by West, Sinden
“So who’s your Devil?” I asked when I could speak again.
He slid his gaze over to me. “You know.”
I didn’t like his tone. It was like we shared a secret, something in common, and I didn’t like that one single bit.
“So what did he do?” I snapped out. “Or was it just that he fucked your sister?” Instantly I regretted the nastiness in my tone, flinching in anticipation of his anger.
But he surprised me by doing nothing. He slowly took his gaze from the road and looked at me briefly with a small smile on his face, before returning his concentration to driving. “No, Paige. I am not annoyed because he was having sex with my sister. She was obviously a willing participant. It’s what he did later.” He spoke calmly and rationally and it gave me the courage to enquire further.
“Which was?”
He shook his head. “We’ve got a long drive a head of us. You should get some sleep,” he told me. We were out of the city now and exposed to a tranquil ocean view that had me yearning for Aaron’s house and the security that I had sometimes felt there. This ocean that we were flying past was deceptively calm but from a distance there were storm clouds preparing to let loose a torrent of driving rain.
“Here.” The gun was on his lap now and with his free hand he held a syringe. I didn’t know where that had come from. “This will help you sleep.”
I crept closer to the door. “I don’t want that. I don’t need to sleep.” I managed to keep the whimper from my voice.
His eyes flicked up again into a quick smile. With an abrupt jerk of the steering wheel we were taken from the road and onto a dirt path with a sign signaling a rest stop. I groped for the door handle, preparing to run the moment the car came to a halt, but his hand took a firm hold on my arm.
“Trust me, it’s for the best.”
I squeezed my eyes closed and felt the sharp prick. The last thing that I remembered was him rubbing the sight of the injection as if soothing me to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Somewhere something dripped. In my blackened mind I imagined that to be a drip of blood, a crimson drop that continuously appeared to splatter on the floor, but I couldn’t quite make out the body from which it had come. Eternally, that drop appeared at the fingertips of that nameless person in my dream, falling before being replaced by another red indicator of something terrible.
It took a lot of effort to crack my eyes open. Part of that was due to the grogginess in my brain while the other part was the reluctance to face whatever may come next. There was no body like my subconscious had expected, there was only darkness, interfered with by a dim light coming from a corridor far off. The other surprise was that I was not bound. My limbs were free as I lay on some kind of cot covered by a sleeping bag that rustled as I moved. My movements were slow and lethargic, and the energy that it took to make the slightest action had me nearly screaming in fear and frustration in the realization that I wouldn’t be going anywhere fast.
But that didn’t stop me trying. I managed to sit up and the sleeping bag slid from me to the ground. My legs tried to follow it but the effort had me moaning and doubting my ability to stand.
Footsteps made me freeze and wait on the cot like a lamb to the slaughter. A brighter light approached and a shadow sprung up, large and nightmare-like against the wall. Ryan appeared, lit by a gas lamp that he held, appearing smaller and less terrifying than his shadow. My breath exhaled, almost in relief.
But remember, this is the guy that just cracked your head open a short time ago.
He set the lantern down with a clunk on the concrete floor as he took off his backpack, opening it and extracting a bottle of water which he handed over to me. My hands worked better than my legs and I took it, even managing to open it. I lifted it to my lips and drank deeply.
“Hungry?” he asked as he watched me satisfy my parched mouth from where he crouched next to his backpack.
I shook my head as I screwed on the top of the bottle.
“You sure? It’s been a while since you last ate. You’ve been out for the better part of a day,” he urged. “I’ve got tins of beans, fruit salad…”
Why was he being kind? “I’m not hungry.”
He stood and gave a nod as he accepted my answer. “Maybe later then.” He moved over to the cot adjacent to the one that I sat on, leaning against the wall and out of the light.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re below ground. It’s my family’s bunker.”
I raised my hands and felt the wall behind me; it was made from concrete blocks, cold beneath my shaking touch. “A bunker? What for?”
“The End of Days.” He shifted on the cot again, bringing his face back into the light. “Not that it saved them then, of course.” There was sadness in his tone more than anger.
I swallowed and asked, “What happened to them?” Part of me already knew though. His name reverberated around my brain like it was bouncing off these concrete walls.
“Do you really want to know? Do you really want to be faced with the things that he’s done?” The way he watched me was like I was under a microscope and he didn’t want to miss any part of my reaction.
I leaned in slightly closer. “I know what he is, what he’s capable of...he’s done bad things to me as well.”
“I know, your friends, terrible business.”
My head snapped up and my back straightened while my stomach twisted with dread. “What?”
He gave a slight smile and tilted his head, studying me. “The two girls. Mary, and the other was called something weird, Toro maybe?”
“Torrance,” I said quickly, wanting their names correct, they deserved at least that. “Mara and Torrance. Those are their names.”
He gave a nod. “That’s right. Pretty girls, I saw their pictures in the paper, along with yours. Such a tragedy.”
“What do you know about them?” My lips barely moved as I asked that, as if my body were rebelling against the question because it knew that the answer to it would not be good.
“I know what he did to them.”
“He didn’t,” I barked out automatically, my heart beating fast. No, no, no, no, no…
He gave me a soft smile that was almost pitying. “Paige, I’ve been watching him for a long time now. I had him watched when I couldn’t do it myself. My man followed him up to where those girls were drinking, he watched him throw them both over the edge.”
I clutched at my stomach and struggled to breathe.
“I didn’t know why at the time. It seemed odd that anyone would order a hit on those two particular girls, but then I figured out that it was you that he was watching, that it was personal.”
I managed to look at him. “Were you there when he took me? Did you just stand by while he did those things to me?” My voice shook.
There was nothing in his eyes for me to read. “My man saw him abduct you. We lost him after that, he disappeared for a good month, but you reappeared, adding to the mystery of the whole affair, but then again, you weren’t my target so I didn’t spend too much time on you. It was interesting, however, that you took him as your lover.” His lip quirked up slightly.
Bile rose in my throat but I managed to swallow it down. “Why is Aaron your target? What did he do exactly to your family?” I rushed out. I wanted to hear something awful, something far more terrible than I had just been told. I wanted to drown in the misery of others rather than deal with my own suffering.
He met my gaze head on and lifted his chin almost as if in determination, meeting a challenge to speak the truth out loud. “He slaughtered them. All but me. He was just twelve years old and he hunted them down with his crossbow. He picked them off one by one.”
My face stayed twisted in horror. An image of a young, lethal Aaron committing mass murder, a lone wolf killing off sheep, danced in front of my eyes.
“You’re supposed to ask why,” he continued. “You’re supposed to look for reason and meaning behind the horr
ible actions of the one you love in order to justify it. That would be normal.”
“But I don’t love Aaron, and nothing he does surprises me,” I replied in a dull tone, wishing I could get the picture of him stained in the blood of others out of my head. A sudden thought occurred to me. “Did he kill your sister, the one that he was sleeping with?” I couldn’t even comprehend why the answer to that question was so important, but it was and I held my breath.
Ryan nodded. “Right in the heart, don’t you just love the symbolism?”
I looked away, clutching my stomach harder as queasiness seized my insides. “He didn’t just kill them for fun though, did he? There would have been a reason,” I said weakly as I did just what Ryan expected; I looked for some way to justify Aaron’s actions.
“What reason could possibly justify taking out an entire family?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and lay down on the cot. My head hurt, my stomach hurt, it was too much effort to continue sitting up. Hugging myself, I turned to face the wall, not wanting his eyes staring at me.
“I’ll let you rest,” he murmured and I heard the squeak of his cot as he stood and his footsteps on the concrete floor sounded. I didn’t breathe again until they died away.
If everything Ryan had said was true, then Mara and Torrance had died because of me. Aaron had killed them to torment me. I felt like ice was beginning to spread through my body, numbing and killing the fiery anger that should have been burning from my heart outwards to crush through vessels and organs until an explosion rocked everything around me.
But instead, there was just coldness. There weren’t even any tears.
Chapter Fifteen
Ryan returned later, his footsteps serving a warning that had me sitting in preparation. Although, in truth, I didn’t care that much what he would do to me or what the point of his near friendliness was. All I could think of was Aaron.
“You need to eat and keep up your strength.” He passed over a bowl that had steam rising from it.
“Why do I need my strength?” I asked listlessly as I took the spoon and out of habit stirred the hot liquid. “I don’t need to be strong for you to kill me.”
He gave me a small smile that was almost pitying. “Is that what you think I’m going to do? I’ve already apologized for hurting you the last time that we met.”
“I think that you’re a fucking liar, that’s what I think,” I murmured as I still stared at the soup. Its heat rose and warmed my face.
“I can hardly blame you for thinking that, but Aaron is my enemy, not you. Unlike him, I try not to take my rage out on innocents unless it’s avoidable.”
“And it wasn’t unavoidable to crack my head open?” I still stared at the soup, wondering if there were drugs in it. But then I decided that I didn’t care and ventured a taste. It was tomato flavored and thick; it burned my tongue.
“That was necessary, I’m afraid. I needed to send a message and it had to be via that particular method or he wouldn’t have got it.”
I raised my eyes to find him watching me. “Why?”
Ryan let out a breath. “Because that’s how he killed my father. He tied him up and bashed his head into a concrete wall until his skull cracked and his brain turned to mush.” He shook his head. “Although, I’m not sure that he quite understood the relevance. Sometimes I doubt my family’s death even lingers in his memory.”
I thought of the terrible tree mural and its hidden people and knew that it wasn’t true.
“I don’t think that he does the things he does for pleasure. He’s…different, but there’s usually a purpose behind his actions. Why would a twelve year old boy go on a killing spree?” I said this more to myself than to Ryan, and then I continued eating the soup so my mouth wouldn’t be tempted say anything further.
“You should have met his old man. He was one tough son of a bitch. He was brutal. He would tie that kid up and whip the shit out of him until Aaron was unconscious and his back a mess of exposed flesh and blood.”
My mouth twisted at the image that Ryan created in my mind. I put the spoon back in the soup and lay it down on the floor. The metal bowl made a clunking sound as I did so that echoed around us. Just how big was this place?
“How did you know that? Did you watch?”
“Our land bordered his family’s farm. I used to spend most of my time exploring and creeping around. I was always younger than my siblings and anyone else in the area and they were all too busy for me, so I used to hide and spy on everyone.” He let out a low whistle. “The things I used to see…”
“So what? He just snapped one day and decided to kill everyone?”
Ryan grinned. “He found out that his mother was sleeping with my father. That, apparently, was the catalyst.”
“Did he kill her as well?” My heart was thumping as I wished that his answer would be no.”
But unsatisfyingly, he just shrugged. “She’s dead too, so it seems likely.”
“And his father?”
“Dead.”
“And why did he spare you?”
Ryan’s grin faded. “Probably because I cried like a fucking baby. I was always the wimpiest of the lot. I had a machete in my hand and just dropped it when he turned to me with the crossbow loaded and ready to go.”
“He just let you go? Knowing you’d go to the police?”
“I’d never speak to the police. That was against our way. I didn’t think he cared right then anyway. He just turned and went back to his house, and I followed for some stupid reason. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know. I watched him from the trees. He went into the house and came out a minute later with a handgun. On the steps of the house, he sat down casual as anything and put the gun in his mouth. I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see his brain splatter everywhere, even after what he’d done. But then I heard the sound of a car, he heard it as well and he took the gun from his mouth. It was his uncle. I didn’t know how that man knew about what had gone on, but he was speeding like he was in a panic. The moment the car came to a stop, he was out the door and running to Aaron, pulling him to him like he was the most important thing in the world. And Aaron cried. He fucking sobbed like he was the one to be pitied.” Ryan gave a humorless laugh and ran a hand through his short hair.
“And then what happened?” I leaned forward.
“They made it look like Aaron’s father did it. This was before forensic testing was what it is now. They forged a note and made his death look like suicide. He was the local drunk anyway, a real asshole, and everyone was just too eager to believe that he was the villain in our little nightmare.” He stared down at the floor.
“And what happened to you?”
“My grandfather took me in. He and my Dad had been estranged. Dad hated the greed that my grandfather and his corporation stood for so he moved us out here and prepared us for the day that we’d be raided by the government. He’d be spitting tacks if he knew that I was the sole heir to that fortune now.” His forehead furrowed as if this bothered him.
I frowned. “So you use that money to have Aaron watched, his house attacked…”
He raised his eyes to look at me and gave a crooked smile. “You know what they say: revenge is a dish best served cold.”
I closed my eyes briefly before opening them again. “You’re right. Get them when they’re least expecting and their mind will run over every bad thing that they’ve ever done, wondering who the hell wants to ruin them.”
“You’re a smart girl, Paige. It’s a shame that we didn’t meet under different circumstances.”
I swallowed. “Can I watch when you kill him?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you that upset over your friends?”
I looked him straight in the eye. “Yes,” I said in a tight controlled voice. “You have no idea what he’s done to me. I want to see him dead at my feet, hurt and begging. I want him to know that I won. After everything, I won.”
He watched me, his cool gaze giving nothin
g away. “Really? He was your lover one day, your enemy the next? He’s going to die because he came looking for you.”
“He was always my enemy, and we were never lovers. I was his whore, there for his amusement. That’s all that there was.” My voice sounded deep and raw; it sounded brutal. “And he won’t be the first person to die because of me.”
Ryan’s lips flicked up into a brief smile. “It won’t be long now. He’s coming here, finally.”
“How do you know?”
“I have a lot of money, and a lot of people willing to do what I ask,” he said smugly.
“Will they kill him, or will you?”
“Me. Definitely me. I’ll be delighted to get my hands dirty.”
“But Aaron has connections. Aren’t you worried that you’ll make enemies with the wrong kind of people?”
Ryan shrugged. “This is my moment of reckoning, Paige. What happens after this doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he dies by my hands.” He seemed at peace with the process. There was no rage in him, or emotion. He was almost businesslike in his single mindedness. Nothing would get in the way of the task that he had set for himself.
His phone went off. How it would work underground like this was beyond me. He stared at it, frowning. “We’ve got a visitor. That was the alarm on the perimeter of the property. He’s taken out my men,” he murmured, not acting like he cared that much.
“How do you know that?”
“Because they would have warned me. That means that they’re dead or incapacitated somehow. I’m guessing the former.” He gave me a smile. “Come on. It’s time to welcome our visitor.” He stood and slipped his phone into his pocket as he gestured for me to do the same. I stood warily, taking a breath as I let the sleeping bag and its warmth and security slide to the floor. I followed him out into a narrow concrete corridor that was lined with closed metal doors and lit by dull green emergency lighting. Finally, we came to a set of steps and he stopped and turned to me as he reached into his jacket pocket. “I hope you don’t mind, but I still don’t really trust you.” He pulled out a set of handcuffs and held them out. Slowly, I reached out my arms in front of me, hoping that he wouldn’t insist on locking them behind my back.