Hurt (The Hurt Series, #1)

by Lydia Michaels

  Sùdrach had played a key role in the making of a monster. And tonight was the night one of Rory’s makers was scheduled to die.

  Over the three-hour ride back to Edinburgh Callan rested, though it had been months, perhaps years, since he’d truly slept. When the train arrived at his stop, he was the last passenger.

  Clinging to the shadows, he remained mindful of the CCTV cameras stationed throughout the city. The night was, for once, dry, and that made for an easy trek.

  The school campus stood in open emptiness. But in a few hours, it would be alive and bursting with innocent minds as the students spilled from the dorms.

  Perched just beyond the property line, sat a picturesque home. Someone had lovingly planted flowers along the walk, making it an inviting place to visit, a well-disguised place of pain, a memory for so many, entrenched in guilt, shame, and silent blame.

  He lit a smoke and studied the dark windows of the house. The all boy boarding school seemed the picture-perfect backdrop to such carefully designed lies. But beautiful things often hid the worst ugliness inside.

  Sùdrach purposely chose this home. He used it like a portal to hell, luring innocent boys into the basement under the pretense of being a math tutor.

  It was where he taught Oscar Riordan the formulas to collect interest and the profits that could be made from commissions and fear. It was where he showed him what pain truly felt like, the inescapable surge of hurt that ravaged the weak and spewed the shattered pieces back into the world.

  It was where Rory first fell in love. Not with Sùdrach, but with the ease of agony. It was where the innocent little boy had died, and the monster was born.

  Sùdrach showed him first-hand the power of cruelty. It must have seemed so vastly opposite from the fragility of everything good that little boys were.

  Callan could almost sympathize with why a young Oscar Riordan would make a conscious decision to let the hurt in. Embrace the pain. Horns would always be sturdier than feathers.

  The evil born in that house broke wee Oscar and built Rory. And the man who sired all that damage, taught the monster, a budding, young sadist, how great other’s pain could be, was overdue to die.

  He flicked his smoke into the grass and crossed the lawn. His glare fastened to the front door, as his strides swallowed the distance. The house was dark, its inhabitants likely asleep, so he knocked loudly.

  Sùdrach had three daughters, all off to uni and out of the house. His wife was a minor concern, but not a deterrent.

  Callan knocked again, this time harder, and a light flickered on at the second floor. The porch bulb clicked, illuminating the cement step. The vase surrounding the light entombed countless moth corpses. This place reeked of forgotten innocence and stolen joy.

  Sùdrach wouldnae recognize him. He hardly had time to see him when the door finally opened.

  Callan’s hand flew out, his fingers popping the underside of the man’s nose and sending his head back with an explosion of blood. It was a messy but quick way to disarm an enemy.

  Sùdrach cupped his face, dark, oily blood seeping through his fingers. Callan gouged his finger into the soft skin beneath the eye and sent him to the floor, shoving a knee into his chest.

  A light flicked on at the top of the landing. “Graham?”

  “I—”

  Callan’s knee pressed harder, forestalling him from answering. Then he applied pressure to the carotid artery, cutting off the oxygen feeding the brain and Sùdrach’s body went limp.

  Callan dragged him into what looked like a dining room.

  “Graham?” Soft footfalls descended the stairs. “I thought I heard—Oh!”

  Covering her mouth, Callan performed the same move on the wife, touching down on the same pressure point but with more care. He gingerly laid her on the carpet, slipped a little something in her mouth to keep her asleep, and adjusted her head so she’d not waken with a stiff neck.

  “Stay,” he whispered.

  Grabbing Sùdrach’s ankle, he dragged him through the hall toward the basement Rory had described. Hauled the piece of shite down the stairs feet first. He groaned as Callan hoisted him up by the wrinkled scruff of his neck and threw him over the back of the sofa, facing the double paned bow window that looked out on the schoolyard. Heavy, light-blocking drapes hung to the sides ready to provide privacy.

  Reaching in his bag, he removed five extra-long zip ties and a roll of tape. He tied Sùdrach’s arms behind his back, fastening the ties at the elbows to make it as uncomfortable as possible.

  “Wha—”

  Callan cuffed him in the back of the head and shoved him forward over the sofa. “Shut yer fuckin’ hole.”

  He bit off a length of tape and slapped it over Sùdrach mouth, wrenching back his head by the thinning hair. He hissed close to his ear, “This is yer favorite room, is it not, old man? Do you think yer fear’s as sharp as all of theirs?”

  A panic, muffled cry answered back.

  “No, me neither. But I’ll get ye there.” He released his hair with a hard shove and secured his ankles to the feet of the sofa, spreading him nice and wide.

  According to Rory, the room was soundproofed from the upstairs for the Missus’ sake, so he dinnae worry about his cries or screams carrying. He tightened another zip tie around Sùdrach’s neck, using his wee finger to keep it loose enough for air to wheeze past his windpipe.

  “Don’t want ye passin’ out and missin’ it, now do we?”

  He cut away the man’s pants and tossed them aside. Sùdrach jerked hard enough to shove the couch, but Callan kept him down.

  “How many times have ye sat here, lookin’ out tha’ window, playin’ a game of who’s next?”

  He forced him to look now. The black night was dotted with security lights throughout the campus. The landscape invited eyes, but Sùdrach had done more than just look at all the pretty trees.

  “Did ye think ye’d get away with it? Tha’ no one would ever know?” His voice lowered another degree. “What did ye do to them to keep them quiet? Did ye threaten their families? Their pets? How did ye get them to come back, even when it hurt?”

  He released his hair and rounded the sofa. A frantic, possible apology muffled against the gag as tears gathered in the clouded whites of his eyes.

  The skin around Sùdrach’s eyes had thinned to crepe, softening the windows to the soul in a dangerously misleading way. He had the aged eyes of Santa Clause but the appetite of Lucifer.

  Callan glared into those lying eyes. “You’re not sorry. Only sorry ye got caught.”

  Once Sùdrach understood what Rory was, he’d taken the boy under his wing like a protégé, taught him the art of cruelty the way a totalitarian teaches obedience—exhaustively and unflinchingly until it corrupted every private thought.

  Together they fed off the agony of others, the pain of those weaker than them. Rory loved his trinkets, loved to save pretty little treasures to play with again and again. A collector of weapons, beauty, and nostalgia. And he learned that from this man.

  The room had several filing cabinets and a dusty desk in the corner. Callan jerked a drawer open and removed a file. It appeared nothing more than financial statements.

  “Where are they hidden?”

  He yanked open another drawer, spilling documents all over the floor and Sùdrach groaned. Sweating profusely, he watched in horror as Callan ransacked his papers. Only when he stopped groaning did Callan know he’d found the right drawer.

  “This one?”

  Sùdrach shook his head, confirming his suspicions, and Callan flipped through the files. Eureka.

  Disgusting photos of young boys in every which position, several showing Sùdrach’s face. It was all the evidence the world needed to see what kind of animal this man was.

  He dropped the file on the coffee table, leaving it open. Sùdrach’s brow kinked with deep lines as he sniveled and looked away, the back of the sofa still wedged under his ribs as his tied body bowed over the cushions. />
  “Open yer fuckin’ eyes, you godless piece of shite and look at what you’ve done!”

  A tortured whimper choked through the gag. More tears gathered in his deceptive, soulless eyes.

  Callan revealed one more zip ties. “This next part’s gonna hurt.”

  In one quick pull, he cinched the tie around Sùdrach’s cock and bollocks. The man bucked like a raging bull and screamed bloody murder. The sofa jerked under his thrashing and rammed into the coffee table, knocking some of the photos onto the floor.

  Callan popped his fist between Sùdrach’s legs, delivering a brain-scrambling blow that belted out an agonized sob.

  “Ye love the pain, right? Is this enough for you?” Callan removed the blade from the holster at his thigh. “Nah. I think ye still got a ways te go.” Crouching down, he looked him in his now bloodshot eyes. “No one can hear ye cry. Ye made sure of tha’, dinnae ye? Now, they’ll all know what you’ve done.”

  Another broken cry. Sagging over the back of the sofa, drowning in his own misery, Callan gave him a few minutes to wallow. His dangling bits darkened like rotting fruit, the fight draining out of him as the circulation cut off.

  “Dinnae quit on me yet,” Callan taunted, rising to speak so closely to the man’s ear he could smell his sweat. “A man’s entitled to his weapons, so long as he respects the power they wield.” He stared into those frantic eyes, tipping his head in the direction of Sùdrach’s tethered cock. “Ye ignored their screams when they begged. So I’ve come to relieve ye of your sword.”

  He shrieked against the muzzle, begging for mercy. Callan flashed his sharpest blade, examining the curved point and lethal edge. He waited for Sùdrach’s cries to quiet.

  “The things you did te those boys... They carry the scars as men. So many lives ruined.”

  This place bred monsters, and Callan’s inner beast preened as it woke, licking its jowls for its next victim, hungry for other’s suffering of those who deserved to die.

  Callan was not as monstrous as the rest of them. He was merely the instrument of a brutal form of justice.

  “I’ll give ye a choice. One, ye can live, but without yer cock and balls. Two, I do the world a favor and end yer pathetic life now. Either way, everyone will know the monster ye are by morning—the polis, yer wife, your family ... yer daughters.”

  He wept, and Callan leaned forward, ripping away the tape.

  “What’ll it be?”

  “Please,” he sobbed. “My family! My wife is upstairs...”

  He rounded the couch. “I ken exactly where yer family is. Mentioning them willnae earn ye any mercy. If ye cannae make up your mind, I’ll choose for ye.”

  “Please! God, please, no!”

  Callan wrenched back his head and hissed, “Then choose. Three seconds. One, two—”

  “Kill me!” he sobbed. “Oh, God, just kill me.”

  Callan yanked his head, exposing his throat. A blue line crowded the zip tie cutting into his flesh.

  “When ye meet the devil, tell him Callan MacGregor sent you.” The blade sliced across his quivering gorge, tearing into tender tissue with a flood of scarlet.

  Gurgles faded to silence as a puddle of blood seeped into the cushions. Dead. The monster was dead and the beast temporarily sated.

  When he passed the dining room, the wife was still out cold. He had no guilt for what she might find when she woke. Chances were she’d had her suspicions all along and turned a deaf ear to the cries below. He’d spare her life, but not her conscience. In the end, she’d square away with the Almighty, and He’d decide where her final resting place would be.

  As for the polis... Once they discovered Sùdrach’s crimes, they’d be grateful for Callan’s services. Any investigation would only draw attention to the predator they missed.

  As for Rory... The side of Callan’s mouth kicked up in a satisfied half-smirk as he left the house, taking the pretty flowered path into the shadows and pinching a smoke between his lips.

  Sùdrach was Rory’s hero, his malevolent sire, his companion and the closest Rory could get to love. His death was a crumble in the foundation upon which Rory so arrogantly stood. Soon, his entire empire would fall.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Saratoga Springs, New York—America

  Present Day

  Wesley Blaine was born during a December snowstorm, twenty-one years ago. It was the last white Christmas on record. His father was a successful commercial architect and his mother a dental technician.

  He attended Bay Cove Day School and served three years on the student council at Bay Cove High School West in the affluent suburbs of Ansley Park, Georgia. He still holds several swimming records there. His picture’s still displayed in the trophy case of his high school, just across from the main entrance.

  Those were the things being reported about Wesley Blaine on the news, the things journalists thought the world needed to know. The things that were slowly overshadowing the fact that this gently bred, upper-class, future success story was also a vicious rapist.

  His bail had been made and the court date set. Emery returned to work but could hardly make it through a shift without having a breakdown. Matt had hired a guy by the name of Peter, saying he felt better having two people at the desk at all times—safer.

  She didn’t talk to Peter because she didn’t know him and had no interest in getting to know him. She answered the phones and confirmed reservations, but she couldn’t leave the lobby without breaking into a cold sweat or falling apart.

  She was a mess. But good old Wesley Blaine—handsome, high school hero whose life fit like a charming Norman Rockwell painting over a crack in an otherwise perfect wall—yeah, he was doing fine. That’s what mattered, right?

  She’d never given a statement to the press, and her silence angered the media. Forget that she’d already been violated in the worst possible way. Reporters lurked around her community like sharks fishing for chum, scenting the blood in the water and wanting more.

  As if leaving the house wasn’t already stressful enough, now she had to race to her car and dodge random people hurling questions at her? Questions that hit like bullets. And when Callan saw the media sharks, he revealed a threatening side of himself that left her in awe. Once the sharks realized she had a killer whale at her side, they backed off.

  As her silence screamed on, the rumors and assumptions started to rumble. She almost contacted a reporter when she read Wesley’s lawyer’s diatribe of how needy she’d been, begging for attention and determined to get it. The liar even posed the possibility that she’d used a door to break her own hand.

  The newshounds visited the hotel disguised as regular guests, trespassing into her life, into the place of her employment and nightmares. She had no defense against their intrusive observations, as they were paying customers like every other guest staying for a visit.

  She’d thought privacy was her right. What a joke.

  Frustrated by her silence, they doubted her unspoken conviction of an otherwise perfect man. Suddenly, she wasn’t the victim anymore. The mood of the stories shifted as more artistically designed elements of Wesley Blaine’s impeccable life slipped into the public eye, and suddenly she was the villain of the piece. A hysterical woman out to destroy a good man, tarnishing his clean record with her filthy accusations, and depriving the country of what might be the next Olympic gold medalist.

  Her fingers clutched her phone like a security blanket that never left her hand, as she watched the reporters detail more pretty pieces of Wesley Blaine’s life. A text came through, the slide of the banner startling her out of her daze and interrupting the video.

  She closed the report and opened her messages.

  Stop watching the news.

  Her gaze drifted across the lobby to where Callan sat. The bar was empty, closed since midnight, but he waited for her to finish her shift. Lately, he felt like her only friend.

  Were they friends? Were they more?

  “I’m back.�
��

  She startled as Peter returned. She hadn’t realized he’d gone somewhere. She needed to pay better attention to her surroundings.

  She didn’t say anything but managed a jerky nod.

  Everyone knew. Callan had no choice but to explain the situation to Matt, who then passed along the information to the owners of the hotel—corporate people they never saw. A business card with an HR rep’s name on it appeared in her mailbox the day she returned. Did they want her to call the number? Was it required?

  No one told her what to do. Everyone sort of watched her, waiting for her to flip out. Sometimes she did, but never the way they expected.

  She’d almost wet herself during her first night back. Not until Callan realized she’d been avoiding the bathrooms, did he insist she go. He went in before her, inspected every stall like a mom checks under the bed for monsters, and guarded the door so she could pee. No one could hear her scream, but the acoustics of her urinating carried the subtlety of a gong.

  The one thing about Callan, she was coming to realize, was that he didn’t embarrass easily—or ever. If him hearing the tinkle of her pee was the only way she could go, then so be it.

  The paradox of their relationship could be defined in boundaries. Strange walls remained between them that might never be breached, and gaping openings left no room to hide. He confined her the way a basket gathers fragile eggs, but he also gave her room to breathe.

  They didn’t have to be friends because they were trapped in something more. Something adult, but not at all sexual. Yet an undeniable sense of intimacy surrounded their every encounter.

  Were they dating? Could two adults date and never fondle or kiss? Never ... fuck?

  She watched him, his hand scribbling over his book as he journaled in the pale light. When she asked what he wrote about he said the journals were filled with wind, as if that was all he was full of.

  She highly doubted the books were filled with nothing. How much space could nothing take up?

  Callan was always writing. Every night he’d spend hours, sipping a whiskey and jotting down his thoughts. Something more than wind filled his mind and those pages.