Page 24 of Vicious Savage

“There’s no one else other than you or Caleph I would’ve chosen to be with on this mission,” I tell him. “But The Jekyll comes in a close third.”

“That’s your underhanded attempt at a compliment?”

“I can trust him. But he’s too invested emotionally.”

“He has to be, Attila. It’s obviously the only thing that’s kept him going in his search for Castillo. His feelings for his dead wife; that’s what will keep him focused enough to get this job done. One way or another.”

“He needs to switch off,” I argue.

Dante shakes his head and looks at me sympathetically. I’ve obviously misunderstood something about life that he and The Jekyll understand very well.

“If anyone ever hurt Kingsley the way his wife was killed, I would burn the whole damn country down. I don’t know how the man is actually still functioning.”

When Dante says this, I’m humbled into lowering my head and saying no more. All the men playing a part in my life have been affected in one way or another by a woman. Caleph has found Ariadne, and although he’s still the strong, powerful businessman, he now has a soft spot reserved just for the woman who shot into his life like a typhoon. In finding Ariadne, it’s like he’s complete and he’s come full circle. Dante, too, did a 180 when he met his beautiful wife Kingsley. He became a beast when it came to defending and protecting what was his after she was taken by a madman. All this even before she became his wife. There’s a light in Dante’s eyes which doesn’t often touch men like us. Men who reside in the dark. That light was put there by Kingsley. The same way that Ariadne put the light in Caleph’s eyes. Even The Jekyll, who lost his wife prematurely, had a darkness in him that stemmed from a light placed in him by his deceased wife. He at least had something to occupy him, albeit vengeance. But he had still been privy to that light that fulfilled him. Who was I to tell him he had to turn off his emotions in order to deal Coyin Castillo and his ilk their death blow? Who was I to deprive him of doing things the way he wanted to do them? At his own pace, in his own way. The way I saw it, he’d been waiting five long years for his taste of revenge, and this was the closest he’d ever gotten to it. Getting to that final finish line, whilst still doing things his way, was probably precisely what he needed in order to move on. To have the closure he needed. And properly mourn the death of his wife. But he wouldn’t do it at the expense of another.

“There’s movement.”

I look up at The Jekyll as he comes into my line of view. I don’t even know his real name. We have a common goal, one that may get either or both of us killed, and yet I don’t even know his name. I don’t know his story — not all of it, anyway. And I have no idea what he’ll do or what will happen once we complete our mutual mission. But at the moment, he’s a trusted ally, and I need to treat him as such.

The Jekyll lowers the tracker until it sits between us and I watch the screen as the tiny red dot moves back and forth, like a pendulum.

“Could they have found the tracker?” I ask him. I try not to be infuriated when he grins back at me wickedly.

“Doubtful. I think this means our girl has resumed her irritating habit of pacing again.”

25

LUNA

I’m in a prison cell on my own, in the dark. It’s cold. And unforgiving. There are so many bad memories in this house. So many tortured souls, and I don’t know why he’s brought me here. I’ve always loved the area, but never this house. This monstrosity which will always serve as a shrine to my mother.

I have to believe that they’ll come for me. It’s all I have left to cling to. So I sit and I hope and I pray that they are invested in finding me — no matter the reason — and that they come soon.

It’s cold in the dungeon, and I’m still wearing the clothes I wore yesterday. My father hasn’t given me any food or water, and my throat is scratchy with dryness. I could expire in this very cell and no one would ever know. Would anyone even care? Nadia — if she’s still alive — would never know what became of me. And there’d be no one else to mourn me. No one that cares enough to shed a tear over me or say a prayer that I’m in a better place.

It’s so, so cold at night that my teeth chatter against each other in the absence of a blanket or any warmth. My father is a cruel, cruel man. He makes the devil look simply angelic.

I lay my body against the wooden plank of the makeshift bed, made this way specifically to make a person as uncomfortable as possible. “No comfort for the weary”, I remember him saying when I was a child and he would emerge from the belly of the house, his lips twisted into a cruel, wicked gash meant to pass for a smile. I curl my body in on itself, seeking warmth from my bound energy as I fold into myself. If my father doesn’t kill me, the cold certainly will. My head starts to hurt, a sharp icy pain radiating against my scalp. It rattles and thunders between the layers of tissue and blood, the pain a dull, unforgiving ache.

I convince myself that I should have kept running towards the cliff. I should have. That fate would have been a far sight better than the one I’m facing now. Death by suicide would have been more courageous than death by my father’s hand.

My mind flutters and dives into the past, going back in time as it recalls the horror of what my father is actually capable of. How does a child come back from watching their father kill their mother? How do I unsee the unforgivable? Undo the unthinkable? And after all is said and done, knowing what I saw with my own two eyes, he actually tried to convince me that I’d imagined the whole thing.

Singlehandedly, and I don’t care what he says, because I know what I saw, he had managed to deprive me of the scent of my mother. Her smell, her perfume. Her presence. I would grow up without a mother, literally an orphan because he didn’t even act like a father. I would grow up without a role model, that strongest of female connections. And I still didn’t know why he’d done it. One could say it was a momentary lapse in judgment. A moment of anger. A bad decision. One of a whole lot more he was bound to make. But how, really, could you profess to love someone so completely, then be the perpetrator of such a heinous crime? How?

Their fights were louder and more frequent than ever, my father’s raised voice booming above my mother’s fragile one. She was beautiful, my mother. What one would call ‘ethereal’. With her dark blonde hair and gorgeous whiskey colored eyes that beguiled. I would see the way that people stared at her. Even I looked at her in awe.

Whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always inevitably say, “I want to be just like my mommy”. Little did I know then that I would probably never get that chance. Not with the life and the destiny that was written for me. No, I would rot in this hell.

That day, my father’s voice was exceedingly loud. It was more like a roar, but my mother’s strangled sobs are what finally made me walk toward their room. Their door was open. I stood in the doorway, looking in as though in a trance. My mother was lying on the bed, my father hovering above her prone body, a knife in his hand. His knuckles were white. He was so angry. So venomous.

I heard my mother. Heard the whimper that escaped her lips. I digested the words that fell from her mouth and drummed through my ears, sealing her fate. Why did she say that? Why would she say that?

“I don’t love you,” she whispered, her lowered tone a deafening clang to my heart. “I don’t love you.”

My father, almost as though realizing I stood there, looked up and caught sight of me, his eyes going wide as though something fell into place for him. He finally understood something. I don’t know what, but that much was obvious, because his face shuttered, and he was never the same man again.

That day, I lost both my parents. I lost my mother when my father turned back to her and swiped the knife across her throat until she gargled and left this world. And I lost my father as he disappeared into his own misery and became unknown to me.

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