by Ace Gray
Diego slammed his beer into Dantè’s and predictably, Dantè made quick work of it. Each chug tugged at the corner of my smile, and by the time he finished, I was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. If it hadn’t been so damned important to watch his perfect ass plummet, I would have joined him in Wonderland. Because that’s what the drugs I had slipped him would do—turn this house, our house into a land of caterpillars and queens. And mushrooms. Of course there’d be mushrooms.
I rolled my eyes but my smile widened as I reached for the nearest barely clothed woman and pulled her between my knees.
“Hey,” she balked until she turned around and saw me. “Oh, Danger, it’s you.”
“Fuck yeah it is.”
She blushed as she shrunk away from me, pretending to be shy, but then her hips started to move. Into my crotch. I laughed as she began to work my body like a pole where I leaned against a countertop. This was the perfect way to pass the time until Dantè Rogue’s world folded in on itself.
The slut was making out with my neck when I first noticed—so subtle I almost missed it. He was dancing, his hands tracing Mercy, then he whoozed. His hands flexed and his eyes unfocused, and for just a moment, Dantè Rogue’s perfect little facade was gone. He was gone.
But then he snapped back.
His eyes refocused and his body slid against hers but there was the slightest question hanging on his features. My insides warmed just knowing that it was starting. And when he blacked out completely, it was like lightning struck. I’d never been so warm and goddamn tingly inside. Wicked was a heady drug.
Vengeance too. Though he’d never done anything I really needed revenge for, it was fun to level the playing field. Or tip it toward my heavy feet. Whatever.
And when the pristine, perfect Dantè Rogue puffed up his chest and fought the guy that randomly touched Mercy, I laughed. A big fucking belly chuckle that made the girl hanging from my neck look up at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. Whatever it was—fury, retaliation, a little drunk, a little high, batshit fucking crazy—it felt good. No, great. Only a small part of it was because Dantè’s drugged up ass had given me a motive and made tonight that much easier.
“Grab his feet,” I commanded as Rousse and Diego came around the corner of the back shed.
“Oh my God, did you kill him already?” Rousse asked as he pulled his gloves from his back pocket.
“No, he’s just out.”
“This the bastard that put his hands on Mercy?” Diego asked, as he kicked the body I was dragging through the woods. “I’ll gladly kill him for that.”
“How do we make this work? The timelines, framing him, all that shit,” Rousse asked as he reached for the dude’s ankles.
“Good question,” I said as I dropped the body.
“He just left the house. Haven’t a fucking clue what for,” Diego volunteered.
“We grab Dantè when he comes back. Before she sees him.” If I wasn’t the ringleader, this whole fucking circus was going to get eaten by lions.
“You have to drag this dude. If it was just Dantè, he could only drag him, and since you started, you have to finish.” Rousse was suddenly a wealth of information. “Consistent weight and pressure and shit.”
“What about footprints?” Diego asked just before jumping onto a downed log.
“Can’t erase them. Make more maybe?”
“Who knew Rousse, who can’t string twelve steps together, can plan a fucking murder?” I chuckled again.
“You mean who knew I thought about the future and wasn’t a complete idiot?” he snapped. “Dantè that’s who.”
“God, are we doing this whole I have a conscience thing again?” Diego rolled his eyes where he stood in the sliver of moonlight just before he jumped back down to earth. “It was getting tired a month ago.”
“Forgive me for thinking through ruining a friend’s life and taking another’s.” Rousse, for once, didn’t seem phased by the ribbing.
“At this point, all any of us need to know is are you in, or are you out? You sick of playing second string or not?” I said it sharp and clear so they would both know that this was done. That this was happening.
“It’s not a good enough reason…” Rousse trailed off.
“Not what I asked.” I didn’t give a fuck about the reasons anymore. Getting what I wanted was plenty good enough.
“Yes, I’m in,” he snapped back.
I didn’t bother with a response; I just started dragging the soon-to-be corpse down the trail as my smile spread. Diego whooped in his usually way, which gave a certain lightness to the deep of the dark night forest. It gave levity to something that should have weighed a million pounds.
It reminded me of that night. With the mud for face paint. As I dumped the limp body next to the fire ring and reached for the shards of glass that always seemed to be nearby, I thought about painting my face again. About the satisfaction I’d get from showing the monster within. And if it hadn’t been evidence, if there wasn’t a chance it would have gotten me caught instead of Dantè, when I stabbed the guy and his body seized and his eyes flew open just in time for blood to seep out of his torso wound, I would have painted my face again. But this time, with blood.
I was gone.
Time was gone.
When it came back, we were in the kitchen, and Mercy was dabbing the back of my neck with a cool towel. My heart was racing as I shook and there was vomit beneath me where I bent over the sink. She was touching me, I should have felt her fingertips, instead I saw her. I saw what she looked like where she stood behind me, almost like I was floating above us. There was genuine fear painted across her face, and her body shook too, though hers came from her heart not her central nervous system.
Beneath her hands, I was a man unhinged. Something was bound to split out of my sweat soaked skin. But I couldn’t feel that either. I was a character in the movie unfolding in front of me. The longer it played out, the harder it was to tell what kind of genre I was stuck in. I tried to tell myself romance but the world started fading out and blurring again, then it blew out with that whomp in my ears, and it went dark.
All of it.
And when I woke, I had my real answer.
Horror.
Blood coated my hands where I knelt in the muck of the forest. Pine needles were matted beneath my knees, the mud and moss cold against my shins. Only the wind sounded in the ancient towering pines, drowning out the crash of the ocean way below the cliffs, spiriting away any hint of salt. My heartbeat blared in my ears when I realized I was alone.
Sort of.
The lifeless body of the man that had tried to put his hands on Mercy was beneath me twisted into a broken, gruesome shape.
Six Months Later…
I. Don’t. Know.
The three words had taken over my life. In the six months since I was arrested, tried, and convicted, those three words were the world I inhabited.
I could remember the hot stick of blood on my hands, and the horror that struck a hole inside my gut as I realized it came from a body beneath me. The wind whipped cold on the edge of the cliff—our cliff—that I had ruined. Or had I?
I didn’t know!
My tears stung my cheeks even now when I thought about the kid, the lifeless kid destroyed beneath me. The rocks, as I crashed to my knees beside him, had left the smallest scars for a time that were only now fading away. Like me.
The lights—blue, red, blue, red—blinding. I only wish the sirens could have drowned out Mercy’s screams. They were the sound I still heard, hollow for a moment before they filled with disgust and terror. No matter how hard I sifted through that night, I couldn’t figure out if those feelings were toward me or for me. Or because I’d left her alone.
More things I couldn’t answer.
Like the endless questions from the police and then the prosecution. Who was he? Why would I kill him? Why was I out there? When had I left everyone inside? I couldn’t answer a single one. Where were your friends? Was I
on drugs? I. Didn’t. Know.
But they seemed to.
They painted the picture of an entitled kid who was rolling on ecstasy cut with ketamine when some random guy fucked with his girl. The party was too loud, too wild for anyone to hear the tussle out back where the light of the party wouldn’t reach the cliff. There were so many kids there; no one had a reason to know I was missing.
A bloody glass shiv cleaned off with my dirty laundry—the same towel I’d used to gently clean my cum, or ejactulatory DNA, from Mercy’s beautiful body that very morning—was a pointed nail in my coffin.
And I had no defense.
After all, I didn’t know.
Then all too quickly and with the heavy, jarring clank of a metal door, I traded all the unknown of that night for prison. That was a totally different unknown.
“What are you in for?” The graveled disembodied voice from next door asked the same question I’d answered too many times today.
“Murder,” I answered softly, my voice betraying the fear weighing on my chest.
“The pretty, perfect boy with a dark side.” The man laughed and a few inmates around us joined in. “Are you guilty?”
“I don’t know.” I almost choked on the bitter words.
“That’s a new one. Usually you freaks end up in some psych ward.”
I turned over on the thin, lumpy mattress and looked for the stars. For Cassiopeia.
It was too hard to think about Mercy now. She was gone forever and not just because of my sentence and our separation but because I was this. I was this and I’d left her. I’d broken my promises. And in a way that was as permanent and solid as the bars I now lived behind. She’d forgive me if I let her but I wouldn’t forgive myself. I wouldn’t let her either.
But the stars…I could search for something to keep my humanity, and her memory, in the stars.
“If you wanna stay in here and out of a straightjacket, you’re guilty or not guilty, boy. Hear me?”
I tried to swallow the knot in my throat but didn’t answer.
“It’s not much here, but it’s better than there.” He rolled over on his mattress, the same depressing sound as mine echoing into the empty cell block.
“I don’t give a fuck where I am. I don’t know that I give a fuck about anything.” And when I thought about what I’d lost, what I wasn’t getting back, and that I didn’t really know how any of it had happened, that was the truth.
“Oh boy.” He laughed again. “Lesson number one, don’t be so goddamned naive.”
The sun was bright and harsh in the yard. It wasn’t a pop-up basketball game or a bench press fest like I expected from the movies. It was a cracked slab of concrete surrounded by chain link and razor wire, where a bunch of thugs swaggered and threatened each other.
“Scared?” The same graveled voice from the cell next door asked.
I turned to find a weathered stranger. He looked Native American with long jet black hair and deep wrinkles that made troughs around his permanently downturned lips. He wore a tear drop tattoo dripping from the corner of his eye. He studied me through squinty and utterly dark eyes until the light shifted and he had to lift a hand to keep up his evaluation.
“Fine, don’t answer.” He stopped his hand and arched his eyebrow. “You reek of fear anyhow.”
“I do not,” I shot back.
His wild and wicked laugh drew the attention of a few people in the yard. I shrunk back.
“I’m Ari. Around here they call me The Priest.”
“The Priest?”
“I’ll make you see God.” His lips peeled back, and his teeth were yellowing, dingy along his gums. Shivers wracked my spine.
I swallowed and stepped back. Into another hard body. I humphed when I hit.
“Mmmmm, I love fresh meat.” The man behind me leaned in and his hot breath blasted my shoulder. His hand drifted on my hip and I tried to jerk away. His hand found my neck lightning fast and kept me back against his body. “He yours Priest?”
“He can be,” Priest answered as he crossed his arms across his chest and eyed me from behind his upturned nose.
He’d been right before. I was likely a queasy shade of green or a sullen shade of purple. My bones chattered and acid churned in my belly. I was scared. Of everything. Of what I’d maybe done. Of what I’d lost. Of being in prison. Of what I would become. But I hadn’t thought about the details. If I had, I would have admitted I was terrified of being abused and broken. Of being raped. Of being someone’s. I’d only ever been Mercy’s, and since I’d lost that, I just wanted to be my own.
But choice is a funny thing. The absence of it even more so. An answer as real as the sunbeams filtering into this yard materialized.
“I’m Priest’s,” I managed through my tightening throat, choosing what seemed like the lesser of two evils.
The hand behind me disappeared and I dropped to the concrete, searing my knees and digging gravel into my palms. I felt that night—the things I knew and didn’t know—all over again. The last tiny shred of the pride I had was the only thing that kept me from rolling over and surrendering to the tears watering in the corners of my eyes.
“Good choice kid.” Priest grabbed me by the arm and yanked me up to standing. He searched my face once, twice, then started pulling me toward the corner of the yard. My feet tried to keep up but they were victim to the desperation shutting my body parts down. And they were parts I was starting to think I’d never get back.
“Get your shit together, boy,” he snarled as he shoved me up against the chain link fence.
The tears that had welled up behind my eyes freed themselves from the corners, one to cover each cheek. Priest’s big hand made to move them off, slow and gentle, like a lover’s caress. Fear churned with revulsion inside my stomach. Agony ripped at my chest as I anticipated his touch. His hand moving over me. Down me. I reminded myself that I’d chosen him, I’d chosen this.
I closed my eyes, picturing Mercy. Praying that the way I’d tried to etch her in my memory would hold even when it wasn’t her hands on me. When I was forced to do the things that actually are real in the movies, I would try and picture her. Her hands on me, on my dick, on my ass. Not theirs.
Never theirs.
A stinging slap sent my brain sloshing in my skull and my eyes shooting wide open. I tensed, my body taut like a rubber band ready to snap in any which direction. I tried to focus on Priest. On his face. Desperate to read what he might do next to me. A second and surprise backhand to the opposite cheek jarred my brain again and kept my focus blurred.
“You will not cry in here.” He crossed his arms again and studied me as if I was a bug he might squash. “Bitches cry.”
I nodded as I sniveled.
“Bitches don’t make it out alive. Not even I can save you if you cry.”
I nodded again as I sucked it in and shoved it down.
“I don’t know how the world worked where you came from. I don’t care. You can be guilty. Not guilty. Whatever.” He reached one hand out to the chain link beside my head and leaned in. “But in here, you’re hard. You’re ruthless. You’re vengeful.”
I swallowed, knowing I was none of those things. Not even knowing where to start with being those things. My life had been good. Things had come easy. But now…How to be this, how to be something utterly foreign and wrong, wasn’t easy at all. It felt as hopeless as the drab color of my scrub-like jumpsuit that matched the concrete walls.
“Say it.”
“Say what,” I choked out.
His free hand flew again, crashing into my cheekbone and making my eye squeeze shut to keep it popping out.
“You are hard, you are ruthless, you are vengeful.” The spit that flew on his words splattered my face.
The tears threatened to pour out again but I shoved them down. I let myself think back to things said in court that made me seem so wicked, so guilty. I heard them anew in the lawyer’s voices and even one or two of the misinterpreted sentences in m
y friends, my love’s voice. I washed myself in them, in the hatred that spewed in that mahogany filled courtroom. And for the first time, I let myself believe I’d killed Leo Villeres, and that I deserved to be here.
I still might have stuttered on the words, on the reality of my guilt, but it made it easier to say, “I am hard. I am ruthless, I am vengeful.”
I had once taken a series of photos of broken mirrors that Dantè and I’d found in an empty warehouse. Some were shattered in their frames; some had turned into shards and blanketed the concrete. I recognized each one as my insides now.
Dantè was gone. Taken from me in the cruelest of ways. And my life had split apart because of it. Sometimes I was broken; sometimes I was completely shattered. All the time, I felt wrong. So wrong.
See, the thing about me was, I was always broken—like born broken—and only Dantè had ever bothered to mend those cracks. Without him, they started to show again. The crevices filled with the loneliness I’d always known and the once mended pieces started to drift apart. Back to where I’d always known them to be. Only this time, it hurt. It hurt like putting my hand to a fire, subtle at first and then searing as the flames lit the whole damn thing on fire.
I was lit on fire.
And doused in ice cold water all at once.
Because I’d known what different could feel like. I knew it healed. And I wasn’t healed anymore. I was split apart. Like the mirrors. Again.
My fingers trembled as I reached for the envelope. The courier font said California Prison System, but I knew the letter said so much more. It said when and where I could put my life back together.
The fibrous rip of the paper tugged against the skin of my thumb and made a crisp sound as it cut through the quiet in the kitchen. It was always quiet in the kitchen now; I couldn’t bring myself to cook. I pulled the thick letter out of its confines and felt the weave of the paper beneath my fingertips just before I read it.
We regret to inform you that your application for visitation rights to prisoner 4356 has been denied…
