by S. Ann Cole
Life was slow and dreary when I wasn’t occupied plotting Chad’s death.
Because I had no life, I had nothing to do. And, even though I should be plotting Chad’s demise, I wasn’t. Didn’t feel inclined to. And didn’t know why.
Or maybe I did…
Nadia showered and left for work an hour ago. I’d taken her home with me last night after hitting Chad in the Chill Room. She’d had not an ounce of reservation about leaving with me, even spent the entire day at my apartment, and was actually loath to leave for work earlier.
What with how listless I’ve been since Sydney left, her company was more than welcome. Plus she was malleable, and I liked that.
Tireless, too rested, and with too much energy pumping through my veins, I lay mind-numbingly purposeless in bed until I grew tired of staring the white off the damn ceiling.
My whole life was shit, uneventful and enclosed. The knowledge alone of being on a leash was enough to make anyone start hearing crazy voices in their head.
If I had freedom, then I could go wherever and do whatever, have friends, drink booze, get drunk.
But whenever I ran and tried to take my own freedom, I was always found. There was nowhere on this planet I could hide from The Voice without being found.
He always located me, and the repercussions for running were enough to make me think twice about running again.
It also didn’t help that I constantly felt like I was being watched by him. Chad. The idea was crazy, of course. But whenever I was home alone, that’s how it felt. Even though I obsessively scanned for bugs and detected none, I still felt Chad’s eyes on me.
Blowing out a noisy breath, I swung my feet off the bed, sat up, and opened my nightstand drawer. My Bersa Thunder 9mm stared back at me. I took it up from where it was nestled among two grenades, eight copper bullets and a taser gun. Slipping my index finger on the trigger, I jammed the mouth of the Bersa up under my chin, closed my eyes and embraced the pain of hard metal digging on my skin.
I did this a lot. Tempted myself. But could never find the balls to pull the trigger. Just teasing myself with the possibility of death. Promising my soul freedom, then never actually delivering. Instead of pulling the trigger, I pressed the gun harder under my chin, and harder, until it felt like it would rip through my skin.
Pain was good. Pain was distracting. Pain was soothing.
When it became unbearable, I ended the tease and set the Bersa back into the nightstand drawer.
Fuck my life.
Easing off the bed, I plodded over to the dresser, selected a sweats and tank top, and then dragged them on. Shoving my feet into a pair of Adidas sports slippers, I grabbed my apartment keys and slammed out of there to get some air. Needing fresh air to breathe and think about a life I didn’t have.
My apartment complex, The Chess, was well-secured and safe. Residents of this secluded little place paid a fortune for the peace of mind, not the apartments. So at late nights I usually had no qualms about strolling about the well-maintained complex, which had a pool area, tennis court, basketball court, playground, and its highlight: a blooming, evergreen, wide expanse of a garden at the back, which had every colorful flower one could think of, and variegated trees.
Since I had nowhere to go on the nights I didn’t turn in at Empty Cage, I would mostly walk the beautifully designed, lush and inspiring garden. Although it would be better to appreciate its glory during sunlight hours, I only came out at night because I liked the shadows of the trees offering me fake security, the whistling of the wind through the leaves like a death ballad, a sweet lullaby to my ears.
I breathed easily in the darkness, held my breath in the light.
That’s why I walked the gardens at night.
Here, I had no friends or family—well, I had no family period. Back ‘home’, in Russia, at least I had a handful of odd friends, if I could refer to them as such instead of co-workers, considering they, too, were employers of The Voice.
Stepping through the glass double doors of the building, I threw my head back, inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly, allowing the cool night air to stream through my nostrils.
Ah. Better already.
The Chess apartment complex had an exclusive hotel feel to it, with the glowing ground lights lining the walls all around, the towering palm trees, and gushing, lit fountains.
Sinking my hands into my pockets, I began the wandering jaunt. Seeing as it was almost nine-thirty, no one was out but me. Thus leaving the night still and quiet. Only the stars spoke, the moon, and the pesky night creatures. And I meandered, one foot after the next, like a restless, tormented ghost roaming the earth.
That’s what I felt like most times, anyway. Like a ghost within the world of the living, but unable to live. Unable to smile, love or dance a while.
Craning my neck slightly, I looked up the eight-story apartment building. Some of them were three bedrooms, some two, some one. Some of those apartments, had families, some newly-weds, some single, lonely suckers like myself. But the ones I envied were the three bedrooms with the immediate families inside. Maybe a brother and a sister who fought a lot. Maybe a teenager who thought his/her parents hated them for trying to guide them in the right path. Maybe a wife who didn’t appreciate the affection of her husband. Maybe a husband who never takes the time to compliment his wife. Maybe a newborn who cries all night.
It didn’t matter. They were family. Families who’ll never know the importance of each other until something terrible happens.
Family. Something I no longer had. Something that was cruelly taken from me.
Isabel Byrd, my mother, was never a good mother. She was a cold, distant, and enigmatic woman. And I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that whatever came down on our heads was on her account.
We were Americans, not Russian—well, my mother gave birth to me in Russia, but both my parents and my brother were Americans. My father told me that before I was conceived, my mother had gotten a job offer which would pay her big. The job was in Russia. My father said he loved my mother to the moon and back, and would’ve done anything to give her smiles instead of worry lines, so although he wasn’t on-board with the whole moving thing at first, he’d eventually caved, packed them all up, and migrated to Russia. I knew of no other family but them, no aunts or uncles or cousins.
A year later, I’d popped into the picture, and I grew up speaking both English and Russian—English the more dominant. Other tongues I was forced to learn during training.
Isabel being home with the rest of the family was rare. For days at a time she would be gone, sometimes weeks, and on rare occasions, months. With the kind of income she used to rake in, she’d asked my father to quit his job as a car salesman so he could remain home and do the parenting, while she made the bread. So he agreed and took on the mother and father role. Became the shoulder for me and Ricardo to lean on.
And him.
Chadrick.
Chadrick resided two avenues away from us. His father, a Russian, was analogous to my mother: always busy, never home, distant. And his mother, an American, was one big ball of depression, perpetually high on her medication drugs, and too caught up in her own desolation to be a mother to her son and two daughters.
Chad and Ricardo were best buddies, and he spent the majority of his time at our house. My mother had favored him more than Ricardo and me, and whenever she was away and called at home, if Chad was there, she would always ask to speak with him first. My father, on the other hand, favored none of us more than the other, and would cook, play games and watch movies with us. Sometimes even Chad’s sisters would come over and spend the weekends. Because my father was so sweet, kind and lovable, people simply loved being around him.
As time passed, however, Chad began to change. Half the time he was sad, downtrodden, and sometimes had questionable bruises all over him. One time he even came over with one eye so swollen it was completely shut and as black as tar. But whenever any of us inquired what was going on
with him, Chad would only mutter “I’m fine” or “It’s nothing”.
Only my mother seemed to know what was up and down with him. Whenever she was home, she would take him into her office and they’d be locked in there for hours.
But when my mother wasn’t there to comfort him, Chad was afraid and terrified, sometimes paranoid. And in those times, his sneak-ins to my room to read became more and more frequent. Like he desperately wanted to get away from something.
Soon, his visits to our house dwindled. He became withdrawn. Remote. Aloof. He talked less and stared a lot. And, although he was the same age as Ricardo, and was not an inch taller, he’d started to appear taller, as though his posture was somehow corrected. He walked straighter, quieter. His arms grew thick with muscles, and strong like he was lifting trucks in the mornings, and his face got harder, stonier. He looked strangely older. Cold and deadly.
But still we loved him. Loved him. And always, always looked forward to his visits. Dinner in the evenings wasn’t the same if Chadrick was absent from the table. We considered him a part of our family.
My brother called him “brother”. I called him “Blood”. He called me “Tweety Byrd”.
And in the end, he betrayed us. He clipped the wings of the Byrds.
And he ruined me.
My Blood ruined me.
My reading partner colored my mind with reality, and ruined me.
Wandering through the garden, I watched my feet as they made small, unhurried, purposeless steps to nowhere. If I could run away from my very self, I would.
As I traipsed under a tree arcade, I spotted a bench swing under a sprawling, flourishing maple tree and directed my steps toward it.
Although the night was dark, when I reached the bench swing, the ground light was adequate enough for me to discern it was made of oak, and had words carved into the top wood: Margaret & Ford—Souls Enshrined, Engrafted and Entwined.
With an eye-roll, I clapped my ass down on the swing and pressed my back over their names. The idea of love didn’t repulse me. It was because I knew I would never experience that with anyone. Souls enshrined, engrafted and entwined—whatever the hell that even meant.
The very prince of my dreams when I was younger had turned out to be the villain. And that’s when I stopped believing in fairy tales.
But that love thing must be a real good thing why people chase it so hard, so fervently. Love was either the best thing that could happen to a human, or the worst damn thing.
For me, the only ‘real good’ I feel in my shitty life was during sex. And that ‘real good’ was usually fleeting. Once I came, it was all gone, like a fading essence, and all I want to do was chase it, catch it and plant it within me. Which was the reason I craved sex so much. To make the ‘real good’ last as long I could before it evaporated from me like steam dying in cool air.
A rare small smile tugged at my lips and I shook my head. But hell, I did feel something more than ‘real good’ last night. With him. What I felt with him inside me, on top of me, surpassed great, bordering on extraordinary. And the ‘after’ feeling lasted longer. It didn’t leave immediately. It lingered. Stayed a while. And only faded because he moved.
Because the feeling was within him. The second he got off me, the feeling didn’t vanish, it just changed, from ‘extraordinarily great’ to ‘real good’. And that ‘real good’ didn’t leave until I was out the room.
I bit down on my lower lip, hard and punishing, crossing my arms and hugging myself tight until my ribs hurt, an attempt to distract myself from acknowledging that: it wasn’t the sex that made me feel that unprecedented euphoria. It was him. Just him.
Whether I was fucking or fighting him, he was undeniably, uncontrollably mind-consuming. He made me feel great.
Sure, he also made me frightened, uncertain, and sometimes petrified. But the overriding emotion was irrational desire.
After I’d hit him and run last night, he hadn’t chased after me like I expected him to. Didn’t threaten me or send the club manager to fire me. In fact, I didn’t see him at all after that. Which was something to worry about.
I might have crossed the line with that uppercut. So avoiding the club for a week at most and plotting a new move seemed shrewd.
Plotting. Pfft. The amount of clear opportunities I’d had to kill him and didn’t. Last night was another easy kill. And instead of taking advantage while he was vulnerable, I took off.
I was losing focus and perspective, caught up in depression and self-loathing, knowing I have a task to complete but, subconsciously, failing on purpose.
The Voice would call again soon, and he wasn’t going to be pleased to hear of my failures. And the last thing I should be doing right now was giving him reasons to believe I was a liability instead of an asset.
The truth was, while I still wanted freedom, I no longer wanted revenge. Revenge wasn’t looking all that appealing anymore.
I wanted something new, something more, something sweeter than revenge could ever be. Chad. Alive. And mine.
I was between a rock and a hard place. How did I eliminate the one person who made me want things I’ve never wanted before? Made me feel things I’ve never felt before?
The bench swing suffered a steady and forceful push from behind, and before I could register what was happening, my body was flying forward through the air.
I landed in the grass with a muffled thud and an “umf”. Senses momentarily scattered, I rolled over on my back with a groan, my limbs protesting with small winces of pain.
Before I could gather the energy to spring up and assume a defensive position, my attacker was already straddling me.
Carefully, I opened my eyes.
Holy shit.
Those eyes. Those black, undead eyes. Those obsidian pools of nothingness, beautified with abnormally long lashes. Those wide, tempting lips peeled back in a snarl.
“Did that hurt?” he questioned.
“Not even a little bit,” I replied, braving it.
Strong, long fingers instantly fisted around my throat, tightening, squeezing… “Does this hurt?”
My breathing was cut off completely, and my veins felt like they were swelling, about to implode at any minute. A heaviness behind my eyeballs was practically forcing them from their sockets.
Holy hell, he was killing me.
Still, I managed to give an infinitesimal shake of my head.
Clearly frustrated with my obduracy, he made a growling noise and released his grip on my throat. As I moved my hand toward my aching throat, he promptly grabbed my arms, yanked them straight at my sides, and pinned them down with his knees—which hurt like a motherfucker. The man weighed a freaking ton.
I clenched my fists and curled my toes to stop myself from crying out like a virgin getting penetration for the first time. “You said you’d never hurt me.”
Those empty eyes narrowed to scary slits as he roughly cupped my chin and held my face in place so I had nowhere to look but into the infinite blackness of his eyes. “Judging by the way you fight, you’re trained. So you do know that an uppercut done the way you did it could have killed me, right?”
I didn’t respond. But I did know. There were uppercuts for fighting and knocking someone out. And uppercuts for killing with a single blow. But I wasn’t an MMA fighter. I was trained to kill. Not knock someone out.
So, yeah, I knew what I did. Which was why I ran. Nevertheless, we both knew my intention wasn’t to kill him. If I’d been aiming to kill him, I would’ve channeled my swing more towards the throat and less towards the chin.
Still, he asked, “Were you trying to kill me, Blood?”
My turn to narrow eyes at him, because I knew he knew the answer to that.
“Answer me!” he said in a hushed growl, squeezing my face harder.
Through squished lips, I said, “If I were, you wouldn’t be straddling me now, would you?”
Releasing his hold on my face, he sighed, frustrated, irritated, those damn
ed sexy lips forming a pinched O for the air to pass through.
The man was straddling me, inflicting pain on me with his knees pinning my arms, and, in the midst of all this, all I could think about was how much I wanted those lips on mine again.
A rush of white-hot arousal pooled between my legs, and I squirmed beneath him.
Chad misunderstood my squirm. “You’re hurting. I’m sorry. But…before I let you go. Tell me…”—his gaze shifted from mine to the grass, and his chest rose and fell, as he let out another exhalation. Then his gaze came back to me—”Do you want to kill me?”
What? Did he really just ask me that? Did he know? Did he know it was me?
No. He couldn’t. There’s no possibly way he would’ve allowed me to get this close to him if he knew. This was Chadrick fucking Niiveux. He would’ve killed me ages ago if he knew.
I could understand him questioning who I was, considering I fought like a man and showed no fear to his face. Maybe he was just suspicious of me and a little leery. If he knew, one hundred percent, that I was his once-upon–a-time reading buddy, back for revenge, no damn way in hell I’d be breathing right now.
I didn’t answer with a yes or a no, because I figured, if I lied to his face like this, he’d be able to tell. “Swap the L’s with S’s in the word ‘kill’. That’s what I want to do to you.”
As his gaze drifted down to my lips, warmth supplanted the emptiness, supplanted the threat in his eyes. But it didn’t stop him from gritting out, “Answer my question.”
I didn’t. I was stubborn like that. “Kiss me, boss.”
Slowly, steadily, he breathed through his lips, gaze still on my lips. “Whatever you’re doing, stop. Unless you want me to fuck you right here in this garden with no regard for the residents.”
My core throbbed, and I squirmed again, licking my lips. Clit pulsing heavily with need. “That’s.exactly.what.I want.” As I hiccupped those words, I moaned out loud, thrusting up my hip in impatience, simply because I couldn’t help it.
Chad made me feel. Just feel. And he wasn’t even trying. He was just like any other human being, yet his mere existence affected me in ways I never knew possible. He made me so damn hot and feverish.