Inflict

by Bethany-Kris

Connor didn’t see the point.

  Spread out limp and unable to fight back, his victim made blood trails across old hardwood floors as he attempted to crawl back into the main room. Connor let him go, for a short while, and then he followed.

  Connor inhaled the sudden rush of peace settling deep in his chest, as he crouched down over the man. He allowed the tip of his knife to draw the nicest, straightest line down the flesh of a now tense, arching back, watching skin split open and blood well.

  This was why he wore his mask, why he pretended he was so different from his father, and why he never cared to reflect on the image staring back at him when he cared to pay it any attention.

  A monster stared back.

  It always stared back.

  Destroy the house. Destroy the house.

  Connor’s internal mantra helped him to focus on his new task at hand, and not the dead body he’d left in the next room. If he needed to, he could syphon a bit of gas from his Harley, but he was in a Russian’s home. A Russian who had been drunk.

  Mikhail had a whole cabinet devoted to spirits, Connor found. Had he been in the mood for a drink, this place would have been just as good as a damn bar. Unfortunately, he had other things to worry about, and other uses for the liquor.

  Connor grabbed two bottles of whiskey, cracking them open and tipping them over as he walked through the bottom level of the house. The smell of the liquor almost overtook the smell of the blood in the house, but it wasn’t nearly enough to do the trick entirely. It probably didn’t help that Connor was bloodstained and filthy, his hands covered in reddish-brown tracks of drying blood.

  It wasn’t a smell he could escape.

  Even if he wanted to.

  Connor went back to the liquor cabinet and grabbed two heavy, unopened bottles of vodka. They’d do the upstairs, surely. He was so focused on his task, of soaking the hallway carpets upstairs in vodka, that he passed by several opened doors without bothering to look inside. After all, bedrooms were full of things like curtains, linens and mattresses that didn’t need any extra help going up in flames.

  He’d been so focused, in fact, that he only noticed her as he headed back to the stairwell.

  Maybe it was the white she wore that caught his eye. Maybe it was the blonde curls hanging down her back, with the hint of red undertones shining under the hallway light, spilling into the room.

  Connor didn’t know what exactly caught his attention and made him stop, but there she was. Quiet as could be, kneeling down on both knees at the foot of the bed, her back to the door and her head tilted down just enough to make it look as though she might be in prayer. Except she couldn’t be praying, because her hands rested limply at her sides, unmoving like the rest of her body.

  He almost wondered if she was alive for a second.

  Her back barely moved.

  Her shoulders rarely lifted.

  It was as though each breath she took was careful—measured. As if maybe she could be so quiet, so stone-still, that she wouldn’t be seen at all.

  Connor blinked. “Lass.”

  The bandana still tied around his mouth did nothing to muffle his call, but the girl didn’t move a single muscle to say she had heard him. There was no way she hadn’t heard him downstairs for the last hour, not to mention before that, when Mikhail had come at him with a feckin’ bat.

  What was this woman doing?

  “Lass!”

  Nothing.

  Irritation bubbled in Connor, if only because this job was meant to be quick and easy, and suddenly, it felt like neither of the sort. His father’s orders had been clear: kill the Russian, keep any souls that could be sold.

  Connor still thought that was odd, seeing how Sean had known Mikhail was separated from his wife, and had no other children living in his home. Yet somehow, Sean had made a point to be clear there could be someone else inside.

  Had Sean known about this woman?

  Connor stared at her for a minute longer, wondering to himself if he was even using the right word. She seemed wee for a woman—skinny, fragile, and all too delicate. Even in the darkness where she rested on the old carpeting, bathed in a bit of light from the hallway, he could see her figure. Of which, she barely had any. The bones of her shoulders protruded through the thin fabric of her white dress, and even her limbs were thin like sticks.

  Stop overthinking, he told himself.

  It wasn’t his job to give a shite.

  He simply had to get this finished before daybreak.

  “All right,” Connor said in a grunt, dropping the empty liquor bottles to the hallway floor before heading toward the girl. Inside the bedroom, with him standing damn near at her side, she still didn’t react to his presence. There was no feckin’ way she didn’t know his arse was standing right beside her. “Get up, lass.”

  Her eyes were open, but her mouth was firmly shut. No smile, no emotion, and no recognition in her profile as to who was speaking to her. Even when he reached out and pushed her wayward curls back over her shoulder, she didn’t flinch at his touch.

  Nothing.

  It was as though he didn’t exist to her.

  He hated that he recognized this.

  He hated that he knew why she was acting this way.

  The girl was trained—like a pet, she knew her place.

  Connor was not her owner, and she would not react to his orders.

  “The Russian—Mikhail—is dead downstairs, lass,” Connor told the girl, not bothering to soften his tone for her. It wasn’t as though the words could be said in an easier way. “That means whatever he’s expecting to see from you, it don’t matter. This’ll be a hell of a lot easier on us both if you just listen for the next while, all right?”

  Finally, she turned to look at him.

  And Connor froze.

  Green eyes—as dead as they seemed to be in their deep pools—watched him. Pink lips, set in neither a frown nor a smile, barely parted with her breaths. It was the slope of her nose, down to the cupid’s bow of her lips, and even the high lines of her cheekbones that he did a double-take.

  Because her eyes were the most familiar.

  Her eyes he recognized.

  Her features, however, were older.

  Gone was the healthy pinkness of a girl-child that had met him in the woods, day after day for well over a year two decades before. Lost was the roundness of her cheeks when her joyful smiles took over her entire face. Vanished was the wee girl who was just a child, because he knew all too well how growing up into an adult took away the expressions of the young.

  But it was her.

  There was no denying that.

  It was her.

  He’d thought about her a lot over the years, because she had been such an important piece to his childhood—a good, happy memory—whereas the rest, he preferred to keep buried. It had been her love of drawing, her childish scribbles, that pushed him toward a new escape when he no longer had a playmate outside of the hell his home constantly was.

  She haunted him.

  Her sweet voice, pretty dresses, all her bows and sparkly shoes … they haunted him.

  How could he forget?

  “Evelyn,” Connor murmured behind his bandana.

  Her green eyes looked over his face, or what of it she could see, he supposed. His eyes, the upper part of his face, and then down over the lower portion of the skull bandana keeping him covered. That recognition he knew was in his eyes, did not show in hers.

  Not even an ounce of it.

  And good God, that hurt.

  Connor tugged the bandana down, letting it fall around his neck, hoping that if she looked a wee bit harder, stared for a while longer, she might see him, too. Instead, all he got was that same, blank stare.

  One he knew was probably learned.

  It was always learned.

  “Do you talk at all?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Are you allowed to?”

  Nothing.

  Connor’s h
and lifted again, and before he knew it, the pads of his fingertips traced the line of her cheekbone, gentle and slow. Freckles dotted her skin, from the bridge of her nose to her cheeks, and even across her shoulders. “I have to go—you have to listen.”

  A nod answered him back.

  She understood, at least.

  That was one battle over.

  “Up,” he demanded, grabbing Evelyn by the elbow and pulling her to stand.

  Even once she was up on her feet, she didn’t move. His patience was already running on low fuel, but he tried to tamper his immediate reaction to just throw her over his shoulder and go with her.

  Connor would have to deal with the consequences later.

  Whatever they may be.

  “You know where the back door is downstairs, right?” Connor asked.

  Another nod.

  “Go there and wait.”

  At first, she didn’t move.

  Connor let out a hard sigh. “What, lass?”

  Her gaze jumped toward the foot of the bed, and then back to him. He didn’t have the first clue what she wanted, whether it was to sit back down where she had been, or what.

  “I don’t understand silence,” he told her.

  Slowly, and silently, she bent down, her hands slipping under the foot of the bed, even while her gaze never left him up above her. She pulled out a familiar sight—something any artist would recognize—and stood straight, hugging the sketchbook close to her chest.

  The residual blankness in her gaze disappeared for a moment, and for the briefest flash, Connor was positive he saw a challenge staring back at him. Like she was silently daring him with her eyes and nothing more to take the sketchbook from her, or tell her to leave it. He almost did, just to see if he could break her silence.

  Maybe she’s not as gone as you thought.

  “All right, you got your book,” Connor said, surprised at the gruffness in his tone. “Is there anything else?”

  She shook her head once, and without even needing to be told, headed out the door. Connor stood in that unfamiliar bedroom, listening to the soft pad of her footsteps that were almost completely silent, as she headed down the stairs. He thought had there been any normal noise in the house, no one would even know she was there.

  Like a ghost.

  All dressed in white …

  Connor let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in, and it was feckin’ painful. His gaze scoured the room as he backed out of it, and the things he took note of only confirmed his suspicions even more. A pallet bed in the corner, forgotten like a pet’s might be, with a thin blanket and no pillow, caught his eye last.

  He was going to burn this place to the feckin’ ground.

  And for a whole new set of reasons, he wasn’t going to regret even a second of it.

  • • •

  Evelyn did not like the Harley, or so it seemed. Connor had pulled out his jacket from the saddle bag, wrapped it around her thin shoulders, and set her where she needed to be on the bike. He quickly figured out that putting her on the bitch seat wasn’t going to work, because she wasn’t willing to release her sketchbook, and Connor suddenly didn’t have the heart to take it from her, when she was holding onto the damn thing like a feckin’ lifeline or something.

  Instead, he’d put his helmet on her, deciding to take the risk of having her ride in front of him, as she didn’t obstruct his driving or maneuvering. As long as no goddamn cops saw them, they should have been fine.

  And they were for the drive.

  For the most part …

  By the time Connor pulled up to the rear of his brownstone in upper Brooklyn, Evelyn was shaking like a wee leaf that was stuck in hurricane winds. At some point in the long drive, she had gotten so afraid that she damn near caused him to wreck when she turned around and bear hugged him.

  “The truck next time, then,” Connor said, peeling Evelyn off him and setting her back on the bike. “I don’t know about you, love, but I’ve got no interest in being scraped off the pavement like a feckin’ langer.”

  She just blinked at him from her perch on the bike.

  Yeah, he didn’t know what to make of himself half of the time, either.

  Connor walked the Harley in through the back, before locking the gate on the fence, and pushing down the kickstand to balance the bike. “Off we go, lass.”

  Evelyn didn’t move.

  It took him far too long to realize her feet were bare.

  He’d carried her out of the house before he’d set fire to it earlier. He hadn’t bothered to take note of her lack of shoes, only that she needed a jacket. She had no clothes, but for the white dress on her back that barely covered her arse. No shoes, and he hadn’t noticed very much that might have belonged to her at the Russian’s place.

  A sad reality was starting to stare him in the face.

  Connor chose to ignore it for the moment.

  “Well, feck,” he grunted. “All right, then. Come here.”

  Connor picked Evelyn up, cradling her frame as he headed toward the back of the brownstone. He was all the more aware of just how light she was when he held her, how she felt like nothing more than a damn feather in his arms. She should have weighed at least one-twenty to one-thirty, but the girl was lucky if she weighed even a hundred pounds.

  Too light.

  She needed food.

  He could feel her feckin’ bones.

  Sickly and frail.

  It bothered him.

  “Hungry?” he asked as he unlocked the back door.

  Not shockingly, Evelyn didn’t respond.

  “You can speak if you want to,” he grumbled as he walked through the brownstone, heading towards his main room. “It’d probably help us both.”

  Nada.

  He’d just gotten Evelyn sat down on the leather couch and was reaching for the light switch when the cell phone in his jacket pocket started to ring. The jacket she was wearing. Evelyn damn near jumped out of her feckin’ skin at the sound, her wide-doe eyes looking to him with a mixture of horror and confusion.

  He missed the time before cell phones, when people had to reach him by calling through to the house line, or sending someone over with a message. Now, mobile phones made it easier for him to be at people’s beck and call twenty-four-seven.

  “It’s all right—just that stupid phone,” he said, reaching inside the pocket of the jacket to retrieve the device. She flinched away from him, looking as though she was afraid he might hit her or something for having the phone. With the still-ringing Nokia in his hand, he said, “Hey, relax, love.”

  Evelyn eyed the phone in his hand, still wary in her features as she settled back into the couch.

  Connor checked the caller ID on the screen, and cussed a blue-streak before picking up the call. “What?”

  “That is not how you answer a phone call from me, lad.”

  “It is when I just got home, Sean.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable sitting on your arse like an eejit. I want you at the church tomorrow morning—you can fill me in on the details of how the night went.”

  “Morning is in two hours or so. Church is in a few hours after that. I’ve been driving all feckin’ night. I’m not making that trip to Jersey. I’ll be over there on Tuesday. Talk now.”

  Connor swallowed hard, passing the silent, stoic Evelyn a glance. She was staring at the wall, back into one of her blank trances where the rest of the world didn’t seem to exist. He wondered how often she found herself in those empty spaces inside her head.

  “Fine,” Sean said harshly, “now, then. How was it?”

  “It was grand,” Connor said, “same as it always is.”

  That was as much as he was giving to Sean.

  “Did you check the place?” his father asked.

  “Sure.”

  “And?”

  “And what? It’s gone—went up like feckin’ matchsticks, nothing new.”

  Sean grunted something under his breath. “Y
ou’re sure?”

  Connor kept an eye on Evelyn as he said, “Yeah, just the one. The place was empty.”

  He knew lying would get him nowhere in the end.

  How long could he keep the lie up?

  How long could he hide what he had done?

  Why had he even bothered in the first place?

  Evelyn’s gaze turned on him, all green- and gold-flecked, familiar and unknown at the same time. Connor knew she was staring at a monster, likely. Bloodstained, dressed in black, and three times her size, standing above her.

  Yet, she just … stared at him.

  Unafraid.

  Quiet.

  Still.

  Waiting.

  “You’re sure,” Sean pressed again, not posing it as a question the second time.

  Connor had no doubt his father’s hands had somehow found themselves into the situation Evelyn had been in for two decades—that was why he expected her to be there at the Russian’s house. Not someone, no. Her.

  But why?

  “It was empty,” Connor repeated. “I checked every room.”

  He’d be sticking to that.

  Until he couldn’t, anyway.

  • • •

  The brownstone was both quiet and dark when Connor stepped through the front door. He hadn’t been in the mood to cook, and he wasn’t very hungry himself, but just a look at Evelyn and he knew she needed some kind of sustenance in her body. He probably could have gotten her into the truck for the drive to grab some food, but decided against it after the night she’d already had.

  Now, he was wondering if he had made the wrong choice.

  Had she run?

  It was unlikely, simply because where in the hell could Evelyn go? She had nothing to get her places, nothing to sell for money, and he didn’t even know if the girl was street smart enough to do any of those things, even if she did have something to take.

  His suspicions were confirmed when he walked into the dark living room to find Evelyn exactly where he had left her. He’d only told her to stay, and nothing else. She still sat there on the couch, staring at the wall, with her hands neatly folded in her lap as though she were a frozen doll, waiting to be woken up again.

  Connor wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.