Shadow of Nevermore

by Lilly Black

  "You don't get to choose that, Olivia," Liana protested, but despite that she was terrified by what Olivia could do to Aiden, she wasn't shouting because she knew Aiden was in the wrong.

  "The hell I don't," she said, then she turned to Alek and John. "Take him!"

  "Take him where?" Liana asked, her voice pleading as the men positioned themselves on either side of Aiden, who had no intention of fighting them if they tried to grab him.

  "He's going to sit in chains and watch the video from Death Row until he understands what those women went through!"

  "I understand, Olivia," he admitted. "I understand better than you'll ever know, but that doesn't mean we should be as cruel as those we sentence. That wasn't about justice. It was about revenge, and you know it."

  "So. Fucking. What?" she roared. "If it makes the survivors feel better, what difference does it make?"

  "Would you feel that way if Rundo's child was watching?" he asked.

  "In this world? Yes."

  "Then what about the women he raped, then? Once they've had time to heal, they might have questions, they might want to know what drove him to do what he did, and now they'll never have that chance!" Aiden was shouting, working himself into a frenzy, and as Alek and John stood at his sides, they both watched Olivia intently for nonverbal cues that she felt she was in danger. Perhaps she should have; his posture alone was threatening enough, but she was a stubborn woman.

  "I guarantee you none of those women give a rat's ass why he did it," she argued.

  "You've never been in their position. You don't get to speak for them."

  "You don't know shit about my past," she spat. "And there is no explanation he could possibly give them that would make the slightest difference in how much damage he did to them physically, psychologically, and sexually! Rundo and Brock got what they deserved!"

  "You just keep telling yourself that, Olivia. You know, if it weren't for people like you, maybe I wouldn't be a fucking orphan," he hissed, and the room fell silent. This was something nobody knew about him, so nobody understood how it related to the current situation, and they were all too stunned to speak. After a few seconds, Aiden's shoulders fell as he sighed. "I'm sorry. I should have handled this differently. If you need to take me into custody, I understand. I won't fight."

  Olivia looked to the others for clues to tell her how to proceed. John and Alek remained prepared to do whatever she thought was best, but Liana pleaded with her eyes. She wanted to be the one to get to the bottom of this, and understanding that, Olivia decided to let her friend handle it...for now.

  "Only the people in this room know what happened tonight," she said. "I'm not promising that it will always stay that way, but we don't have to tell anyone yet. Aiden, though we obviously have a lot to talk about, I think you need to get your head straight first, and sitting in a cell won't make that happen. Let's all sleep on it and pick this up tomorrow."

  "Yeah, that's fine," Aiden acquiesced, embarrassed by what he had shared.

  "Okay," she said, and as she turned to leave, Liana mouthed the words, "thank you."

  "Get your shit together, man," Alek whispered to Aiden, and they headed toward the door. Once they were outside, Olivia asked Alek to arrange to have guards posted outside their cabin until further notice.

  "You're an orphan?" Liana asked as soon as the others were gone, and Aiden slumped onto the couch.

  "Yeah," he said. "I was raised by my father's sister after my parents were killed."

  "Killed?"

  "I don't like to talk about it. I don't think I've ever told anyone."

  "Tell me, Aiden. There's nothing that could ever change how I feel about you," she urged him on, and realizing that he had to let it out, he sighed and began.

  "I was so young when it happened. My aunt in Canada adopted me, so I just started calling her mom, and did my best to forget..."

  Aiden's father, Charles, was from Joliette, a small town outside Montreal, and his mother, Marianne, was from Burlington, Vermont. They had met at a high school party, and later when they were married, his father moved to Vermont where they bought a house and started a family. Once Aiden was a teenager, his aunt finally told him the truth about his childhood.

  Everything between his parents had been wonderful for the first few years of their marriage, but after his older sister, Starla, was born, his father noticed that his wife had become withdrawn. She began attending church, something she had never done in all the time he'd known her, and she spent less and less romantic time with Charles. He tried going to church with her to see if maybe their teachings were the reason she had changed, but it was just a standard Presbyterian church. It took several uneventful Sundays for him to realize that his wife was completely misinterpreting the sermons. It was as if they were not even hearing the same words.

  Charles opened a dialogue about it, but only after arguments that nearly destroyed the marriage did Marianne agree to counseling sessions. They started therapy together, and gradually their home life began to return to normal. By the time Aiden was born, it was as if that chapter had never happened, but shortly thereafter, Marianne began to revert back, taking her newborn son and five-year-old daughter to a hellfire and damnation church and ceaselessly poring over a bible full of highlights and notes. Eventually, everything became a sin to her.

  What Charles didn't know was that in her early teens, Marianne had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though well-managed by medication, she had still hidden it from him for their entire marriage, taking the labels off of her pill bottles and lying about what they were for, and she had always been so secretive about them, he didn't even notice when she stopped taking them during both pregnancies. After her children's birth, her therapist had been able to get her to start taking them again, but eventually her new church persuaded her otherwise. They disavowed all pharmaceuticals as attempts to evade the will of God, and psychiatric drugs were considered the will of the devil, created to silence modern day prophets. The change in Marianne was gradual, but eventually she reached a full blown psychotic state in which she became convinced that her youngest child, 3-year-old Aiden, was the son of Satan.

  Charles had no idea how bad it had become. He traveled for work, and when he was home, though he was annoyed by his wife's extreme religiosity, she never showed him signs that she was dangerous. In her twisted reality, she couldn't trust him either, and she believed he would stand in her way when she decided that it was her responsibility to send the devil's child back to Hell.

  There was only one night of the year when she believed it would be possible - Halloween, when the portal to Hell would open. She planned it carefully, and even though her husband would be home that night, she knew he would be asleep by eleven, giving her at least an hour to perform the ritual she had fabricated in her mind.

  As Aiden's father slept, his mother stood at the kitchen stove, bringing a pot of water to a boil while her 3-year-old son played on the floor at her feet and her 8-year-old daughter sat awake upstairs in her room, angry that she was missing out on trick-or-treating with her friends for another year. Starla had plans of her own, to sneak out and go to her friend's house a few streets over to get some candy, and shortly after eleven when she expected her parents to be asleep, she tiptoed down the stairs.

  Instead, she heard her mother in the kitchen, chanting words that terrified the young girl, who almost went back upstairs. Then she heard her little brother cry out.

  "No, Mommy, No!"

  Concerned, Starla quietly crept down the hallway into the kitchen where she saw that her mother had drawn a circle on the linoleum and bound young Aiden in the center of it with rope and nails driven into the floor. She had cut him and was adding his blood to the large pot on the stove as Starla peeked around the corner. Though their mother did a fine job of hiding her ill thoughts from her husband, she never even tried to hide them from her children, thinking them too naive to be concerned. Though Aiden was, Starla was eight, and based on the strange an
d frightening things she had heard her mother say lately, she immediately knew something bad was about to happen. She slipped back down the hall and called 9-1-1, then she returned to the kitchen to try to talk some sense into her mother.

  As she entered, Marianne picked up the pot and walked across the room toward the small, scared boy. Starla didn't know what was in the pot, but she could see the steam rising and hear the gurgling sounds as it continued to boil. When her mother stood over Aiden, she began to chant again, and Starla realized she was about to pour whatever was in that pot over Aiden. Without the slightest hesitation, she did the only thing she could think of, rushing to her baby brother and throwing herself on top of him, shielding him with her own body just as Marianne turned the pot upside down, emptying the boiling water.

  It splashed over Starla, covering her back and scorching her flesh, and the cry that came out of her was so gut wrenching, Aiden remembered the sound to this day. It was loud enough to wake their father upstairs, and he grabbed his gun, thinking someone had broken into their house. By the time he made it to the kitchen, his wife had thrown Starla off of her little brother and was kneeling over Aiden with a knife.

  "What are you doing? Stop!" Charles cried as both of his children screamed in terror and pain.

  "You don't understand!" Marianne roared. "He's the antichrist! We have to send him back to Hell!"

  "Honey, Please," he begged, raising his gun. "You're not well. Aiden's our son. He's not the antichrist."

  "He's poisoned you! You can't see him for what he is, but I can and I have to stop him from destroying the world!" With that, she raised her arm up to plunge the blade into her child's heart, and Aiden's father pulled the trigger, killing his wife just as the police stepped onto the porch. Hearing gunshots, they kicked down the door and rushed into the kitchen where they saw two bodies on the floor and Aiden's father holding a gun. They opened fire.

  Little Aiden was the only survivor. His sister stayed conscious long enough to give her testimony to the police before she slipped into a coma and died two days later from her severe burns, but even if she hadn't been able to tell the police what happened, Aiden remembered it. He didn't remember the chanting or his mother accusing him of being the antichrist, but he remembered his beloved big sister saving him. It was seared into his mind, not to be overwritten like all of his other memories from the first five years of life.

  Now Liana knew almost everything Aiden did about that night. Almost. There was a part of it he was still keeping to himself because he wasn't ready to share. Though the secret he kept had plagued him ever since, he knew it was insignificant in the face of his sister's and father's deaths.

  "I never got to ask Starla why she sacrificed herself to save me," he said as he cried in Liana's arms. "I never got the chance to know my mother when she was on her medication, and I never got the chance to grow up with a father because some overzealous cops decided to shoot first and ask questions later. There's always someone out there who deserves a chance to ask those questions if we can give it to them, Liana, and there's always a chance when we rush to judgment that we'll execute the wrong guy. My dad and my sister saved my life that night, and they both paid for it with their own. I just feel like I owe it to them not to become like that cop, to make sure if I'm going to be a part of taking away someone's life, it's a last resort."

  "Of course," she said, tears streaming down her face as she held him. "Is that why you wanted to let Rundo and Brock go?"

  "I didn't want to let them go. I just wanted to let them live," he said. "I know I'm wrong in this world, but when went to visit the doctor in the jail cell, he told me more about those guys. They had children - children who might still be out there somewhere alive. I just couldn't stand the idea of orphaning them when we didn't have to. I'm not saying I think we could rehabilitate them. I just thought maybe... I don't know. I feel like we're becoming the monsters we're trying to save the world from. How is Olivia any better than Rundo and Brock?"

  "You can't mean that. Those men raped women and little girls to death. Olivia would never kill an innocent person."

  "Billy Behney," Aiden said sternly, and even though she understood why Olivia killed him, she also understood Aiden's point, especially when he added, "The community may have voted for it, but she's the one responsible. She could have brought him into the fold under guard and shown him that his concerns about this place were unfounded, but instead she used fear to get what she wanted from the community and showed us all that he had every reason to be concerned."

  Maybe I have created a monster, Liana thought. The concept of the Bloody Queen was all her doing, and despite her adamant protests, Olivia had slipped into the role like a comfortable chair...or throne. Liana just wasn't sure who was right, and in the world they lived in, she had no idea how to figure it out either.

  Day 58

  Olivia and Alek

  It had been four days since Olivia and Alek shared a bed, and once more a pivotal night together came on the heels of an execution. She was beginning to feel ghoulish, particularly because she wasn't fazed in the least. Rundo and Brock deserved much worse than they got, and if anything, she was angry because of the stunt Aiden pulled. By all rights, he should be in a cell, and Olivia's inflated sense of justice tormented her. It wasn't right. If anyone else in the community had done what Aiden did, they would be awaiting trial, and it was important to Olivia that their position not afford them any special treatment. The Deadfall was a community of equals, even if they did call her queen.

  "What's the matter, baby?" Alek asked as they turned down the sheets.

  "Nothing," she said, giving him a warm smile and pushing the thought out of her head. He had just spent the last four nights knowing that she was in bed with another man, and there was no way she was going to let Aiden cause her to make Alek think she was anything less than thrilled to be back in his arms. As soon as they lay down, he pulled her to him.

  "Are you sure?" he asked.

  "I've just missed you so much," she purred, reaching down and grabbing his cock through his boxer briefs. She felt an intense flood of excitement as he grew hard in her hand, and he quickly shed his underwear, obliterating any lingering thought about the evening's events when he rolled her onto her back and positioned himself atop her, his erection grinding gently into her.

  "You missed me or my cock," he teased.

  "You, of course."

  "So, you'd rather just cuddle tonight, then?"

  "Well, no, but.."

  "But?"

  "Okay," she admitted. "I missed your cock."

  "That's what I thought," he said with a smile as he reached down to guide himself inside her.

  "I missed your tongue, too," she whispered in his ear, and he laughed.

  "I fucking love you," he said, and just before he drove her to the edge of madness, Olivia's last thought was about how smooth this night that she had expected to be marred by jealousy was going. Alek's thoughts were all centered on his urge to overwrite any pleasure she experienced in his absence, and he did everything within his power to accomplish it, leaving her a devastated mass of tingling flesh beneath him.

  "I missed you, too," he breathed as he slid to lie beside her on the bed, and she melted into his arms, her head on his chest. "So, was it still good?"

  "What the hell does that mean? Of course, it was," she said, her confusion exacerbated by the fuck high.

  "I just meant now that you have a recent basis for comparison."

  "Alek," she groaned, thinking the jealousy she was anticipating had finally come out, but that wasn't exactly his point.

  "I'm just curious is all," he said, trying to minimize the true inappropriateness of his question.

  "No one's better. It's just different."

  "Different how?" he asked.

  "You tell me first. What's it like with Amina?" she asked, hoping that flipping it on him would put a stop to it.

  "I don't love Amina. It's just sex."

  "But
is it good sex? Does she know little tricks I don't? Was it better? Hotter? Wetter? Tighter?"

  "What? No, none of those things," he insisted.

  "Same is true for me."

  "Those aren't all really applicable, Olivia."

  "No? Just because I'd need lube if I fucked you doesn't mean that it can't be wetter, and tighter is definitely a thing, so if you would like to get on all fours, I'll go get a toy from the stockroom, and we can find out."

  "Is that what you did with Reid?" he asked.

  "I have and I will again sooner or later."

  "Okay," he said. "Pencil me in for tomorrow."

  "You're going to let me fuck you just because Reid lets me?" she asked, and he paused, looking down sheepishly before answering her.

  "No," he said finally. "I've actually been curious about it since...well, since I was a jerk and read your diary."

  "Well, why didn't you say so?" she asked with a devilish grin.

  "Now, I'm getting nervous. You seem way too happy about this."

  "Oh, I am," she said, her demeanor no less disconcerting, and Alek wondered what he had gotten himself into.

  Guess I'll find out tomorrow, he thought nervously.

  Day 59

  Dani was still in bed when Jax got up for an early morning shift at the gate. He still didn't know how last night had gone. Part of him had wanted to be there to punish Rundo and Brock, but he trusted that no matter what, Olivia would see to it that they got what they deserved. He was more concerned with Dr. Farrell. Though the women had vouched for him, they hadn't been there when he put that poor girl out in the yard to be cannibalized as the blood from a miscarriage still flowed down her legs, and that had put Jax in a horrible position, forcing him to watch her fate with no way to help. He couldn't even rush out of hiding to put a bullet in her brain to ease her suffering lest he give himself away.

  Rundo and Brock were surely dead, but Jax still woke with a feeling of unease that would last the whole day. It was made even worse when he quietly kissed Dani on the forehead and whispered goodbye only to notice that she wasn't wearing her rings. He couldn't think of any reason that he should have caught her without them twice already when she had seemed so happy to receive them. He didn't know that they had fallen off her fingers during sex yesterday and rolled beneath the bed where she would find them later.