Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
EZRA *Six Years Ago*
I t had been a year to the day that my mother had decided to hang herself, and while I was used to death in my line of business, I hadn’t ever anticipated the sense of loss and annihilation that losing her could do to me. Utter despair was an understatement. There was nothing holding me back now.
The old school phrase ‘ spare the rod, spoil the child’ was one of the more modern-day proverbs, one of many preferred pearls of wisdom my father would spit at me when disciplining me as a child.
Shouting it on a loop as I cowered in the corner of his office.
Sometimes he’d get creative and use a belt, a fire poker, maybe even his own fists if nothing else was to hand—but more often than not, the rod in the glass case above his desk was his weapon of choice.
My father was nothing if not consistent with the regularity of his beatings; it was a trait handed down to him from his own father, and where there was legacy, there was structure.
The important thing to remember was that my father was a religious man where it suited him.
The sacred vows of marriage or honouring thy family took a nosedive out of the window when he was three inches deep in any woman momentarily charmed by his status or wealth—I can assure you, the plethora of women who graced his lap weren’t there for his looks. Money talks and sex sells.
The Wolfe men had always been big, towering over six feet tall, and I knew even as a child that one day I would be able to match him in size.
Where he was round and pudgy—gluttony of all things in life showing in his appearance—I had used my height and my broad stature to pack on muscle.
The fact that I looked nothing like my father often led to beatings where he berated my mother on suspected affairs, when in fact, I just fortunately looked more like the men on her side of the family than I ever did him.
The mismatched eyes I saw every time I looked in a mirror were the only feature I shared with my father.
I hated the sadness that ran through my mother sometimes when our gazes met on occasions after he had been particularly brutal to her.
I didn’t want her to see him when she looked at me.
I counted down the days until he would finally fear me.
But as I grew, a kind of respect for my father swelled in place of the hatred, and while I’d never say we were friends, I came to admire the power he wielded.
His orders were never taken lightly, his men willing to die for him if it was required.
His commands were never second guessed, and of what I knew of his business, it ran like a well-oiled machine.
It was that sense of comradery that led me to becoming my father’s bounty hunter enforcer.
I didn’t need to know the inner workings of what he did.
I had always been an angry child, and being given permission to take out my rage on wicked men who deserved it, exploring my darkest depravities—that was all I’d needed to know before I signed on.
My mother hated my choices, pleading with my father to disclose the truth of everything his business entailed, but the more she demanded, the harsher the beatings she would receive.
I learned to keep my mouth shut, and so did she.
My mother’s health had been declining over the years, and working for my father meant I could keep a closer eye on her.
Her sister had moved in to help, but even that wasn’t enough to stave off the mental torture my mother had been feeling—it all became too much for her.
Since her passing, that anger inside of me had bubbled up, leading to uncontrollable bouts of violence that were impossible to contain.
Anything good, any light that may have tickled the edges of my darkness, had disappeared from my life the day she died.
There was no respite from the evil thoughts, there was seemingly no good left in the world, so rather than turn against the life I had built that she hated, I leaned into it—finding an odd sense of comfort in its familiarity.
Death, torture, darkness—I understood these things.
I had gone from being her son to being solely his, and the shift ingrained itself into the deepest recesses of my soul.
There was no more light in that house to draw me back from the shadows.
My father had two rules: don’t get caught and don’t embarrass him.
I could enact any level of torture I saw fit, as long as I cleaned up after myself and left no trace of my victims behind, and for a while it worked for everyone—until it didn’t.
I was a beast that had been let out of his cage with no keeper, and no one was safe.
I rode up to the warehouse my dad had fronted as a legitimate candle business—fucking candles.
The scent of our victims’ burnt bodies were anything but fragrant, unless charred pork with a hint of frazzled hair was the ambience you were looking for.
The monotonous pelting of rain against my helmet, and the hum of my bike’s engine dying out were the only sounds in the deserted parking lot.
I flicked the coin my mother had given me when I was young with my gloved hand, letting it decide what the night would bring.
I don’t think she ever expected it to be used like some fucked up magic 8 ball, but as crazy as it sounds, it brought me comfort that even now, on nights where I’d let my demons out to play, I found solace in the little piece of her that I had with me.
Raymond Virgil Parker had been strapped up in the basement of my father’s warehouse for seventy-two hours now, teetering on the edge of death for at least two of those as I hooked the wires attached to the industrial generator to his nipples, each slice of my blade on his torn-up chest no longer oozing as the blood coagulated.
Raymond here liked to abduct women, the younger the better apparently, ship them overseas, and sell them for a profit—after he’d had his fun, of course.
He was also for a time my father’s personal driver and the last person to see my mother that night.
We could argue over who in this room has the least humanity, but I had never and would never inflict pain on any woman or child.
So this shit stain won in the lack of morality lottery today, and for his crimes, he had found himself on the receiving end of my twisted brand of vengeance.
I had always wanted to be one of those cool detectives you’d see on TV as a kid, making the world better one collar at a time, hoards of the townspeople cheering their name.
Well, this was nothing like that; in a fucked up way, I could argue that I was making the world a better place by disposing of these men, but there certainly weren’t any townspeople cheering my name, and it was the farthest thing away from a cool afterschool special.
My life was tainted with enough horror that I’d be more inclined to liken it to a George A.
Romero marathon stuck on repeat. My truth was plain, simple, and more often than not—bloody.
I brought sinners here to meet their grizzly fates, and I enjoyed what I did.
I had been following Raymond since his early release from prison, a tampered evidence call got his twenty-year sentence knocked down to eight months—time already served.
Hanging from chains whilst enduring the most painful torture known to man was a productive process that elicited the results I needed.
The weeks it would take for me to track down leads online, searching through their bank statements, their email history, and their call logs didn’t feed my need to kill the wicked like it had done before my mother’s death.
The police officer quitting the force for early retirement—with a generous bonus, of course—had deemed her death a suicide; coincidentally, he was also the man who’d arrested our friend Raymond here.
He was second on my list. The court judge who had three million pounds wired into his private account, who’d thrown out Raymond’s case due to a flimsy technicality, could also expect a visit in the near future.
If there was one thing I had learned in all the years of watching my father conduct business, it was that corrupt men would do just about anything for money, and following the money trail would always lead to the people responsible.
When I got the information I needed from Raymond, I hauled my axe from my holdall, enjoying the gut-twisting fear that descended around his blown pupils as his eyes widened in shock.
I’d had my fun, and now was the time to move down to the next name on my list. Blood pumped at an alarming pace through my veins with each thwack as the steel blade connected with skin, bone, and muscle.
Drenched in the warmth of his blood, that sense of calm I always seemed to be chasing washed over me, the addictive need to maim and murder momentarily sated.
I followed my father’s rules and cleaned up after myself, discarding Raymond and any evidence that he was even here into the incinerator, enjoying the warmth of the fire as the flames consumed him until he was ash.
Thoughts of my father on the drive back and the new information Raymond had shared with me before I’d butchered him, kept my brain ticking over the closer I got to home.
Everything from that point on got a little hazy, and it wasn’t until I was being handcuffed in my father’s office hours later—his blood painted on every surface, my trusty axe at my feet coated in bits of him—that I began to question what had happened before I’d blacked out.
His wife, the woman he’d married two months after my mother’s death, screamed from the doorway as she crumpled to her knees in shock, an officer holding her up as she caught sight of what was left of my father as he slumped splayed open in his leather chair.
The glass casing above his desk was wide open, that rod he loved so much rammed so far down his throat, it seemed to be the only thing connecting his head to his body.
EZRA
PRESENT DAY
I very rarely sleep, and when I do it’s usually broken—memories from that night assaulting me as I try and piece together exactly what happened.
I lose myself in watching Cara, her ungloved hand with her prosthetic metal appendages splayed across my chest. I feel calmer than I have in years beneath her, cradling her in my arms like I have earned the right to do so.
She’s too good for me, I know that, but I can’t seem to stop myself from seeking her out.
I’ve never felt this way about a woman, the intense need to protect her, to make her happy—it’s addictive.
I can keep her safe. I can climb out of the darkness—for her. Tucking a curl behind her ear, I trace the curve of her jaw, reverently running my thumb over her parted full lips as they tip up into a barely-there smile.
“I can be the man you need me to be.”