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Conor
I stood there in the doorway, watching Aurnia asleep in my bed. Her cheek cushioned by my pillow instead of bruised against the cold wooden floorboards. Her toes wrapped tight by my comforter instead of frozen and exposed. Her lips exhaling even breaths that rippled softly the well-worn sheets instead of catching splinters on the floor.
She was safe. Protected. Guarded.
Except from me.
Even with eyes squeezed shut I could not help replaying the way she came undone for me last night. The way her body rippled around my fingers as she came hard, as her juices coated my tongue. What had I done?
Fuck. God only knows, I had fought against it. This. Her. I fought. I’d still lost.
Even now I wrestled with the demons inside me. Tried to reason with the voices inside my head that called me names. Monster. Pervert. User.
That’s why I’d only made it about her. Made it about her pleasure. Only hers. Why I’d not let her touch me, to bring me to my own release. Somehow, it felt…justified. Barely. I had given her it all, had taken nothing.
You think that makes it okay, asshole?
Who was I kidding? The devil had already reserved a spot in hell for me.
Better not keep him waiting.
There was a pent-up fury in me that had not been—would not be—released on Aurnia. I had to find some way of unleashing it. I knew just the target.
When I was quite certain that Aurnia would not wake at the creak of the front door of the flat, I slipped out with nothing more than my leather jacket and the keys to my motorcycle. A bat would have been smart to bring along. There was an old pocketknife in the top drawer of my dresser that probably would have come in handy. Hell, even just grabbing a dumbbell from the garage where my punching bag hung would have only taken seconds.
But I didn’t have the time. Couldn’t spare a minute. Couldn’t spare a second.
My rage had been caged ever since seeing Nick on the security camera footage at Dublin Ink. Finding Aurnia had been more important. Making sure she was safe. Making sure he hadn’t found her. Making sure he hadn’t…
My rage was now free and it was sinking its teeth into me. I only had so long before I was its victim.
The night was bitterly cold. The wind chapped my knuckles to the point of cracking. But I didn’t care; I knew it was just the start. The street lamps lining the abandoned streets grew farther and farther apart. Glass crunched beneath my tires as the darkness increased. There would be no stars that night. Only a swirling mist. Only the headlamp of my motorcycle trying to cut through it as I shook. As I pressed the bike faster. As I tore through the night like a madman.
Aurnia’s house appeared out of the fog almost before I realised it. I had meant to stop a block or so away to watch, but I was right upon it. I wasn’t thinking straight. My thoughts were consumed by images of Nick’s dirty fingers on Aurnia’s neck. To see any trace of him left on her was enough to send my wheels spinning.
It wasn’t good, my distraction. It was going to get me killed. Death seemed like a trivial thing compared to the thought of Nick being anywhere near my little thief. I might be racing to my death, but I wouldn’t be going alone. Hell would welcome two goddamn monsters that night.
I wasn’t certain that Nick would be there, at the house, but I had my suspicions. The connection between Aurnia and Nick almost positively had to be linked back to that godforsaken shitehole. His lurking, wicked presence there explained Aurnia hiding out at Dublin Ink. Her crawling in through her bedroom window. Her willingness to leave with me when I’d shown her nothing but violence and anger. I was not a good man. But I was not Nick. I was not my old friend. The lesser of two evils, I supposed. I would be that, at least, to Aurnia: the mad dog that rid her of the mad wolf.
It didn’t really matter to me if Nick was there or not. If he wasn’t, I would search elsewhere. I knew enough of the seedy underbelly of Dublin to know where to look, to know who to ask. I would find him eventually. If it took all night, if it took all my nights, I would find him. I would end this.
But it seemed thatwhatever god was up there above the mists wanted a show that night, because I wasn’t in the shadows outside Aurnia’s house for more than thirty minutes when the devil himself walked out the front door.
To see him on the blurry, unfocused security footage was one thing. But to see him there. In real life. Not more than a hundred feet away. That was something else.
To make out the tattoos on his fingers. To count the frays along the black hoodie he flipped over his shaved head. To hear his shoelace tap against the frozen sidewalk with every casual, easy step toward his car. He was the past come to life. I thought I’d put him behind me. Nothing more than a bad memory, a distant nightmare, a fading storm.
But he had found me through a weakness I never intended to have: Aurnia.
It was simple enough to follow his beat-up old car, even with it having only one working tail light. It was either that it was late enough not to suspect himself of being followed or he was high enough not to care. But whatever the reason, I was completely unsuspected behind him on my motorcycle. Or at least that’s what I thought.
Nick climbed the rickety staircase of the abandoned warehouse with a whistle on his lips. I thought that meant he didn’t know I was there in the consuming darkness, toes silent on the metal grating. He turned on a kerosene lamp in the centre of the damp, mouldy warehouse floor and set about laying out a blanket on the dirty floor. I waited in the shadow of the stairwell as he took a big swallow from a cheap bottle of whiskey.
I wanted to take him by surprise as he slept, to strike fear the way he had in Aurnia. The way he had in me, for having to watch. But I was not to take him by surprise. Because before he even spoke, I recognised the song he was so casually whistling. It was the song that was playing that night. It was our song, hers and mine.
He gave my blood just enough time to run cold before saying, “Are you just going to skulk there all night?”
His voice echoed up to the unseen heights where broken windows let in the harsh cold. It didn’t matter, though; it could have been a hundred degrees inside with furnaces ablaze and I still would have shivered.
