Cold-Blooded Beautiful (13 page)

Of course, once I stepped foot outside, it began raining a thick mist of icy cold daggers, it
was
England after all.  With tightly clenched fists shoved deeply in my pockets, I stormed blindly through the streets, acknowledging nothing and no one. I only glimpsed shadows of copper-haired figures taunting me in my peripheral vision. My clothes and hair becoming heavier and heavier the more the sky’s tears soaked through them. 

I only stopped walking when a tall gate stood in my way, and a dark looming mountain of a building stood like a god behind it.

Realizing where I stood set my heart thundering against my chest, trying desperately to climb up my throat and eject itself from my flesh.  The moment my eyes locked onto the abandoned edifice was voltaic.  Blood rushed through my heart and surged through the vein in my neck, causing my cheeks and forehead to blaze with heat.

Demanding and harsh, the building stood menacingly over me.  Saint Benedict’s.  The place I lost my innocence.  The place where Thomas took my life.  Where all my demons were born sixteen years ago.

Fingers clasped into the chain links, muscles pulled my body up and over the fence; I walked across the overgrown campus and up the crumbled and cracked stone steps. 
Time to face these demons head-on
.

Fuck you, Thomas. 

Fuck you.

And fuck you Sam, for leaving me.

Chapter 8

David stood in the corner, smiling with eyes like one of those sinister, scary as hell circus clowns. Expensive over the top slacks and a crisp blue Armani shirt. He regarded me with a silent condescending stare. Looking at me as if I were already an obituary in his morning paper, over the loss and utterly bored.  Everything in me froze. Time stilled and moved along in exaggerated sluggish motions. Long elegant fingers lifted the velvet box that sat in the bouquet and opened it, revealing my once beloved diamond studded eternity wedding band.  “Time to come home,
wife
,” he whispered darkly, plucking the ring from the box. 

Tilting his head, he looked straight into my eyes.  His normal golden brown iris’s were void of all color, just deep black pools of dilated darkness, and his smile…his smile was
chilling
, making an icy tremble crawl down the back of my neck.  Those were the eyes, and that was the smile of a killer.  My killer.  The man who desired to cause my very last breath.   

The instant, I stepped back towards the door, David was closing the distance between us.  With one hand, he was raising a gun to my face. The other clutched a dirty brown sack.  A glint of light reflected off the diamond band that dangled mockingly from his pinky, as his index finger teased the trigger. 

My legs immediately weakened and turned cold, as I clawed at the door.  My hands numbed as I desperately turned the knob and fumbled with the lock.  Adrenaline kicked in, hormones raced and released into my bloodstream.  I could hear my heartbeat, pounding in my ears, and I willed it to slow down. 
I needed to neutralize the threat.  Gun in hand, get it out.  Take control of the weapon.  Achieve a position of advantage
.

First thing I did was try to scream my damn head off.

David closed in fast; gun rose higher and slammed his full weight on me, crushing me against the door knocking the wind out of me so my screams could not be heard.  I slammed my fists into his face, raked nails along his skin, “Shoot me then, shoot me!  I’d rather die than go with you!”  My fists and nails met with hard solid flesh, unmovable, and impenetrable.

His laughter rang harsh and savagely in my ears.  The hand holding his gun wrenches a handful of hair at the nape of my neck, violently yanking my face closer to his.  Hot wet lips smash savagely over mine with such brutality that my bottom lip tears open on one of his teeth.  There’s not an ounce of tactical training that I can remember. It’s just pure instinctual fear and a screaming rush of adrenaline that had me punching and biting back. The hard metal of the gun pressed against my skull, as his free hand grabs wildly at my wrists, trying to stop the onslaught of my defense.

Pulling away, his face is covered with blood.  Whose blood exactly, I couldn’t tell you.  I tried for another blow to his face, but it was stopped by a vicious elbow that he slammed my face against the wall with.  The hit to my head rang loud in my ears, and made my vision double.  A thick warm cloth closed over my head and plunged my eyes into darkness; the theft of fresh air stifled my breathing.  I screamed out, but a heavy pressure slammed against the coarse, salty tasting bag gagging me, as a mouthful of the coarse fabric was shoved into the back of my throat.  Sharped edged plastic wire ties closed around my wrists with a loud
zip
, while I retched and coughed until the material was gone from my airways.  My throat scorched and ached, tears flooded my eyes, stinging and biting my lids.  Anger and panic ripped through me when I tried to move my hands to lift the hood off, only to feel the sharp pain of the tight plastic ties that bound me. 

“Shhh…” A low voiced hissed, seeping warm breath through the material and into my ear.  Hot sweaty hands forced my shoulders down until my body was lying facedown on the cold tiled floor.  The slow, strong roll of his hips over my ass again and again had me choking, and I struggled frantically to break free.  “I love watching you fight, pet.  If I only knew months ago how much of a challenge you’d be, I would have tried to break you sooner. This is quite fun, wife, I might even keep you alive as my pet,” he hissed.  His hips continued their relentless obscene taunting thrusts, and even through our layers of clothes, I could feel the bruises form and my skin scrape with the friction.

Sick fuck.

Sick.  Sick.  Sick fuck
.  I struggled to scream, to push the heavy material out of my mouth with my tongue, but the end result was me just gagging on the cloth as it filled my mouth more.

 A heavy pressure on my head crushed my face against the ground, as I struggled and kicked out my legs, then the sharp precise burn of a needle into the flesh of my arm brought me to the precipice of oblivion.  My thoughts shrieked in utter horror, as the surge of whatever poison flushed like pure acid through my veins.  The heat coming off his skin seeped into mine, as he gathered my torso roughly in his arms and dragged my body along the ground.  My legs and arms weakened until I could no longer move them on my own volition.  The floor tiles scratched and scraped beneath me, as he towed my body to whatever destination he wished.

I had no say.

He was supposed to think I was dead.

David’s going to kill me, and Kade is going to break completely.

“Kade,” I garbled weakly into the darkness of the cloth, as I plunged into a black hole of nothingness.

Please, God, just don’t let Kade find my body.  Please, please, please don’t hurt him again like that.  Please don’t hurt him again. 

Please.

Just let him think I left.

It’ll be easier…

To forget me…

If he…

Hates…

Me…

Chapter 9

While Samantha Matthews-Tucseedo, who-bloody-ever she was, continued her bloody fucking life without me, I stood somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean from her, under Europe’s cloudy skies, on the cracked foundation of my past.

Saint fucking Benedict’s,
where high school students come to die
. 
England’s best educator for the criminally insane and mass murderers
.  My beloved bloody high school.
Bitter, much, you ask
.  Fuck yes, I’m bitter.  Tragedy makes people bitter; it makes you petty, hateful, and vicious.  My doctors had told me eighty-five percent of all gunshot wounds are fucking survivable.  Only a half an inch difference would have made all the bloody difference between life and death for me.  If only Thomas had raised his hands a bit more that day, aimed that gun a tad bit higher, I would have never had to deal with any of this suffocating grief.

With muscles coiled, I pulled myself though a glassless window, falling into an empty abandoned corridor.  My shoes echoed a loud slap against the cracked floor.  Sharp concrete scraped against the flesh of my hands.  I smelled blood instantly, yet all I felt, was numbness. 

I walked with a purpose, a destination.  Decay peeled at the walls, rot and mildew crawled along the ground. It was the place that nightmares lived, a backdrop for horror movies.  Thick vines of ivy crawled through the windows and scaled the walls long ago.  Desks and chairs were everywhere, toppled over, encased in strands of ivy.

For sixteen years, I’ve lived with emptiness and darkness in my heart. Since Thomas shot a hole through my chest with a 9mm, complete with a motherfucking exit wound,
and
the bullet blasting into the wall behind me.  It was a black hole too, one of those massive objects in space caused by the gravitational collapse of my world. A star exploding as a supernova so intensely, it sucked everyone into my darkness. I let the violence of that day define who I was as a man.  I spent my adulthood hidden inside the walls of my house, writing about the horror of violence. Yet, there were never adequate words to reveal the hell and destruction of what it really was.  There would never be any way to explain the absolute primal agony, mental, emotional, and pure fucking physical agony that comes with such torture and grief.  Every goddamn night after the massacre, I prayed for my ending. I hated every breath I took, each and every single healthy one.  I should have died that day.  I was the first one hit, he blamed everything on me,
fuck,
Thomas said it was
all my fault
.  Said it was everybody’s bloody fault. 

The abandoned school walls spun around me, blurred and pulsed. An icy breath of life flickered through the corridor, and a lone loose door swung slowly in its upward draft.  The cold vacant hallway welcomed me like an old friend.  I could hear the echoes of the other students, voices loud and laughing, unknowingly walking towards the last chapter in the book of their lives.

Suddenly, I was sixteen again, awkward in my body, carefree and innocent, unaware of the horrors that my life had in store for me.

I could taste the last smooth drag of my Marlboro, before I held it between my thumb and middle finger and flicked it into the street.  Thomas and I, always sneaking drags before each class.  He was laughing about something that morning, chuckling about some project he was going to be a part of, and how excited he was finally to show me what the bloody hell he was talking about.

“This is a killer project, mate,” he laughed.  “Best thing I ever bloody thought up, and it’s all for you.”

Distinct, astonishingly precise details were coming to life around me.  Inconsequential bits and pieces of the minutes
before
, the last few beautiful moments of my youth.  Standing there in that abandoned school, I remembered them all.  In.  Exact.  Horrifying.  Flashbacks.

Running up the stairs, the soles of my Converse hit the ground, echoing, echoing their tap-tap-taps.

Thomas’ boots
slap-slap-clump
against the tiles.  His deep laughter as he climbed higher up the steps, racing me to class.

The rustling of the leather jacket I wore and the smell of cigarette smoke lingering on my clothes. 

The creak of the classroom door.  The look-through glass smudged with grit and dirt.

Mrs. Turner’s smile.  Her big blue eyes.  Long lashes, blinked, and smiled.

Ticking of the classroom clock above her desk.  Tick.  Tock.  Tick.  Tock.

Blink and smile.

Dusty white chalk tickling the back of my throat. 

My girlfriend, Lizbeth, flipping the pages of a book.  Paper against paper.  Pencil twirled around a brown lock of hair.

Then, Thomas was holding a gun, standing in front of the door, blocking the exit.  Smiling.

Shooting.

And
smiling
.