by Hart, Callie
Officially.
Inevitably.
Unequivocally.
So fucking screwed.
I would have laughed if my own thumb knuckle wasn’t digging me in the left ass cheek. I’d seen the pathetic, desperate light in his eyes back there in The Barrows; he was in love with the woman, this Sera chick. I almost felt sorry for the poor bastard. Women were wonderful, wonderful creatures, but boy did they complicate the fuck out of things.
The tap dripped on my foot—one large, offensive water droplet after the other. A loud, rhythmic banging started up in the apartment, two rooms away if my calculations were correct. Unmistakable banging sounds. The sound of a guy pile-driving his dick into a pussy. Un-fucking-believable.
They were out there, hooking up, and I was tied up in a fucking bathtub. Originally, I’d planned a little get-together at my place back in Seattle for this weekend. Would have been fucking perfect. A sea of naked, writhing bodies, tangled together, mouths on mouths, hands on skin, so many exquisite bodies on display. I would have had my choice of any of them, but no. I was stuck in fucking New York, one of my least favorite fucking places on earth, tied up in a bathtub while two other people got to fuck each other’s brains out within hearing distance. Least they could have done was fuck in front of me or something. I could have enjoyed the sensation of my dick getting hard, even if I wasn’t able to touch it.
And they didn’t just get the job done and move on with their day. Fix made sure his girl was screaming his name for a good forty minutes before he finally let her come. Hats off to the guy for that, at least. Afterwards, silence fell over the apartment, and I got fucking bored and made a point of falling asleep. The nightmares that plagued me whenever I passed out were goddamn brutal, but still, I could sleep through a fucking hurricane if I wanted to. A neat trick I’d picked up in prison. It was simple: you either learned to accept physical discomfort, screaming, shouting, and the constant possibility that you were going to get your throat cut while you were unconscious, or you never got any fucking rest.
It amused me greatly when I woke to find a perplexed Fix standing at the end of the tub with his arms crossed over his chest some time later. It had gone dark outside, so I must have been out cold for a while. With sharp, accusing, unnervingly pale eyes narrowed at me, the priest huffed out a sharp breath. “Sweet dreams, princess?”
“Yeah. Thanks for asking. I was fucking your mom.”
He didn’t skip a beat. “So you like fucking dead people. Stands to reason. Necrophilia’s probably the only way you can get laid.”
I let the dig slide. “Mmm. I was wondering why she was such a lousy lay. Very unenthusiastic. All makes sense now. Did your father quit fucking her when he became a priest? How’d that even work?”
A flicker of emotion chased across Fix’s face—a mixture of anger and expertly concealed pain. Maybe other people didn’t see through the façade, but I knew what that kind of pain looked like. I’d had plenty of experience with people shielding their flaws, their faults and their weaknesses over the years, that he might as well have been screaming it from the rooftops. I almost yawned out of disappointment. He was fucking predictable, just like everyone else. He had issues with his parents. Boo fucking hoo. I’d been hoping for something a little more complex from him.
“I have no idea,” Fix said lightly. “I wasn’t very concerned about where my father stuck his cock. I was more worried about getting my own dick sucked at the time.”
“Aaaand why is it that I don’t believe you? A good little boy like you doesn’t follow in Daddy’s righteous footsteps if he’s chasing pussy every night of the week.”
He did a better job of hiding his thoughts this time. His face was a blank mask. My lip curled up to one side as I watched him lean forward and stick his hand inside the bath.
“Plenty of room for two in here,” I jabbed. “If that’s what you’re into. I heard you fucking like a pair of teenagers before. Didn’t your pretty little girlfriend get the job done? With a mouth like that, I assumed she’d—”
“I’d stop talking right fucking now if I were you.” His words were laden with ice. Dead, cold, unfeeling words. The kind of words that came out of my mouth all the time. He fiddled with something for a second, and then he straightened, placing a hand on the cold water tap. He cranked it all the way to the left. Water roared out of the faucet, drenching my socked feet first, then quickly pooling in the bottom of the tub, hitting my thighs, my ass, my back. It was fucking freezing.
I didn’t say a word.
Fix stood, detached gaze scanning over me, and I imagined what was taking place inside his head. It was so, so easy to imagine, too, because I’d watching him recede into that dark, quiet place—the same dark, still, quiet place I withdrew into whenever I was about to do something seriously fucked up. He was going to fill the tub up with cold water, dump a couple of bags of ice in here with me, and then he was going to leave me for a couple of hours. Let me freeze for a while. Nothing made a person more malleable than a brutal case of hypothermia.
Or maybe he was going to try and waterboard me. Cover my face with a cloth, hold a funnel over my mouth, and start pouring. Being stuck in a full bathtub would make the process even shittier for me, but it would make his life easier. Plenty of precious H2O on hand to partially drown me with, until I gave him whatever it was he wanted.
Of course, he could just be planning on straight up drowning me. My hands were trussed behind my back, and my ankles were bound so tight I couldn’t even feel my toes anymore. If he’d left it at that, I would have been able to launch myself out of the fucking tub and free myself pretty easily, even if it meant dislocating a shoulder, but no. The fucker had been far too smart for that. He’d connected my restraints together behind my back via a rigid, thick piece of reinforced steel cabling. I’d already nearly flayed the skin from my wrists trying to wrestle myself free, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere. So, I was stuck in the fucking bath, and I was about to die. However Fix decided to end me, it wasn’t going to be fucking pleasant.
I watched him with detached curiosity as he paced to a cupboard on the other side of the bathroom, opened it up and began pulling clean towels out of it and dumping them unceremoniously onto the floor.
This day had been coming for a very long time. You didn’t do what I did for a living, or work for the kind of man I worked for, without expecting to die a horrible, painful, terrible death at some point in the future yourself. I’d wondered often enough how it was going to happen and when, and now that we were here I couldn’t muster any sort of emotion beyond a slight sense of annoyance as the icy water inched its way up the sides of the bath, filling the tub quicker and quicker, covering more and more of me as the surface rose.
“Back in a minute,” Fix said casually. He stalked out of the bathroom, leaving the door yawning wide open. That’s when I saw the girl standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall with her head resting against a framed picture of Trinity Church. The straight edge of her dark hair barely grazed the tops of her shoulders.
“Come to watch the show? I’m impressed,” I ground out. “Most women wouldn’t want to witness a man being tortured to death.”
“I’m not most women,” she replied stiffly. “I don’t relish the sight of someone suffering. But I’m a pragmatist. You came here to hurt me. I need to make sure you’re not going to be able to do that, which means I have to watch. I have to see what he does to you with my own two eyes, so I know you’re not a threat anymore.”
“You think that way you won’t see me lurking in the shadows every time you walk down a dark alleyway?” I bit back the laughter burning at the back of my throat. “You think if you watch me die, you won’t still see my face every time you’re lying in bed at night and you can’t get to sleep?”
A slight wrinkle formed in the center of her forehead. “Something like that.”
The water continued to spew from the faucet; it had nearly filled the tub all the way to the rim. I al
lowed myself to feel the cold instead of shivering against it. I embraced it, letting it seep into my bones, forming shards of ice within the blood that was slowly pumping through my veins. “Then you’re fooling yourself, Sera. I will be the only thing you see for a long time to come.”
She shifted, moving her weight from one foot to the other. “You flatter yourself. I’m sure I’ll have forgotten all about you by the time Fix drags your carcass out of this penthouse and dumps it down the garbage chute.”
“Hmm.” The water rose up over my shoulders, hitting the back of my neck. I tipped my head to one side, resting my temple against the side of the bath. “How long did it take you to forget that other guy’s face? The guy you killed back in Montmorenci when you were sixteen?”
Her face lost what little color it had as she fidgeted, her eyes rounding, doubling in size. She pulled the sleeves of her oversized shirt down over her hands. Unnerved. Shaken.
Bingo. You’re not as strong as you think you are, little girl.
Still, she didn’t run away. “If you think I’ll talk Fix out of this, you’re wrong, asshole. You can’t appeal to my conscience. You can’t stop this.”
Rolling my head so that I was staring up at the high ceilings above, I admired the intricate crown molding around the light fitting. “Never said anything about you stopping it. I’m just reminding you of the bad taste I’m gonna leave in your mouth. You can scrub and scrub and scrub all you like, Lady Macbeth, but this damn spot won’t be coming out. At least for a while anyway. Until you’ve killed a bunch more people and nothing matters anymore.”
I returned my gaze to her, peering past her caution and her hesitation. How long would it be before she picked up a gun or a knife and she used it? She’d been willing to shoot me with that assault rifle; she’d fucking tried to. It had only been her shitty aim that had saved my head from being blown off my shoulders. I didn’t lift my chin to avoid the water as it finally reached the lip of the bath and began to spill over the sides. I remained still, the surface of the water lapping at my top lip as I looked at her. No, it wasn’t going to be long before Sera Lafferty became the monster this Carver guy was trying to sell her as.
Not very long at all.
Fix appeared behind her, then, carrying something in his arms. Small. Cube-shaped. Black. A set of black leads with clamps attached to either end was slung over his shoulder.
Jumper cables. Jumper cables, and a brand-new car battery.
So that was how I was going to die: he was going to electrocute me.
Fix didn’t look at me as he stepped into the bathroom, unfazed by the water that was all over the floor. He turned the tap off, movements measured and unhurried, and then he kicked at the towels he’d dumped on the floor, arranging them haphazardly around the bathtub with the toe of his boot.
“Make sure you mop up good.” Opening my mouth, I let the water rush inside. I swirled it around my teeth. Swallowed. “Electricity doesn’t discriminate. One little spark, one little pool of water touches your foot, and boom. You’re one crispy padre.”
Pulling the jumper cables from over his shoulder, Fix shot me a winning smile. Perfect white teeth. Motherfucker. “The soles on these boots are an inch thick. Rubber. I’m sure I’ll be just fine. Thanks, though.”
I shrugged. “Just doing my civic duty. Wouldn’t want you getting hurt now.” Somewhere, deep within the cavernous black space where my heart would have been located (if I’d had one) something fluttered, coughed…and then died. Nope. I really couldn’t muster up a single fuck to give right now. How depressing. It wasn’t as if working for Charlie was very rewarding on a day to day basis. My right hand guy, Michael, would notice if I was suddenly no longer around and I stopped sending him lists of tasks to complete and people to hurt, but apart from that…
I was hardly going to be missed. And I was okay with it.
Against my will, an image flashed into my mind: a woman with long, dark hair. Tall, with fire in her eyes. A white jacket. A stethoscope looped around the back of her neck. A heavy, stifling mantle of sadness weighing her down as she stood in front of an elevator, waiting for the doors to roll back.
Oh no. No fucking way. Not happening.
I shoved the image out of my head so fast, I left myself reeling. She wasn’t welcome here. She had been a stupid mistake. A lapse in judgement. A moment of weakness that I was never going to revisit again, not even here, inside my own head, seconds before my death. The woman in the white jacket was trouble with a capital T, and she’d follow me into the damned afterlife if I didn’t keep her out.
Fix clamped the ends of the jumper cables to the lip of the copper tub. He was methodical and intent on what he was doing, a calm resolve settled over him, giving him an eerie sense of peace as he worked. When that was done, he set the car battery down on a wooden stool that he placed at the other end of the tub by the taps, and then he held the other end of the jumper cables in either of his hands, raising them up.
“Try not to shit yourself,” he growled. “You’ve made enough of a mess of today as it is.”
I bared my teeth, snarling at him like a wild dog. I wasn’t going to beg for my life. I wasn’t going to plead, and he was going to show no mercy. Men like us never broke, one way or another.
“Just fucking do it,” I snapped. “Do your fucking worst.”
Determination, grim and lethal, flared in Fix’s too-pale eyes. He connected the other ends of the jumper cables. And when the current hit, the savage roar that ripped from my throat felt like it would be my fucking last.
SEVEN
FIX
At the age of nine, my father spirited me away to church camp during summer break. It had fucking sucked, not only because all my friends from school had gone to baseball camp and I missed out on all the associated fun, but because, on the very last day of said church camp, I nearly fucking died.
Camp clean-up had been well underway. We were all supposed to be preparing for the journey home. My father had told me to get all of my shit together and to help the younger boys pack up their stuff, but it was sweltering and sticky, the air close, almost unbreathable it was so humid, and I’d decided to go swimming instead—one of the very first times I’d dared to actively disobey the great, intimidating and thoroughly imposing Father Marcosa after he’d issued a direct order.
The camp lake was long and thin, the size of four full football fields strung end to end. On our side of the lake: the Sunday meeting house; the kitchen block; eight small cabins which housed the camp attendees; and a store house where the canoes and the other sporting equipment was kept. On the opposite side of the lake: farmland, for as far as the eye could see. Dairy farms, mostly. The stench of manure had hung in the air, a thick cloud of sulphur that refused to budge, no matter how strong the breeze.
A group of boys, a couple of years older than my unimpressive nine years, had decided at the beginning of the break that swimming from one side of the lake to the other without the aid of any floatation devices was the best way to prove you were one of the cool kids. I hadn’t even tried. I fucking hated swimming. Hated the water in general. One by one, though, the other kids had completed the trial, and by the second to last day, I was one of the only camp-goers who hadn’t undertaken the swim.
So.
The day I disobeyed my father, stripped down to my underwear and stepped into the lake, pigeon chested, gangly limbed, knock-kneed, covered in sweat and determined, it had been my last opportunity to prove my worth. I’d paced myself, making sure not to power too hard for the line of the other shore too quickly. I’d known I needed to conserve my energy in case I got tired, so I’d doggedly plowed my arms through the water, daring every three or four strokes to duck my head below the surface into the murky green soup below.
I was fine until I reached the halfway mark, and that’s when I’d begun to wonder: did I have enough energy to go as far as I had already come? My heart was thrumming inside my chest, my blood thundering in my ears. I felt okay, mu
scles warmed and relaxed, but panic had a way of twisting things. Very quickly, my side was cramping, my chest tight, and my head felt lighter than air. Rush after rush of adrenalin washed through me, urging my body to react, to get itself out of the uncertain situation it found itself in. Before I knew it I was floundering.
I couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t keep myself afloat.
Couldn’t quiet the deafening alarms screaming inside my head.
Couldn’t calm the burning fear that had sunk its claws into my back and was trying to drag me down, down, down.
I’d swallowed half the lake and I was more afraid than I ever had been by the time I dragged myself, coughing and spluttering, out of the water. The exhaustion I’d felt was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I hurt everywhere, and my lungs burned like they’d been branded from the inside by a hot poker.
Sleep claimed me.
It was dark by the time I woke up and realized to my horror that I was still on the other side of the lake with no means of getting back. And I was in my underwear. I’d heard people say the word ‘fuck’ before, but I’d never uttered it myself before that moment. I said it quite a few times as I trudged along the muddy shore of the lake, trying to avoid the piles of cow shit that had been deposited at the edge of the water. Cutting across the farm land, higher up, along the edge of the grassed fields soon seemed like a preferable option, and so I altered my course.
