by Lexie Ray
Every night had been like fighting a silent death.
But that night, when Hunter had gotten out of bed, she tiptoed, passing bunk after bunk, cautious that the only sounds she could hear were the breathy exhales of sleeping children and her own bare feet landing softly against the hard wood floors. She had been filled with the darkest dread she had ever known.
By the time she had made it out to the barn, her feet were wet with dew. She peered through a wide crack in the wood slats. What she saw inside was dark, horrific. Her brain had barely been able to make sense of what her eyes were seeing. The hunching figures of men, dark and in shadows. The feminine childlike sobs had told Hunter that Carolyn was buried somewhere in the center, swarmed by all of them. Dark hunching figures, monsters, that caused the stomach to twist and lurch in disgust, horror, hopelessness, emotions reeling and tumbling through the brain and body so violently that the mind could explode or implode or die all together. Suddenly the sobbing had stopped and that’s when Hunter knew they had killed her. Carolyn hadn’t lived through the violence of their sick pleasure.
Hunter shook herself out of the memory and found herself in the bathroom. The thumps of her pounding heartbeat throbbed in her ears. She lifted the toilet lid as quickly as possible. It smacked against the basin with a clank of ceramic against ceramic. No sooner than she had, Hunter vomited. Barely anything came up, though she heaved and heaved, continuing to purge herself of the horrendous emotions that had been resurrected by thoughts of Carolyn.
Eventually she felt cleansed.
Hunter stood in front of the mirror, the steam having finally cleared from its surface, and studied the reflection of her face for a long moment. It finally hit her, the reality of it all: the men from the farmhouse had come for her. They didn’t care that she was no longer a child. They didn’t care that she was no longer needed in the barn, or that she was too old to serve their dark purpose. They had come for her despite all of that.
Hunter decided here and now that she would never let them get her. She would never let them drag her back. Hunter promised herself that she would kill every last one of them. She would kill them if it was the last thing she did.
* * *
“I’m only going to ask you once more,” said the man, as he hovered over Twitch, saliva dripping in strings from his cracked mouth, “Where is Thomas?”
“I don’t know no Thomas,” answered Twitch defiantly whispered, spitting blood. His back tooth was loose. He could feel it. This asshole had punched it out of its socket.
Twitch’s ribs were searing in agony that seemed to radiate downward through his guts in excruciating pain, as he rolled onto his side in filth and shit, curling his legs into the fetal position.
The man continued to kick Twitch whenever it suited him, blind to how badly he was destroying the kid.
All Twitch could do was grasp hold of the thread that he had already won. This guy didn’t have a clue. He had no idea he was standing only a handful of stories below where some guy named Thomas was getting scraped off an apartment floor, no idea that Ash would surely end him as well, as soon as he came back to the alley. As Twitch took blow after blow, coughing up blood and retching, as his insides turned to liquid pain, he began to laugh.
Louder and louder Twitch laughed.
Then everything went dark.
Twitch faded despite his greatest efforts to stay conscious. His last thought was full of pride. He had watched the back fire escape. No one had climbed up for the girl. He had done his job. And now it was time to let go, let go all the way, and let the darkness carry him.
* * *
Hunter had been pacing, too wired to sleep, too anxious to think clearly by the time the sun began to rise.
Suddenly, the sound of a key scraping into the lock stopped her dead in her tracks, and she stared wide-eyed at the front door until it thrust open and Ash stepped inside.
He met her gaze, pausing only slightly to wrestle his keys out of the lock, then turned to shut the door.
“You should sleep,” he said softly, his voice deep, commanding, yet gentle.
“What took you so long?” She demanded.
“You don’t want to know,” he said more casually than she would’ve liked, as he walked deeper into the apartment, bypassing her, until he reached his pack of cigarettes on the wooden table. “Want one?”
He offered without handing her one. Rather he bit one out for himself and lit it. He wasn’t the biggest fan of how she was staring at him, almost appalled, as though he had done something wrong.
“Are you going to explain to me what happened? Where you were?” She asked, holding her gaze on him, unwavering, yet scared.
“No, I’m tired. I need a shower,” he said, pulling his tee up and over his head.
He stood bare-chested at the other side of the room and tossed his tee absentmindedly onto the armchair.
There was no denying his body was gorgeous. Tight muscles under smooth skin, the lines of his limbs smoldered, exuding a sort of easygoing sexiness that Hunter felt drawn to. He seemed to not even know the effect he was having on her. She found it impossible to keep her eyes on his face. Her gaze continually wandered down, lowering over his pecs, his chiseled abs, the apex of his jeans just under the belt.
She sensed him staring back, and so she snapped her gaze back up to meet his. She felt her cheeks flush pink, embarrassed to have been caught checking him out. His blue eyes seemed to turn dark, brooding. He seemed to be looking at her with an edge of interest, and that’s when Hunter realized the magnitude of her attraction. She felt like she was falling into those dark and brooding eyes. She felt some kind of connection that couldn’t be explained. She felt unmistakably that he was here for her, had been here for her, had been put here for her. It was convoluted and hard to reconcile, but Hunter sensed that he was her protector and that he knew it. Yet she knew there was no way she could ever trust him.
She realized how self-conscious she felt in his presence, as though her lips weren’t sitting on her face quite right. She sensed her hair was probably falling at ridiculous angles. She wondered if her skirt had ridden up too high. He needed to look away so she could recover from the intensity of their eye contact, but he didn’t. So Hunter looked down at Luthor who was lying, spread-eagle, on his back in front of her, blissfully unaware that murders and beatings had occurred all around him.
Ash pulled hard on his cigarette, listening to the tobacco crackle as he inhaled deeply. He liked that Hunter was in his apartment. He liked the idea that she had washed herself in his shower. For a split second he let his mind wander towards images of her naked body, soapy, moving under the hot shower spray.
Hunter’s hair was still wet. The humidity was causing it to curl slightly in long loose waves. She looked pale, ghostly, but it seemed to compliment her features. He could’ve stayed staring at her indefinitely. The way her breasts filled out her tee-shirt, causing the fabric around her chest to stretch taut, while directly below the tee hung loose, draping, sensual. She looked soft yet thin. He was already looking forward to the sleep he would make them both get. He wanted to be in bed next to her. He wanted to see how she might naturally respond to his hard body between the sheets.
But first he needed a shower.
He crossed quickly towards the bathroom and once inside, turned the shower on.
“Are you hungry?” he asked, calling out over the roar of rushing water.
“I can’t eat,” she said.
He turned after testing the temperature of the shower, and realized she was standing in the doorway.
Ash plucked the cigarette from his lips, holding it in the crux of his first and second finger and approached her.
“I got some good stuff,” he said, nearly pressing his body against hers as he made his way through the doorway and into the kitchen. She followed.
White air billowed out of the freezer, hitting Hunter’s face, cooling her down as he opened the refrigerator door. She stood so close to Ash
she could feel the heat coming off of him. She would’ve followed him anywhere.
He handed her a gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream. When she had it firmly in her hands, he peeled the lid off for her. It was half eaten, but somehow that made it seem even more appetizing.
He opened a drawer for her, implying that she should help herself to a spoon, and then returned to the bathroom.
“Get in bed,” he called out again. “We’re going to bed as soon as I’m done.”
Hunter stood, unmoving in the kitchen, a lump of ice cream melting on her tongue, as a warm wave of arousal rolled through her. The idea of going to bed with Ash was exciting. Her heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t felt this way, burning with desire, throbbing with arousal, for as long as she could remember.
She took one more scoop of ice cream then returned it to the freezer before crossing to the mattress.
She would have to lie down in her clothes, obviously, but part of her wanted to shed every ounce of clothing and lay waiting for him, nude, primed, ready.
She sat on the bed, noting the scent of the mattress. It smelled faintly like Ash, the way his neck had smelled when he had held her close. She hoped he would again.
From her vantage point, sitting up in bed, Hunter could see directly through to the bathroom. Ash hadn’t bothered to shut the door. The shower curtain was nothing more than thin clear plastic, but still it revealed only the shapes and shades of his body, omitting the more graphic details that she was curious about.
She liked watching him, the movements of his arms, the way he shifted his weight as he ran a bar of soap up and down his torso and along his shoulders.
When the water stopped running, little more than the sound of the swirling drain could be heard. The quiet called Hunter’s attention to how awkward she felt. And yet shouldn’t she be more concerned with the fact that he had killed someone in her apartment?
Ash approached the mattress with nothing but a towel wrapped around him. Immediately Hunter hopped up, grabbed Luthor, and plopped him down in the middle of the bed. It took Luthor a few turns, following his tail, to mold himself perfectly into the mattress, but eventually he did, curling himself into a warm ball of contentment.
He was aware that she was nervous. It was impossible to overlook. He found it cute how she wasn’t sure where to look or how to hold herself. Part of him wanted to drop the towel just to see how she might react, but he thought better of it and opened his closet instead, using the door as a shield to block her view of him. It was then that he let the towel drop and put on a pair of boxer-briefs. No matter how bashful she was, she would have to be okay with him sleeping in his underwear. It would be too damn hot otherwise.
“You’re not going to leave the window open, are you?” She asked in a quiet voice from the bed. “What if someone comes in again?”
“If I close that window I’m pretty sure we’re going to die in here,” he said.
“I saw someone out there earlier,” she said and was planning to elaborate, but Ash immediately interrupted.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, but it was scary. It was a kid, I think. He was getting beat up.”
Ash paused behind the closet door. He knew who the kid was. He knew why he was getting beat up, but he couldn’t let Hunter find out.
“It’s a bad neighborhood,” he said.
Ash returned in plain view and shut off the overhead light.
It took a moment for Hunter’s eyes to adjust to the darkness but eventually they did thanks to the lights of the city that were pouring in through the window, helping her to understand the layout of the room as it emerged in soft gray silhouette.
Ash sat on the bed, peeling a top sheet up from the foot of the bed, then laid down on his back. Hunter slumped down as well until she was flat on her back. Luthor purred between them.
After a long moment, Hunter took a deep breath and finally asked what she had been meaning to ever since Ash had jumped through her window earlier that night.
“Are you some kind of a hit man?”
Chapter Four
Hunter wished she hadn’t blurted out the question, and yet she felt she had a right to know. She had seen him kill. She had watched him do what she couldn’t: protect herself. And if he hadn’t shown up, she would have become a prisoner like she had been all her life. Hunter realized that she didn’t so much care whether or not he was a hit man. Deep down she already knew he was. What Hunter really wanted to ask him was if he would teach her how to be one as well.
“Sometimes,” he responded finally.
There was something seductive in his tone of voice, the way the timbre softened as a result of lying down, that sent a wave of heat rippling through Hunter. She listened intently for him to continue.
“Does that scare you?” He asked.
She could see his silhouette turn. He was rolling onto his side, facing her.
“I don’t know,” she said in a whisper, “I guess.” After another long moment she added, “Maybe it depends on who you kill.”
“You mean like it’s not scary if I only kill bad guys?” he asked as his hand found its way to Luthor. He stroked the cat’s soft fur. Luthor purred in starts and fits, then relaxed, returning to a deep sleep.
“Something like that, yeah,” she said.
“People want bad people dead,” He said. “Have you ever wanted a good person dead?”
“No, I guess not,” she answered, following his logic, but not quite buying the argument.
“I don’t know how bad they are,” he went on. “Or if they’re bad at all. All I know is that someone out there needs them dead. Some people can’t live their lives unless some bad guy out there dies. So that’s what I do.”
Hunter could relate to that easily.
“Do you think this makes me a bad person as well?” he asked.
“No,” she answered after a long moment to consider the question.
He paused, holding his breath, unsure whether or not to say what he wanted to next. He sensed tension between them, one he wasn’t sure he liked. “I need to know if you’re afraid of me.”
“I’m not,” said Hunter.
Relief washed over him the second he heard the words. He believed her.
“How did you start?” she asked through the darkness.
“You mean who was my first kill?”
“Yeah, and why. I mean, how does someone get into that type of work?” she asked, revealing her interest.
“I had a really difficult upbringing that I don’t really like to talk about, but I killed my way out of it.”
As soon as his response landed in Hunter’s ears, she felt an immediate kinship with him. What had his upbringing been like? Where had he been raised, and by what sort of monsters that he had to kill them in order to leave? The similarities between his mysterious childhood and her own were spawning all kinds of questions in Hunter’s mind. Though he hadn’t shared so much as one detail, Hunter was beginning to sense the reason behind their connection. They were alike.
Already she admired Ash. Hunter hadn’t killed her way out of anything. She had snuck off quietly in the middle of the night, scared to death, abandoning her siblings and friends. Thomas had helped her. He had been on watch that night. His job had been to make sure no one escaped, but he had looked the other way after they had made eye contact across the field. He had been a decent person back then. What had changed? Why had he come back for her years later? What had changed in New Hampshire, at the farmhouse, that all of a sudden they wanted her back?
“So did I. I had a horrible upbringing,” she finally answered in a whisper, “but I never killed anyone.”
Her words hung in the air between them like an accusation she hadn’t intended. Maybe she resented him for his strength, for the fact that he was able to do what she never could. Or maybe she was beginning to wonder how he defined “difficult upbringing.” It was possible that her life in the country had been infinitely worse than whateve
r he had gone through. She tended to forget that, often minimizing her own hardships and giving too much credit to the struggles of others.
“I wish I had,” she added.
“You wish you had killed someone?” he asked.
“Killed my way out of my family,” she said. “If I had, then Thomas wouldn’t have come looking for me. None of this would be happening.”
“Do you want to tell me about it, Hunter?” he asked in a soft voice that was nearly an exhale.
Hunter thought about that, considering whether or not she wanted to, whether or not she could.
“We had rules. Not just family rules, though there were those as well. But all the children had rules, guidelines, for how to stay alive,” Hunter’s voice trailed off into a thread of sadness. “There were so many kids, so many girls where I grew up. We called it a family, but it wasn’t. I guess we didn’t know we were slaves or prisoners. Our first rule was to never make eye contact with the adults. It was a weird rule, I guess, looking back. All of it was weird. All of our rules implied that we should think that we were responsible for what was happening to us because we could prevent it with rules.” Hunter stopped for a second, snorting a laugh of disgust and pity. “But they worked for the most part. Our rules worked. If you made eye contact, it was like inviting them, inviting the adults to take you. It was like volunteering yourself to go to the barn. Don’t look anyone in the eye, rule number one.”
Without warning, Ash’s hand was on Hunter’s, holding it. His grip was firm and warm. His hand, strong and comforting, was much larger than hers. It felt good.
“Was Thomas one of the adults you tried not to make eye contact with?” he asked gently while squeezing her hand.
“No,” she said. “Thomas was one of the kids from the boys’ camp. He was one of us, but they got to him. By the time he was nineteen, there was nothing left of him. His heart had been hardened. It may have even crumbled into nothingness. That’s what they wanted at the farmhouse, to turn the children into monsters so that the horrors of the barn would never end. They wanted generation after generation to continue it, keep it going. That’s why they want me, Ash. I know too much. They think my place is with them in the country. They think my job should be taking little girls from their beds at night, dragging them out to the barn.”