TEN
The night before…
She looked like a prayer and a curse in one.
Mascara streaked, lips parted, chest rising with those soft, shallow sighs that made her seem as if she were already halfway to the grave.
Sprawled across the couch like an unholy offering, one leg crooked over a cushion, the tiny black whore dress clinging to her skin.
No lace tonight – just bare flesh underneath all that.
It made my lungs burn.
One step.
That was all it would take. One step to still her breathing, to drag her across the veil she flirted with but never crossed. One step to show her how close ecstasy and death truly were.
She offered herself to him, a lamb at the wrong altar.
But her soul was mine to claim. Her breath was mine to steal.
And it took every ounce of devotion not to press my palm over her mouth right now, watch her eyes widen, and feel her tremble into our Lord’s silence, while I filled her completely with my cock until breath left her.
With the silence choking the breath out of my lungs, I stood slowly, careful not to let the floorboards betray me.
She didn’t stir – didn’t even sense the weight of my stare peeling back her skin.
My sweetheart. Still breathing.
The window let me out. The breeze took me with the softness of an open throat, and I stayed behind for a moment on the ledge – watching her. Watching the way her fingers curled into the cushion as if they dreamed of clutching a saviour. But she had chosen a sinner.
She had chosen him.
Slipping into the shadows, my boots hit the pavement like a benediction.
The laptop was tucked behind the drainpipe where I had left it.
I flipped it open, fingers dancing in the arc across the keyboard.
The film roll I’d previously set to loop seized, and the cameras blinked back to life.
Digital eyes were back where they belonged – on her.
My Ducati glinted under the streetlight, dark and silent like the body I’d left behind in Obsidian’s basement.
I mounted the bike with reverence, but the engine stayed quiet. I wasn’t ready to leave just yet. The thoughts kept me tethered to her.
How easily she let him inside her. How quickly she opened.
As if my gaze, my prayers, my patience meant nothing.
She let another man desecrate the temple I’d vowed to keep clean and holy in preparation for the absolution.
And yet she slept. So peaceful. So unrepentant.
No one had ever wanted her the way I did. Not with devotion. Not with purpose. He just fucked her. I would have buried myself in her. Fill her lungs with me. Take the last of her air and keep it inside me – like it was always supposed to be.
She would learn…
Salvation always began with suffering, after all. And neither of us had suffered nearly enough.
I stormed out before I could hear another word. The echo of his voice followed me as I pushed through the hospice doors.
His tone held something I hadn’t heard in years – hope.
I needed air. I needed to escape the smothering weight of him, the coldness in his eyes. But the hour-long drive back into the city sneered back at me.
The memories resurfaced, cutting deeper than they had in years. Every mile felt like a knife carving into old wounds that refused to heal.
I considered messaging Scarlett to call it off. The thought lingered as I gripped the wheel, my knuckles pale against the leather. I needed something stronger – alcohol, heavy narcotics, something to drown out the screaming inside my head.
I wasn’t capable of giving her my full attention.
But I didn’t send the message.
I just drove home – every mile plunging a flashback into my chest, the city lights smearing into a dizzying haze.
Somewhere between rage and exhaustion, a dark craving took hold – not for solace, but for control.
I needed to lose myself in something primal, something that didn’t ask questions about the past.
By the time I stepped into the penthouse, the day pushed against my temples so heavily that I could barely keep my eyes open.
I stripped down and headed straight for the shower, the water scalding as it crashed against my skin. I didn’t adjust the temperature – I let it blister me, try to burn away the filth that clung to me every time I left that place.
Today, it was worse.
The monster was awake.
My father. My abuser.
My victim.
His face, lined with age and softened by decades of stillness, was scorched into my mind.
His voice, raspier but still familiar, haunted me.
‘Ah, there’s my boy.’ The words swirled in my head, dragging me back into that room, back to the armchair where I sat stiffly across from him, my body taut like a spring.
He’d talked as if nothing had happened. As if decades of torment, the bruises, the fear, the hatred were fragments of my imagination.
He’d described the last memory his mind could conjure – me, a ten-year-old boy in a little blue Spiderman jacket, snow boots and a matching backpack. His words had painted the scene vividly, every detail laced with an almost loving fondness. He’d spoken about it as if it were his greatest treasure.
That, I couldn’t stomach.
I stood there in the steaming shower, fists clenched at my sides as the water streamed down my face, masking the heat rising to my eyes.
He remembered nothing after that.
No fists, no yelling, no blood on marble tiles. Nothing.
Maybe he’d been lying.
He had to be lying, I told myself, clinging to the truth I’d lived with for years. It was a game – a cruel manipulation to make me feel guilt or compassion for him. It was the way he operated.
But what if he wasn’t lying?
What if the memories truly were gone, wiped clean by time, by trauma, by whatever hell spat him back to life? What did that make him now? What did it make me?
I leaned forward, pressing my forehead against the hard tiles as the hot water pounded at my back. He was just a seventy-odd-year-old man now. Broken. Helpless. A relic of a past he could no longer remember.
But I did.
I remembered it all. It lived on in me: the taste of my own blood. My mother’s cries as she begged him to stop. The way his eyes lit up, not with anger, but with pleasure when he saw fear in mine.
And now he looked at me like a proud father.
I rubbed away the hot rivulets streaming over my face.
Scarlett was the only tether I had. If I couldn’t bury what he’d left in me, I could bleed it out through dominance. Through discipline.
Through her.
I slammed my fist against the shower wall, the pain grounding me for just a moment. Blood flowed from the split skin on my knuckles.
It felt good. Real.
Pain was honest.
I struck the tile again – harder this time – knuckles already slick, the crack of bone echoing louder than the water.
The sting burned up my arm enough to distract from the boy in the superhero jacket. Sharp enough to silence my mother’s scream, just for a second.
I braced both hands on the wall, chest heaving. My head hung low as the water washed away the blood – but not the memory.
Never the fucking memory.
How did one crawl out of their own skin? How did one peel it back until the boy underneath blinked back to life again – the one who used to think love didn’t leave bruises?
But the truth was much harder than a wish – all that was left was a man who only knew how to take control by giving pain. And on the day he couldn’t…
He gave it to himself.
Later that night, I found myself restless.
The phone was already droning between my shoulder and jaw as I wiped blood from my hands – still aching for more than pain. Not just the sting – the spill, the proof.
One ring. Two.
Then Vinnie’s voice crackled through, rough and low. ‘Cain?’
‘Is there still a slot open for tonight?’ I asked, skipping the pleasantries. My pulse was already bracing for impact.
A pause. Then a sigh that carried too much understanding. ‘You know you can’t just show up. Places like that need notice.’
I said nothing. The beast in me was pacing irritably inside me and I couldn’t focus.
Obsidian wasn’t just a fantasy lounge; its underground level was a fighting ring where monsters like me could shed the unbearable weight of their daytime masks.
‘Look,’ he added, tone softening, ‘I get it. But you don’t need to fuck yourself up tonight. Go work on that book. You can do without a swollen knuckle or a broken rib for one week.’
I hung up without answering.
Like a junkie without a fix, my eyes darted around my fucking penthouse, swathed in darkness. I hadn’t even bothered to turn on the lights. Which was fine – monsters thrived in the dark.
The quiet that followed was drowning me.
Pouring some brandy into the cut-glass tumbler, I glanced at my phone. The reminder for Scarlett’s session pulsed like a warning light.
Tomorrow.
One more attempt to hold my psyche together before I fell apart completely.
Patience used to be a polished virtue of mine. Refined over the years – like my knife. Now?
One woman – and it dulled to rust.
Resigned, I decided to look at this night as another challenge. Tonight, I wasn’t seeing Scarlett. I wasn’t getting into a ring. I had no outlet. Tonight, it would be just me and the ghosts of the past.
Dropping into my reading chair like the old bastard that I was, I pulled the printed part of the manuscript off the side table – seven chapters of Damien and Chloe’s chaos. If I couldn’t fuck or beat my demons out, I could drown them in ink and brandy.
The working title still eluded me, and frankly, I wasn’t in the mood to name something that might end up burnt.
I got halfway through before I hit the scene.
The first time Damien fucked Chloe.
I’d written the bones of it – hated it, because it was too vanilla for my tastes. My head hadn’t been in it, which reminded me why I’d hired an assistant. And that assistant—
I exhaled heavily.
Paula coloured in the muscle, the skin. She shaped the fucking moans and the twisted links of character psychology.
And Jesus, that woman had a filthy mind.
Coming from me – that meant something.