Blood and Guts - Left for Dead: A Romantic Suspense

by Gabi Moore

  I was confused, but that only brought back a bit of laughter and a sneer. Watching his lips curl like that has always been a confusing mixture of arousal and contempt for me.

  The dream recall faded, but there was still that sneer in my mind’s eye.

  “Never, ever get invested.”

  The whole reason for his rule hadn’t quite become clear to me until that very moment.

  During my time as a sub, I noticed that the more I wanted from him, the less there was for me to get. If I could have described the desire I felt in a visual way — I would say that I was reaching out to him in longing all of the time. That desire on my part was stronger than any chains that may have been around my wrist. I didn’t even need to desire him as a person.

  I could have only desired him to apologize.

  I could have only desired to be ackgnowledged as an equal.

  The whole point is that I desired, and he was comfortable as could be in his own security.

  By never getting invested he was free to use me as a toy. He was free to indulge in the fact that our power dynamic had me longing in his direction regardless of the amount of care that he had for me. Even after he had abandoned me, I still felt those instinctual desires for him. During my time in his mansion, I suspect that he actually didn’t have any desire for me most of the time — yet, I wanted him.

  The entire perverse power dynamic became clear to me in that moment.

  While I stared into the flames of the fireplace, I felt the power dynamic shift as he bore into me. He ranted and hit me. But somehow, by the grace of single malt scotch, and fatigue — it was all muted. In that muted moment, I reached out to grab a hold of one of the red hot coals of the fireplace. While the flesh of my hand received 3rd degree burns, I made sure that Sclari got a mark on his face that he wouldn’t ever forget.

  “BITCH!” he screamed, the sound of murder coming clear in his voice.

  I had done it.

  I had hooked him.

  He was invested.

  Chapter 24 - Aden

  If she had left a huge sign on the door, it wouldn’t have been any more obvious. The fact that the car was hopped up onto the curb was more than a little worrisome, but at least she had managed to make in there in one piece.

  The car on the curb looked so out of place in the context of Millionaire Row. Granted, it was New York, so these weren’t exactly country estates, but they did look like castles amongst the homes of the common folk. Gilded mansions, four stories tall, and God knew how many stories deep. The interesting thing about most of them was that there was little to no front yard for any except Ryan’s.

  Even in his presentation amongst his peers, he was subversively pretentious. Nothing says I’m wealthier than you like the opulent waste of space. I had to hand it to him. I had managed to isolate myself in the woods from society. It seemed that Sclari had managed to achieve the same goal, in the center of a major metropolitan area.

  The power of wealth, I thought, staring up at the face of the building.

  The door was open, a crack, and I could hear the muffled sounds of a human in pain coming from the living room.

  The car on the sidewalk was the first indication of something being wrong. The second was the open door. Something was happening, and I felt uneasy about the whole thing. Usually, when dealing with people who broke laws like Sclari, you had to deal with a shitload of schemes and traps. The fact that the door was open lead me to believe that this might actually be a trap.

  But the sounds of pain coming from inside. Those were undoubtedly coming from Lorin’s mouth. The other sounds were from a man, whom I could only assume was Sclari. He had an aristocratic tilt to his voice — the sound that someone gets when they convince themselves that their shit smells like roses.

  The problem was that he wasn’t composed and cruel, like an empowered person usually is — he sounded volatile and broken. There was something unhinged about the voice. Whatever had happened in there, she had gotten to him. He had made a mistake.

  To be so brazen in your abuse was madness.

  I allowed myself a look in, and realized that I was in no position to fight. I could get in there, and take him out, probably, but I had no idea who else might be inside of the building.

  The view in toward the barren living room was a sideways glance into a building whose insides were gutted out. The decor was wealth driven, that much was consistent with the neighborhood — but it was also overwhelmingly filled with nothing.

  I couldn’t see to the right hand side of the door. The sliver of an opening that I assume had been created by Lorin’s entry gave me a limited view of a giant reception hall.

  What I saw there sickened me.

  Lorin was wrapped up in ropes, naked, bent over a chair, bleeding. A man was walking around her with a knife and an erection. I can only assume the man was Sclari. I don’t see how anyone else could have the tenacity to behave like that except a man who believes he is above the law. Rage boiled within me, and I wanted to strike out and seize the moment. Something made me give pause. Some element of the situation changed, and I realized to my relief that I would not need to act alone any longer.

  “Put the gun down, son.”

  The sound was little more than a whisper over my left shoulder.

  I realized that I had already pulled the revolver out from the bag, and was holding it unsteadily on the front porch of the mansion. The voice that had came out and spoken to me belonged to a police officer. I had been so distraught and distracted that I hadn’t even noticed that the two officers had come up behind me. They were dressed in assault gear, and moved with more stealth than any officers I have ever seen.

  New York’s Finest, I thought.

  I disassembled the gun and threw it on the deep surface of the snow outside of the mansion. An easy smile overcame my face, as I realized, that it was already over. One of the officers put me to the side, while another came in to fill his place. I smiled easily as the leader of the police team called in the shot, and then took it. There was some more noise as the team went inside.

  A paramedic was called for Lorin, and I got to see her carried out on a stretcher. She looked just as bad as she had looked before, except maybe not as cold. She also had more blood loss. Seeing her in that state was a strange thing for me. Part of me wanted to lash out, but the other part saw her and realized that she did that to herself. She led the police here, just as she had lead me here. She had even kept Sclari engaged until the police arrived.

  On a certain level, she was a martyr for a righteous cause.

  On another level, she was a fool.

  I felt the anger inside of me grow. Those sensations that make a man want to burn down a castle were in me. I recognized the desires for destruction and revenge. That’s when I realized that I actually cared for her. Of course, there was nothing positive to be gained by burning down the mansion. Chances are, it would be sold off to some other fuck, in exchange for money to try and sue the NYPD for murder. Who knows what the people surrounding Sclari were capable of doing.

  A few more shots rang off inside of the building, and I realized that there were a handful of loyal men in there still.

  Good thing the SWAT team took care of things, I thought.

  I had played action hero enough for the year. My body needed time to heal. I was perfectly content to let some other young buck take the fame and the glory for this whole shit show. The servants were taken outside, and lined up. One by one they were loaded into police cars. The whole time I was there, I never once saw any of the neighbors come out to express their concern. Not even when that neighbor of theirs merited a firefight with a strike force.

  Pathetic, hollow lives.

  I shook my head at their lack of community. They had castles, but no heart.

  In the meanwhile, the newest parade of people liberated from the mansion behind me was a team of girls, covered in nothing more than rags. I didn’t know their ages. I didn’t want to know.

&nb
sp; I had seen enough.

  I got up, trying to walk away from the scene. I heard a man yelling at me to stop, but I didn’t care any longer. With this level of depravity in New York High Society, all I could think to do was to get as far away from Manhattan as possible. Christ. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Maybe an Island where nobody ever explored. Surely there had to be some place where I could find peace from the onslaught of bullshit that came about as a result of being a human.

  There was a sharp pain on the back of my neck, and then fire spread throughout my entire body. I had been tazed before; this wasn’t anything new. Experience didn’t make the shock any less painful. The fire passed through my nervous system, and then left me wasted on the ground. A carrier tone passed through my ears, growing louder and louder instead of more silent. When the tone became loudest, I found my consciousness joining with the sound. As though a sweet dream could finally overtake me, I let myself relax into the finality of the experience.

  I lost consciousness, and the sound stopped.

  Chapter 25 - Aden

  When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed, with a nurse checking in on my state of affairs.

  “Look who’s finally up,” she said, supportively.

  I got the impression that she could have cared less if I was conscious or not. For professionalisms’s sake, she felt as though she needed to be supportive. My body hurt, but the pain was fresh, like a wound that has been cut open in order to bleed out an infection. On a base level of operation, I was functional, and I knew that I was well on the path to recovery.

  What I found to be incredible about coming to consciousness was that I was not handcuffed to the hospital bed.

  “Where am I?” I asked the nurse.

  She was busy changing an IV that was linked into my left arm. From the looks of it, there was nothing more on the new bag except for a few deficit minerals, and water.

  “No morphine, huh?”

  She laughed.

  “You’re at the Lenox Hill Hospital on 77th, and no, I’m afraid the doctors didn’t prescribe you any morphine. Are you in pain?”

  I shook my head.

  Even if I was, I absolutely despised painkillers. No doubt, it was a relic of a past issue with alcoholism. I didn’t want to be beholden to any substances, as long as I was still on this mortal coil. Slipping up every now and then was excusable. I could just hate myself for a while, and then get over it. Starting on a whole new dissociative kick was the exact opposite of what I needed in my life.

  “What about Lorin?”

  The woman looked at me, and I saw a bit of warmth and sadness in her eyes.

  “She’s still in Urgent Care, but she’s doing better. We were actually going to move her out into a stable room in this wing of the hospital today.”

  “Well, there’s room right here, isn’t there?”

  I tilted my head toward the side of the room opposite my bed. There was another bed set up without anyone currently occupying the space.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said with a sincere smile.

  I doubt it was customary for patients to request who their roommates were, but you never gained anything if you were too shy to ask for what you wanted. Besides, if she was healing, then I wanted to see her. I had to apologize for leaving her. If I had stayed by her side, then I imagined that things might have ended up differently. I let our relationship get clouded because of sexuality. If I had only thought of her as a partner instead of an untrustworthy, love affair, then perhaps things might not have gone south that morning.

  I shook my head, trying immediately to dismiss the doubts and regrets that already clouded my perceptions.

  “Give it a rest, will you?” I pleaded.

  The nurse was already gone from the room. It was clear to me at that point that there was nothing gained in my entire experience that had made me a drastically different person. Sure, there would be minor developments in the course of my life; this being one of the more formative events. Regardless, I was still begging myself for a break when no one else was around.

  Which is to say, I was still batshit crazy, and relentlessly self-critical.

  Another couple of hours passed while I stared at the wall in front of me. I wasn’t really staring at the wall, as much as I was trying to work out why I hadn’t been locked up in a secure facility. To me, that was the biggest question on my mind.

  An inactive para-military agent goes rogue. He leads an unsanctioned strike on another paramilitary facility on the southern border of Maine. Gets arrested after killing seven people, stealing two cars, burning his own house to the ground, and traveling 400 miles. Then he shows up, armed and drunk at the home on Millionaire Row. Inadvertently, he becomes instrumental in taking down an arms dealer and sex trafficker - as well as stopping an additional murder of passion.

  The scope of what had transpired in the last week hit me with full force. I was stunned, and could do nothing but be grateful that there wasn’t a fucking television in the room. At the very least, whoever had placed me here had the good grace to leave me alone with my thoughts. Whether those thoughts were something that I could consider to be productive or not was another issue entirely. At least I was free to entertain them.

  My soliloquy of uninterrupted mental masturbation was finally put to rest when the door opened once more. Instead of Lorin, another guest had come to visit. When I looked up at the entrance to the room, I saw the grizzled face of what could only be Charlie Hent.

  “You look better in person. You really should update that old profile of yours online.”

  “You’re good at a lot of things, Aden, but lying isn’t one of them.”

  He gave me a smile and then pulled a chair up next to the bed.

  “So, I guess I have a bit of gratitude that belongs to you.”

  He shrugged.

  “That’s one way of looking at things. But you’re right, if I hadn’t of shown up, you’d be on death row right now. Problem is the US Government hasn’t figured out how to ‘unmake’ killing machines once they make them. I suppose they imagine they will get shut down somehow in the field of battle. Or they become so damaged that they become unfit for anything else once they get back stateside. With folks like you, they just have to deal with the consequences and hope the backlash isn’t too severe.”

  “We got lucky.”

  “Yea, unfortunately, Sclari is an example of what you might have become. Only if you had more financial means, and could tolerate a more violent form of misanthropy.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re not wrong,” I replied.

  Whenever people pointed out the negative possibilities within myself, I did my best not to shun them, or pretend like I was above reproach. I’ve found time and time again, that the only difference between ‘bad people’ and ‘good people’, is a string of decisions. Ultimately it is your choices and actions that place you in the camp of being a problem for the rest of the community. In truth, you couldn’t even tell the difference by looking at the behavior of a person. To really get to the heart of ethics, you needed to look at the intent.

  “Both Killers,” I shrugged.

  “And control freaks,” Hent added.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Not to mention the two of you have similar tastes in women.”

  I waived him off. Hent probably knew everything there was to know about my relationship with Lorin. The knowledge that she was all right was enough for me. I would catch up with her later. For the moment, there was something else on my mind.

  “How’s Anna?”

  He paused, and smiled, knowingly.

  “Anna who?”

  I looked at him with intensity, to make sure that he wasn’t fucking with me.

  He nodded again, easing my mind.

  “She’s all right. He never found her. She’s going to go on to live a solid life.”

  There was a pause in the conversation.

  “You know… she might like to know you now
that everything has blown over. Whatever mistakes or problems you may have been associated with in the past don’t need to define the rest of your life. I’m sure she would benefit from your presence in her life, even if it is a bit late.”

  “Better late than never, huh?”

  “She’s your daughter, Aden. You only got one chance at a thing like that. Might as well be there. I’d say there’s more to a father figure than chasing down every boogieman that crosses her path.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I’d say that’s part of the job description — but I think you’re right.”

  He stood up and got ready to leave.

  “The police have everything they need,” he said, standing up to stretch his round body. “I saw to that. You may be required to give a few testimonies, but nothing too strenuous.”

  “And Lorin?” I asked, hopefully.

  He smiled.

  “Let’s just say I think you might actually be able to pull off a happily ever after. Take down the bad guy. Get the girl. Be a father, and a hero. Lucky you.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Hent.”

  “Oh, I’m not. Got a hot date from a new site I’m on called ‘Freaks and Geeks’. I’ll let you guess which one of us is the Freak…”

  He shook his hips from side to side like he was at a disco bar, forty years ago.

  I bit my lip, and shook my head.

  “Oh,” he said, briefly stopping his dance. “Didn’t see you there.”

  I only just registered that he wasn’t talking to me, when I looked up I saw her.

  “Lorin!”

  I shouted, stumbling out of bed, and yanking the IV from my arm.

  “I didn’t get that warm of a reception…” Hent said under his breath, but not quiet enough to where I couldn’t hear him.

  In a moment I was at her side. She didn’t even have time to be fully wheeled into the room.

  “I’m ok,” she said, reading the expressions of concern in my eyes. “The doctors just wanted to keep an eye on me because I had lost a lot of blood at Ryan's place . Alcohol levels and sadists…”