were in the clear at the moment.
Drake had his laptop out, typing away, going through all the software he used to search for Sam. He’d been checking accounts, IDs, addresses, and even car registrations for vehicles. All the things he and Sam had used when operating their playhouse. So far, Sam hadn’t been dumb enough to use any of these. That was actually even more scary. I could tell Drake was confused by it. It meant Sam had hidden some things from him.
The train slowed, pulling me from my thoughts. Drake glanced up and cursed. “It’s a stop. This wasn’t a direct route. They didn’t have any. They’ll be picking up and dropping off the whole way to Naples. Damn.”
“So can anyone get on at these stations?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Drake leaned over, looking down the aisle toward the opening doors. “There’s no telling who might be here. For all we know, Owen could have hired anyone.”
“Owen? Who’s Owen?” I said, brows furrowed in confusion.
Drake sighed and looked at me, tearing his eyes from the doors. “That’s his real name. Owen Torance. I never told you. It didn’t really matter. For all intents and purposes, he is Sam now.”
“Owen?” I worked the word around my head as I spoke it. As banal a name as ‘Sam’ was, Owen was even more nondescript and boring.
“That’s gonna be hard to get used to,” I said after a few seconds.
Drake shrugged and sat back, relaxing as the train pulled away from the station again. “Like I said, he’s become the embodiment of Sam now. If there’s anything left of the Owen I used to know, then it’s all gone now.”
“Are you ever going to fully open up to me?” I asked, surprising myself with the words.
Drake’s eyes widened slightly. “I have, Dahlia. I’ve brought you into my world. I’ve shown you everything you could imagine?—”
“I don’t mean this stuff,” I said, cutting him off. “The…the punishments and revenge is one thing. Learning what I like and enjoy is good but that’s not you. Who the hell are you, Drake? What else are you hiding? Sam’s real name is probably just the tip of the iceberg. If you can’t even tell me that, what else do you have hiding deep down?”
Drake’s face fell slightly, almost like I’d chastised him in some way. Finally, he shook his head and closed his laptop. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Dahlia. It’s that, umm, I don’t want you to judge me. I feel like, maybe, you’d lose respect for me.”
I gaped at him. I’d watched this man butcher human beings. I’d let him fuck me a dozen different ways. Fuck, I’d let him fuck me in a pool of blood for god’s sake. What could be so bad that I would judge him?
Before I spoke again, I gave a furtive glance around to make sure no one was within earshot. “There’s not much more we could do that I would judge you for. I’ve seen you murder people, Drake.”
He ran a hand over his face, his palms rasping over his unshaven cheeks. “It’s not what I’ve done, it’s how I was raised. I don’t know that you’ll respect me when you hear.”
“Jesus.” I grunted. “What happened? Did you get sold into sex slavery or something? Was your grandfather a meth head who raped you? What? Anything you lived, I’ve probably seen the same or worse.”
He tilted his head up, staring at the ceiling, and let out a humorless chuckle. “That is exactly the problem.” He turned to face me. “I didn’t live a life like yours. I didn’t have to endure a living hell. My life was, for want of a better word, perfect.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. I had no idea how someone from a supposedly perfect life could have ended up doing the things Drake did. “Explain.”
“All right.” He looked dejected. He cleared his throat and began to talk. It was the most he’d said in one sitting since I’d met him.
“I was born into a well-off family. My grandfather came to America as a poor immigrant from Ireland. He arrived in 1947 at seventeen years old. Unlike most immigrants after the world war, he seemed to trip and fall backward into good luck left and right. He took work as an ironworker in New York, but the man who owned the company went bankrupt. Through a twist of fate, my grandfather and another of his coworkers had been talking about starting their own business. When their boss said he was closing up, the two men got a loan and purchased the roofing business from him for pennies on the dollar. Less than four months after the sale went through, the company my grandfather owned received a contract to work on not one, but six apartment buildings as well as two skyscrapers. It was a coup for them, and a financial boon for the fledgling company.”
“Drake?”
“Huh?” he said, snapping out of his story.
“I don’t really know what any of this means. Is this going somewhere?”
He blushed. “Shit. Sorry. It’s an old story. Basically what happened was grandpa and his partner ended up owning one of the three largest construction companies in New York by 1950. By the time my father was born in the early 60s, grandpa had sold his portion of the company to his partner for nearly three million dollars. He proceeded to invest, and again got lucky. He managed to buy shares in stuff that no one had ever heard of, right when they went public. Those investments turned that three million dollar buy out into almost forty million.” Drake shook his head in what appeared to be disgust. “That’s close to a half billion dollars in today’s money. I was born rich, Dahlia.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. I knew that what Drake did must have cost a lot of money, but I never imagined anything along these lines.
“Not only that,” Drake said, going on. “I had the happiest home life you could imagine. Mom and Dad were in love, like actually in love. They loved me too. Cared for me and brought me up in a respectful and loving home. Christmases were magical, birthdays were special; I did everything people dream of. Vacations in Japan and Australia, safaris in Africa, and beach trips in the Caribbean. We went to church every Sunday, I was in the Boy Scouts, hell, I was even the prom king in high school, and salutatorian of my graduating class. It was perfect.”
“Why do you make that sound so awful? To me, that’s, like, the picture of happiness. Of perfection. I’d have cut off my left tit to live that life.”
“That’s the problem, Dahlia. I didn’t deserve that life. Someone like you should have had all that. I was…” He locked his eyes on me. “I was different. Even when I was a child, I had urges. The world was unfair, and I wanted things to be set right. At seven, I watched a neighborhood bully kick a little kid. She wasn’t even three years old, and this kid kicked her right in the face for no good reason. I punished him later on. Not severely, but let’s say he never kicked any defenseless babies again.
“It got worse the older I got. Small animals, things like that. I had to set things right, I had to hurt things, and I had to get my impulses out. All this while my parents thought I was god’s gift. I sat in Sunday school talking about forgiveness and turning the other cheek all while imagining disemboweling a stray dog I’d seen in an alley killing a kitten the day before.” He glanced at me. “I did find that dog, by the way.”
“So you kept all this hidden? Your parents never knew any of this?” I couldn’t fathom the idea. Even as drugged up and shitty as my parents had been, I felt like even they would have noticed if I were torturing and killing animals.
“I did. That’s part of why I did so much to seem normal. Made sure to get every merit badge, made sure I said all the right things to get baptized, studied extra hard in school. All of it was so they wouldn’t know what was. That, and I was very good at hiding my tendencies. I was never punished in our house, and other than that bully when I was a little kid, I never punished a human. Always animals I’d seen behaving badly.” He shrugged and sighed in an exasperated sort of way. “At least behaving badly in my eyes.”
A question percolated, one that had been stirring since the moment I found out who Drake really was. A question I needed answered before I could go any further with this man.
“When did you kill your first person,” I whispered.
Drake made a wincing smile. “That comes next. It was my senior year of high school.” He cleared his throat, and his eyes looked wet, like he was about to cry. “I wasn’t an only child. I had a sister. She was ten years younger than me, and she was my life. When she was born, it was like I finally found a piece of humanity inside me. A reason to at least try to be normal. It didn’t happen, but it was nice to try. Her name was Sasha, and I loved her. She was everything I wished I could be. Normal, loving, sweet, and happy. All the things I had to pretend at.
“Anyway, a few months before I graduated, our driver was bringing her home from a dance lesson. She did ballet, you see. It was a late class, and they were coming back home at around nine. A drunk driver slammed into the car. It rolled five or six times. Our chauffeur was killed instantly, and Sasha hung on for about twelve hours before dying.”
A sudden jarring memory of my own sister dying flashed through my mind. Aching sadness filled me, along with a deep longing to comfort Drake. To comfort him the way no one had me. I’d spent days sobbing in my apartment when the police told me. The only consolation I’d ever received had been physically destroying her murderer in the playhouse. Something I could never truly repay Drake for.
“I’m so sorry, Drake,” I said, putting a hand on his thigh.
He nodded and gave me a sad smile. “It gets worse.”
Oh shit, I thought.
“The car that hit them ran off. The police found them a few hours later. It seems that fate and coincidence are fickle little cunts who like to fuck over everyone all at once.
“My best friend from kindergarten all through school was a kid named Sebastian Macintosh. He went by Bash. We were inseparable. I’d been close, very close, to telling him about my predilections at one point, thinking maybe he would want to also partake. It turns out, that particular Friday night, instead of hanging out with me, he went after school and got hammered at the house of one of his basketball teammates. He got into his car?—”
“No. Jesus,” I breathed, putting a hand to my mouth.
“—and drove like a bat out of hell. He ended up slamming into and killing my baby sister.” Drake looked at me, and the sadness in his eyes had been replaced by fiery hot rage. “He was only seventeen when it happened. A minor. So the courts only gave him ten years’ probation and a heavy fine. His parents were rich too, you see. His daddy played golf with the district attorney. Hands were shaken, money was paid, jurors intimidated. He got off. Basically, it was like nothing ever happened. He even received a waiver allowing him to leave the state for college. He’d been accepted into Yale.
“Our friendship was done, of course. He tried calling to apologize but that was pointless. I hated him. The fact that he’d killed my sister by being a dumb fuck but also because he hadn’t been punished. Not properly.” Drake’s hand clenched into a shaking fist. “My parents were beyond devastated. Crying all the time. My mother had to go on antidepressants. Dad started drinking. I knew what needed to be done. For me, for everyone, to feel closure.”
“You punished him?” I asked.
Drake went silent as the train slid into another platform, allowing people on and off. We both craned our necks to watch, checking to see if anyone suspicious got on. After the train started forward again, he picked up the thread of the conversation where we’d left off.
“Yes. I punished him. It was the first time in my life I planned it around a person. My father liked woodworking as a hobby. He also enjoyed nature, so he had a tiny cabin and workshop built in the forest near our home. We’d long ago abandoned New York for the South. We lived just outside Charleston, South Carolina, and the cabin was deep in the forest. A place where he could get away from it all, and make fucking rocking chairs or some shit like that. I never had a desire for that type of thing, but it was perfect to do what needed to be done.
“I waited until the news around the trial had died down, and during the summer, before Bash moved up to Connecticut for school, I picked my time.” A distant and almost dreamy look came over his face as he continued. “Bash was having dinner with his girlfriend, and I waited until they were done. She headed home, and he walked down an alley to his parked car. I took him then,” he hissed, his voice laced with rage and delight as he spoke. “I smacked him in the back of the head with a leather sap I’d made myself. It’s basically a piece of thick leather with lead weights inside. He went down like a ton of bricks, and I can still see him. Now, talking about it, I remember standing above his body, looking down. Anyone could have walked up and caught me but I was too wrapped up in it.”
“Were you worried you weren’t doing the right thing? He was your friend after all.”
Drake shook his head, and his lips curled in derision. “Friend. A friend who got drunk and butchered my baby sister? A little girl who did nothing but love. Yes, we’d been friends. We’d confided in each other and experienced so many things for years. Fuck, we’d taught each other how to ride bikes for Christ’s sake, but in that moment, all I could do was think of all the ways I wanted him to pay.
“I dragged him to my car and shoved him into the trunk. He was still out when I pulled over on a dark stretch of highway to tie his hands and feet together and closed him up again. An hour later, he was awake and screaming in the trunk for help, but we were already in the middle of nowhere. There would be no help. None at all.
“Dahlia, I can’t explain the look on his face when I opened the trunk at the cabin.” He smiled and shook his head ruefully. “His eyes got real big, and then a smile formed on his lips. Then, when he saw the look in my eyes, the smile faded. I think he saw it then. All the dark secrets I’d kept so well hidden? I’d let the curtains fall away. He saw me for who I was, and for the first time in his life, Sebastian ‘Bash’ Macintosh was truly and completely scared.”
My leg bounced, unable to contain my excitement. The story was tragic and sad, but I knew what was coming. I knew how Drake would feel when he punished the person who’d taken a lovely girl from the world. I needed to know, had to know, what had happened.
“What did you do to him?” I asked, my voice hushed as though I was in a church.
“I was a kid,” Drake said with a shrug. “I hadn’t had the…experience I have now. Hell, it took forever just to drag his ass in the house. He was thrashing around, screaming for help. Thank god I’d thought to pull over and tie him up. I got him in there, and I was crying when I asked him why he killed Sasha. When he didn’t answer, all he did was sob and scream. I took one of Dad’s wood chisels from a worktable, and slammed it down on his leg. It took this massive hunk of flesh out. Blood went everywhere, and Bash screamed in pain. I can still remember how it felt when I saw that blood ooze out of him. The flayed muscle and skin? The yellowish fat? I can remember my cock getting hard. Rock hard. I’d never been so excited.
“He begged, of course, you know how it is. They always beg. It went easily after that. After the first blood. I cut off his fingers. I scooped out his eyes. I sliced off his cock and balls. All the while, every stab of the knife I kept shouting Sasha’s name at him. I wanted her name to be the last thing he ever heard. Eventually my throat went raw from screaming it, but by then, he was already gone. My best friend turned into a pile of meat and a puddle of blood, piss, shit, and guts.” Drake turned to look at me then, a glimmer of happiness in his eye. “Do you know what I thought? When it was all over?”
“What?”
“I thought he deserved it. Not once, not in all the years since then, have I ever felt bad about it. Bash stopped being my friend the moment he jumped into his car drunk. He was dead to me the moment he killed Sasha. From that day forward, I told myself I’d find a way to punish those who deserved it and help people, people like you, who needed to find that power and ability deep within.” Drake took my hand, running a thumb over my knuckles. “And you, Dahlia Belrose, are my greatest and most wonderful discovery. The fact I found you makes everything I’ve done and gone through worth it.”