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“Do you know who this is?” my father asked me.
Terrified, I shook my head and struggled to swallow the knot of fear lodged in my throat.
My father grabbed the man by the hair and yanked his head back.
“This piece of shit is Miles Venables. You know who that is, boy?”
I nodded. Everyone at my school knew who he was. Once upon a time he was the school janitor. But that was before he raped Lily Reardon.
Lily was in my math class. Blonde and pretty, she was outgoing and friendly and popular with both the teachers and the entire student body. Three weeks earlier she was raped by Miles while walking home from cheer practice. He dragged her off the sidewalk and beat her unconscious with a rock. After raping her, he left her for dead in the scrub on the side of the road, her head caved in and barely alive. But she didn’t die, and Wilson Robertson, a kid on the football team, found her when he walked home after practice.
But Miles Venables got off due to some bullshit legal technicality that had something to do with the evidence and how it was obtained, and he was released from custody. Now he was free to roam the streets and prey on whomever his deviant mind chose.
The town always turned to the Kings of Mayhem for these types of situations. They looked at the Kings as the town’s guardians when the law failed them.
It had always been the way.
And the Kings never turned their back on their people.
My father would scare him out of town.
“Time to pop another cherry, Son,” my father said with a deep baritone laugh dripping with evil.
I looked at the man tied to the chair, his mouth gagged, his face bloody, and my father’s intentions became crystal clear. He wasn’t going to scare him. He was going to fucking kill him.
“No, Dad, please! Let the police take care of it.”
My father looked at me like I’d suggested he wear lipstick and a dress under his cut.
“The police?” He leaned in real close so I could see the seriousness in his eyes. “The police don’t do shit to scum like this. You’ve gotta learn if you want real justice in this world, you gotta deliver it yourself.”
He shoved the handle of the knife into my hands and fear ripped into me. He wasn’t going to kill him… he expected me to.
“No,” I rasped, barely able to get the word out. “Please. Don’t make me do it.”
My father grabbed me by the hair and painfully twisted my head so I had no choice but to look at Miles.
“Look at him. That piece of scum raped your classmate. Dragged her into the bushes and did what stinking pieces of filth do to a pretty girl when she tells him no.” He released my hair but shoved me forward, making me stumble. “Now you show him what the Kings of Mayhem think about that kind of behavior.”
“Please don’t make me do this,” I begged.
“You go on about your granddaddy being so damn righteous and justified, yet you do nothing to stand up for what he believed in.”
“He would never do this.”
My father leaned in real close. “He did do this. You think he let the man who raped his VP’s wife get away with it? No. He took him to an abandoned car lot and when his VP couldn’t do it, your granddaddy pulled out his revolver and planted a bullet right between his eyes.”
The revelation spun through me.
“You’re going to be a King one day, goddamn it. And you’re going to have the balls to be a good one. Now go over there and show this raping piece of shit what happens to scum who come into our town and rape.” Again, he shoved me forward until I was right behind Miles. We made eye contact. When he saw the knife in my hand, he started to struggle against his restraints, his pleas for mercy muffled by the filthy gag in his mouth.
I looked down at the knife in my hands and thought about Lily Reardon. She hadn’t been back to school since the attack, and people were saying she was struggling to cope with what had happened to her. “Her light has gone out,” her best friend told me. In that moment I thought about what she must’ve felt. The fear. The pain. The struggle. Those horrifying moments right before he drove the rock into her skull. My fingers itched around the knife handle. That thought alone made me place the blade against Miles’ throat.
Licking my lips, I struggled to swallow as panic raced through my veins.
He deserved to pay for his crimes, yet he was free because somewhere someone had gotten something wrong and he couldn’t be charged.
