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Hands on his hips, I look up at him. The burn in his eyes, the urgency, locks me into place, like someone about to confess a terrible sin.
“You need to know this,” he breathes. But I don’t let him go. I hook my fingers into the belt around his hips, keeping him close. Listening but preparing to start over because, whatever he did to those boys, it can’t have matched the awfulness of what he went through. Can it? “You need to know the monster you’re dealing with before you go on kissing him.”
“Why would I believe you to be the monster?” I shake my head with a smile, failing to understand how he could possibly expect that I’d run away from him after all this.
He angles his head to the side like a vulture.
“Don’t you wonder why they never touched my face? Because it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts, I assure you.”
The air between us turns heavy with secret.
“They were afraid of getting too close to my mouth. I’d bitten two ears off after that piece of Top Boy’s little finger, and I was getting good at it. Boarding school boys can’t face a tenth of the pain they give, so they steered clear of my teeth, knowing that I wouldn’t hesitate to use them as weapons.” He curls his lip over his teeth, and I think he remembers the blood dripping from his canines like from a vampire’s fangs. “Sure, some of them eventually repented. Later in their lives, when I went after them, one by one.”
“If you believe I’ll recoil from you because you took revenge–” My fingers hook deeper into his belt, but he grabs my chin and tilts my face up, looking into my eyes.
“Listen,” he purrs, something manic and breathtakingly beautiful whirling in those blue irises. “Soon, I started to see cracks in the alliance between Top Boy and Sister Garlic. He was starting to break under her iron fist that demanded my demise, and I realized I could use that to my advantage. With every burn he seared into my flesh, I gritted my teeth and added another notch to my plan. I used the pain and the hatred as fuel. It all went on for a week, and every day, after they left me hanging limply from that pipe, I would fantasize about what I would do to them if I survived. To all the people like them.” He pauses here as if the words hold some important message I was supposed to receive.
“They only stopped because my flesh had started to rot under the constant chafing and sweat gathering under the cuffs, keeping the wounds wet,” he continues. “Not that they cared about that, but if I ended up needing to have gangrene removed through surgery, they would have had some explaining to do. And, if I died, well, they’d have a body to deal with. They couldn’t risk something like that following them their entire lives.”
My chest caves with pain, my hands moving up his wrists. I imagine him as a ten-year-old, a beautiful child, those blue eyes filled with innocence and tears. I imagine that innocence fading away from his irises, killed by cruelty, his body battered and bloody. My throat works, my eyes stinging.
“So they let me go after a week. Sister Garlic took care of my wounds herself–grudgingly and withholding any painkillers, of course. Every time she cleaned and patched up my wounds, I would look closely at her face, taking in every mole, every hair that stuck out of them, her crooked nose, large and curved over her thin lips. She had a particularly small mouth. But to be fair, maybe she didn’t really look like that at all. It could be that I just projected the image of a witch on her and wouldn’t recognize her again if I saw her today.” He grins and, in it, I can see all the vitriol that once filled him, twisting him into the dangerous man he’s become today.
“Some of the posh boys truly repented. By the time that hellish week was over, some of them looked uncomfortable even watching the torture, let alone applying it with their own hands. One even puked on the floor on the last day. As a general rule, human beings only develop true empathy after twenty years of age. It’s only then that the brain develops fully for that, but there are hints early on, too. By the time it was over, most of those boys glanced at each other as if Top Boy and Sister Garlic had gone completely off the rails. They had. Especially Top Boy. His grin was maniacally and constantly plastered on his face, making him resemble a psychotic clown.”
He bends down to me, trapping me between his arms, his eyes pinning me down.
“He wore that expression two months later when he found Sister Garlic getting spit roasted by two bearded bikers in the shed behind the orphanage.”
My jaw slackens until I’m staring with an open mouth. He doesn’t need to spell it out for me to realize he’d carefully planned for that. He gives me a dark smile, confirming my hunch.
“Yes, wild flame. I’m a wicked, vindictive, vile one. But she wasn’t being taken against her will, if that makes you feel any better. Lurking in the shadows of the chapel for the next few weeks, I heard her confess to Father Basil. They would have made such a pair, those two. But they weren’t attracted to each other, of course, even though they felt like kindred spirits. I could tell that they were close. But that spiritual love should have been enough to justify sex was something they preached only to others–to the people they wanted to fuck, such as my mother, I reckon. I found out the bastard groomed her, made her feel like it was her spiritual duty to open her legs for him.”
I swallow hard, already intuiting how he’d know that. But I don’t interrupt, allowing him to go on seamlessly with his story.
“Of course, Sister Garlic had a veiled way of confessing her fantasies. Apparently, Hell’s Angels descended on her in her dreams. They had their way with her, two at a time, often bending her over their bikes. But when I snuck into her room and read the journal she kept under her pillow, I found out so much more about how she pleasured herself at night.
“Since she’d spent most of her life in a convent and then at the orphanage, there was only one place where she could have gotten the inspiration for her fantasies–the biker pub just down the road. The nuns would pass it by on their way to the market or to do other chores. I watched her linger around the bus stop there longer than the other nuns. Then, one day, I went in. Offered my services on the streets. With my bandages and burn marks peeking out, and the destroyed skin around my forearms, I looked just the part for some of the business the big boys needed done. It took some testing to get into their circle, though I think they made the decision to take me on the moment they laid eyes on me.”
A shiver ripples down my spine, but I grit my teeth against it. I want him to feel that I’m here for him, truly and completely here, more than I want my next breath. I’m not surprised they took him on without much ado, either. I can already picture eleven-year-old Zayne in my mind, and he must have been a vision to behold.
“That’s how you got into the mafia,” I whisper. “The Hell’s Angels.”
“Well, Hell’s Angels aren’t exactly the mafia. They are a different kind of beast. And I had plenty of time to discover that on the streets. Their boss, Clive Thorngren, ended up adopting me. It’s his name that I carry today. He wasn’t married, and he pulled some strings to push the adoption through, but–” he opens his arms as if to present himself before he traps me between them on the couch again, “–here I am. His legitimate child. He didn’t have a wife, and he and his guys fucked a bunch of different girls every week, so I grew up without a mother figure, but I guess that much is obvious. My way of treating women isn’t exactly gentlemanly. Or healthy. Or sane, for that matter.” The glint in his eyes would probably be enough to scare off a seasoned shrink. But I just tilt my head to the side, studying him. The more he gives me, the more I want.
“That’s how the poison they turned me into at the orphanage leaked onto the streets,” he says, every word stabbing me in the gut. It’s an effort to keep my face from distorting from the cruel things he calls himself as a means of self-abuse. “I think what got me past the tests so quickly was when they asked me how much I wanted in return for my services. I told them what I wanted was for Sister Garlic’s dreams to come true. When they asked why, I said I was a good Christian like that. After a few seconds in which I thought they’d kill me, Clive burst into laughter. Seconds later, the others roared with it, too.”
He brings his face closer as he says the next words as if wanting to etch every one of them into my bones. “They hounded her for weeks before they finally got her to meet them at the shed. They threatened her that they’d make her journal public. ‘Come on, Sister, all we want is to give that pussy what it wants before it withers completely,’ they’d say to her. They’d come right outside her window when she prayed, taunting her like demons. I used to crack her door open and watch her on her knees in front of the cross hanging on her wall. She was too distraught to notice me. It was the first time I’d actually seen her pray in all the years I’d been at the orphanage. She shook and whimpered into her fists as she held them tightly against her mouth, her face scrunched. I grinned to myself and oh, was all the shit I’d started doing on the street worth it...” He breathes in, his eyes hooding a little as if he relishes the memory.
“What did you do on the streets?” I whisper, moving him away from the memory of Sister Garlic and her downfall. The bikers might have been the evil woman’s demons, but the memories are his. I already know she ended up with two bikers fucking her in the shed, and Zayne made sure that the boarding school boys caught her.
His expression darkens. “If we go there now, you’ll end up hating me so badly you won’t want to hear the rest of my story.”
I want to protest again, but instead, I bite my tongue and let him keep talking.
“You see, that’s the thing with revenge. The moment you taste it, you just want more. And the more you do it, the more skilled you get at it. It was from mandatory confession days that I found out about Top Boy’s infatuation with his own cousin next.” He grins. “I made a point of fucking her right in front of him. Ten years later, on International Women’s Day, when they were already engaged to be married–the sick bastard had found a way to twist her arm into it. I was the stripper she and her girlfriends had hired. Made sure he walked in right in the middle of the act, my cock in her mouth while she stroked the scars he’d inflicted on me. I met his face, and smiled for the first time in as long as I could remember.”
I stiffen from the jealousy that stabs through me. I can’t lean away from him, there’s nowhere to go with my back plastered to the couch, but he notices it.
