by N. K. Love
“What happened to him?”
“Beth, it’s not relevant.”
“No sugar coating, Jax. All or nothing.”
“Fuck.” He mutters under his breath, sighing aloud and shaking his head. Jax starts pacing the room. Obviously he’d not planned to tell me this part. “Beth.” He warns me again.
“Everything, Jax.”
“Okay—his wife was gang raped and murdered.” I gasp, instinctively clasping my hand to my mouth. “After killing his wife, the gang kidnapped his daughter and abused her for six months. She was fourteen. The gang dumped her when they’d had enough and moved on without a trace. They were never found.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s awful.” Jax continues pacing the room in silence, whilst I try to get my head around what he’s telling me. “That poor girl, Jax… So, after suffering such a loss, your friend, the boss, decided to start his own gang?”
Jax walks back over to sit beside me and takes my hand, cocooning it within his strong, warm hands.
“It’s not like that, Beth. His life had been turned inside out. The damage was permanent. The boss ripped himself apart with blame. He was a powerful man and very well contacted, so he used those connections to delve into criminal cases where the accused was let off on technicalities and that quickly escalated in case after case of guilty people not getting what they deserved. Either they avoided prison altogether or prison was too good for them. A lot of cases didn’t even involve the courts or the police. Sometimes the unreported cases were the worst. Regardless, the boss took matters into his own hands. He fought for the vulnerable. He selflessly stood up to the monsters when nobody else would or could. He carefully recruited men he could trust along the way.”
“Jax, what happened to his daughter?”
“He got her into counselling, that’s where he made more connections with social workers and victim support officers. Over a couple of years, she did a one-eighty. Apparently, she went from a quiet, fragile teenager into a ruthless woman. She learned how to gain strength from her ordeal so that she didn’t let the twisted, evil fuckers win. She became heavily involved in her father’s work, against his better judgement, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer… Years later—she introduced me to the Unit.”
“Carmel.” I whisper as I fix the warped pieces together.
“Carmel.”
“Jax, I thought Chloe’s death and your guilt… and the drugs… I thought that was the worst. I thought that was your darkness, your hidden past. But that’s not everything, is it?”
Jax shakes his head and my heart drops into the pit of my stomach. His touch feels different. I snatch my hand away from his without thinking and he starts rubbing his head back and forth.
“It gets uglier, Beth.”
I feel hollow inside. Jax knows me and he was convinced that this conversation would push me away. As certain he is of that, I was just as certain that my love for him would hold strong. Have I been stupid again? Have I put on my ignorant blinkers, which render it impossible for logic to prevail over emotion?
“I don’t want to know.”
I blurt the words out before I’ve even registered them myself.
“What?”
He looks back up at me in confusion.
“I’m scared that you’re right—that I can’t handle it—that we won’t be able to move on from this. No matter how much I want to.”
“Beth, I didn’t think that you could and I wasn’t going to push you. But—but we need this now. You need to know everything so that we can have a fighting chance of being together. You said it yourself and that’s what I want too. I want to be with you and this time I will fight for us.”
“That’s unfair, Jax.”
We sit in an uncomfortable silence whilst I try to gather my thoughts, which seem to have scattered like debris. He doesn’t try to touch me. He just waits patiently for me to speak. I take in a deep breath and blow it out slowly through my lips.
“So you joined a gang and then what, you became some sort of criminal, vigilante wannabe?”
“I suppose you could call us vigilantes but we weren’t wannabe’s, Beth. We were the real deal. The Unit was well established and ran like clockwork. It was professional, successful and completely secure—I wouldn’t have been a part of it otherwise. After I’d joined, I soon became the most efficient member—”
“What does that mean exactly, Jax? You beat up the most people for robbing old ladies? Terrorised the streets of Birmingham? What?”
“It means I would carry out my assignments better than any other. It came naturally to me and it wasn’t small time Beth. The boss operated just outside of London but very few people got to actually meet him—”
“Unless they’d fucked his dau—”
“Beth—” I instinctively shut up, reacting to his dominance. “The Unit was spread across the country and only handled the most heinous of crimes.”
He is stalling.
“Just tell me, Jax. I’m dying here. Shit—sorry, I didn’t mean—ugh, just tell me, please.”
“We did hurt people Beth. But, more often than not, it was more permanent than a beating.” I see it in Jax’s eyes how he keeps drifting in and out of the here and now, calling on memories that he’s never discussed with anybody before. “We dealt with abusers mainly. Anybody from spineless, wealthy bastards that used hush money to get away with their crimes to lowlife scumbags with no money or morals.”
“What do you mean by ‘more permanent’?”
I take another sip of my water. Jax eyes me cautiously before answering.
“Sometimes, it’d involve maiming—”
“Jesus, Jax. As in what, they’d lose a finger? A knee cap? A fucking arm?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? What do you mean yes? I didn’t mean… Fuck. Yes to all?” I stand up and start pacing the room myself. My blood feels colder. “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here Jax but what you’ve just admitted to, isn’t normal fucking behaviour.”
He obviously anticipated this reaction because he barely moves. Now the whole room feels colder and the walls are closing in.
“Can you sit down please, Beth? Hear me out.”
“Why? What are you going to say Jax? There’s nothing that can make this any less fucked up. I thought you were a drug dealer. That was the worst of what I’d come up with. How could you, how could do such things? I mean physically, how could you actually do that to another person? In fact, I don’t actually wanna know.”
“They were all deserving of whatever they got Beth. I’m responsible for my decisions—”
“That doesn’t mean you’ve made responsible decisions.”
“Well, I stand firmly by them.”
The confidence in his eyes is unmistakeable.
“You stand by them? Even now, you believe that what you’re doing is okay?”
“What I did… I’m out of it now, Beth. But yes, I stand by everything. Everything was calculated, nothing was done unless we were absolutely sure.”
“But that’s not part of your life anymore? Since when?”
“No. I left a fortnight ago… Beth, it’s you. You’ve put a new perspective on my life. I know that I found comfort in my work with the Unit because I didn’t care about my future or seek happiness or approval. I know that it may all seem sinister but our work was positive Beth. We made a difference to good people.”
“Give me an example... Yeah. I want an example of an assignment. I want to make my own mind up whether what you did was deserved or whether I should be running out of that door right now.”
“Okay… My first assignment. A gang had been terrorising a family for months. The son owed them a lot of money so they used his younger sister as insurance until he could pay, which was impossible. One of the main members of the gang took a liking to her—which as fucked up as it sounds—was a good thing, otherwise she would’ve been passed around between them like a spliff. When this prick clicked his fingers she�
�d have to go running otherwise something worse would happen. One time she tried to reason with him and asked if there was any other way to pay. That night, they beat the son to a pulp and left him in the middle of the street as a warning.”
I’ve stopped pacing the room now and I stand dumbstruck, entranced by every word. Jax looks at me with a silent question, asking whether he should continue.
“Go on.”
I can’t hide the fear in my voice. Not fear of Jax, I don’t think. I don’t know what from, but I feel it.
“The school nurse noticed bruising on the girl and persuaded her to talk to a social worker in confidence. She eventually began to trust them and told them piece by piece what was happening. The social worker did her best to convince the girl to go to the police but she said that’d be the equivalent to putting her family on death row. Thankfully, the social worker had links with the Unit. All information was passed on and checked out… Beth, she may have gone to his house knowing she was gonna get fucked but it was still rape. She was an innocent schoolgirl who happened to have a brother with a drug habit. She was a virgin, until Trax came along. He raped her, he caused internal damage by using objects on her. He would force her to inject drugs and beat her black and blue until she begged him to fuck her. It went on for months. He was sick and twisted. What he put that young girl through was nothing short of evil.”
This is like listening to a proposal for a television drama, not real life. I know he’s gone quiet to give me chance to absorb what he’s saying. He won’t continue until I tell him to but I can’t bring myself to look at him. I don’t want to hear what comes next but I know that I have to.
Through Jax’s mannerisms, his tone, his words—he paints such a vivid scenario that I can’t help but get sucked into it.
“So—” I clear my croaky throat, finding myself needing to know the family were safe. “—what did you do?”
“I snatched Trax up off the street at gunpoint one night. Right from under their noses.” Jax sneers at the memory. “His gang all had guns but they knew not to open fire because I would’ve killed one of their elders in a heartbeat, which would’ve been their fault. I took him to an abandoned warehouse and… I tortured him.”
I don’t know when, but at some point I’ve dropped to my knees. I sit back on my heels, frozen to the spot. Jax waits until I can bring myself to look back at his face and then continues.
“I cut off his trigger fingers and poured acid on his dick, amongst other things.” A wave of new pain lands through me. “I didn’t tell him why I was doing it, but I made certain he knew not to fuck with anybody again. I took his money and gold chains to make it look like a robbery, which is the story he stuck to afterwards.”
My hands are covering my face, forcing myself to disconnect from Jax as though that will miraculously make everything disappear. This can’t be happening. I’m nauseous. I don’t know which is more sickening; the thought of Jax doing those things… Or the fact that I’m glad he did.
“Jax. I can’t—I don’t know what to say or what I’m feeling. You tortured him. I don’t even understand how that helped the family?”
“That’s what they wanted. The gang used their knives and guns to terrorise the neighbourhood. The family wanted me to take his trigger fingers. It was symbolic and I agreed wholeheartedly.”
“This is insane. How does that even make the family safe?”
“We moved them anonymously to a safer place and gave them a new beginning. The girl got counselling and the son was helped with his drug problem. She will live with those nightmares for the rest of her life Beth, nothing can change that. But what I did, made a difference to them and I don’t regret it for a single second.”
“What’s happening here, Jax?” Continuously shaking my head, trying to make sense of the nonsensical. “I feel like I’m in a nightmare right now. Is this really happening to us?”
I love him, I really do. But what he’s telling me could shatter us apart and break me forever. My emotions flit from one to the other too quickly for me to grab hold of one and stick to it.
“This is it Beth. Unfiltered—”
Rage. I settle for rage.
“Don’t. Don’t even say that this is unfiltered honesty.” I suddenly feel like a storm within the limitations of a tear drop. But when it lands in my lap the emotion explodes. “This is bullshit and I can’t even comprehend what you’re telling me. Well, this is too fucked up for me.” I drag myself up from the floor. “In case you hadn’t realised by now Jax, I’m just a boring girl with a sweet little bookshop. Being with you was supposed to bring me happiness, not a broken heart and a prison sentence.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Are you sure about that? Falling in love with you feels like a pretty fucking bad move right now. Here was me thinking we could tackle this together and get through it but I didn’t realise that your past was creeping up behind us wielding a goddam sledgehammer.”
I dig my fingers into my scalp, attempting to get a grip of the situation.
“I’m still the same person, Beth. I believe that what the Unit was doing was right and what we were fighting against was evil. But that’s now in my past too because I knew it couldn’t be part of my life, alongside you.”
“But it is part of your life. You don’t get to pick and choose. What you’ve done will never change. It can’t be erased or glossed over.”
“Don’t look at me like that Beth, please. When you’re with me I feel numb to everything else. You’ve made me feel more alive than I’ve ever felt. I didn’t believe that was possible. But you did that to me Beth. There’s got to be a reason for that—for all of this.”
“Jax, I don’t want to, but I’m already looking at you differently. What’s worse is that my fucked up twisted heart urges me to walk over to you, to climb into your lap so that you can wrap me up and make everything better.” Jax holds out his hand to me but I look away. “But at the same time the rest of my body is repulsed by you and it’s telling me to run. I didn’t know you were capable of such things. You’re not the same person… I need to ask you something but I’m scared of the answer.”
“Ask me anything.”
“Have you ever, have you ever killed somebody?” He stares at me, straight-faced and deadly silent. I feel vomit fighting to climb up my throat. Fuck. Is he a murderer? “I said—”
“I heard what you said, Beth… The Unit has killed people before but I haven’t.” The tension in my chest releases a little and my shoulders sag. “At one point, it was touch and go with somebody, but he survived.”
“How can you be so calm about this?”
“I’m anything but calm, Beth. I’m dying inside, seeing the look on your face right now.”
“How did you carry on your life as though this wasn’t happening? How haven’t your worlds collided before the night you were stabbed?”
“They have… once before. I was the reason the manager left 24/7. I arranged for him to be taken and dealt with for—”
“Tricks.”
“Beth. Don’t. Just let me finish.”
“You heard me, Jax. Stop. I don’t want to know anymore. I really can’t do this.”
“But there’s more Beth, more that I need to tell you.”
“And that’s why I can’t. It’s too much. I can’t take it. I can’t breathe in here. It’s suffocating me.”
That safeword is the only thing making me feel like I’ve got a little bit of control here. But these four lonely walls are still closing in. Claustrophobia is creeping up on me. It’s information overload. I can’t think straight.
I make my way out into the yard and suck in the fresh air but it still feels stale inside of me. Jax cautiously walks out behind me and tries to take my hand from behind.
“Beth.”
I swivel on the spot and widen the distance between us. I can’t attempt to think straight with him near me or touching me.
“You were right, Jax—”
“But you must have made enemies because of the Unit. You’ve lived a dangerous life. You were stabbed. You could’ve died that night. They could still come back to finish the job and you told me they wouldn’t.”
“They won’t. Carmel saw to that for me. He was a paedophile Beth. She dealt with him and he has no idea who I am. None of them do. You’re safe with me.”
“I thought we were special. That connection between us… I thought I knew you. But you’ve duped me every step of the way. This, all of this, just proves that what I thought was all that mattered was actually merely us skimming the surface. What you’ve told me takes us deeper than I could have imagined possible and I’m drowning. Drowning in confusion and disbelief. How can I love you? You said Chloe didn’t know you. Maybe I don’t either.”
