Chapter Sixteen
Melina
I obediently follow Austin upstairs. It’s day five and I’m sure my time is up. I haven’t said a word to Austin since he left me in the basement after our fight. He’s talked minimally, which helps. I’ve eaten little food and complied stiffly when he checks the tattoo. The damn thing itches, and he’s lucky I haven’t scratched the ink from my skin.
The smell of dinner fills the kitchen when we walk through the door. The table is set for two. I ignore it and head to the master bath. With a shrug, I lift my right arm and pull the T-shirt off. In the mirror, my olive skin is pale. The eyes peering back at me are dead with no hope.
Austin stands behind me. I ignore the ink on my breast like I’ve ignored it these past five days. He washes my back, ass, and lastly, my breast. The water is warm and should be soothing, but it’s not. I impatiently wait for him to apply the ointment so we can end this charade.
“You’ll be eating dinner with me tonight,” he says after he’s finished. “You’ve healed well.” He’s looking at me in the mirror without remorse. This is the old Austin. I hate him and at the same time, I want to throw myself in his arms and beg. That’s the old Melina too.
He guides me to the kitchen after giving me a clean T-shirt and I sit down across from him. I lift the red wine, take a healthy swallow, and enjoy the dry bitterness as it goes down. It should help with courage so I don’t grovel. My will to live is stronger today, but I know it will only make it harder on me in the end.
Austin places chicken and rice on my plate. It’s nothing fancy but tastes delicious when I lift a fork to my lips and nibble. I remain silent while eating and guzzle the wine. The lack of speech is harder to take tonight. Things were much easier when I thought sharing my life might change his mind. The stories passed the time and helped me deal with my fucked up life. Now they’re meaningless. No one but Austin will ever know what my life was like and no one including him will ever care. I drink the last of my wine and stand to return downstairs.
“Stay seated,” he orders.
“Why?”
He grunts and continues eating.
The wine goes to my head and the room spins slightly. Austin pours me another glass and I down it. “If I’m not leaving, let me spend my last night in peace, please.”
He lifts his head and our eyes meet. Death is back in the cold green irises. His voice is completely devoid of emotion when he says, “Last night was your last night.”
There it is. I’m going back tonight. Too soon. I stare down at my empty plate. Austin stands and walks behind me. His hand smooths down my hair and over my cheek until he’s cupping my jaw. I clench my fingers tightly, not wanting his touch. “Your brother won’t kill you. You’re his flesh and blood.”
With all the power of my slender muscles, I grab my fork and slam it into his groin. It enters his flesh and I’m thrown from the chair with a shove of his forearm. The floor has no cushion and my shoulder takes the brunt.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Austin yells. I hope I’ve ended his chances to ever fuck again, so his litany is not appropriate. He limps to the sink and grabs a handful of paper towels. I watch through the hair covering my face as he shucks his pants to check on the damage. If it were a direct hit to his cock, I doubt he’d be moving this easily.
My head spins and it dawns on me that something besides the wine is responsible. “You drugged me,” I yell with rising panic as I try to stand.
“Stay down or you’ll fucking fall down,” he snaps.
“Fuck you,” I yell and try to stand. My legs won’t work, and I melt back to the floor staring up at the ceiling. Austin fills my vision. His face, his eyes, his heart. No, that’s blood from his leg, I think groggily as I try to hold on to consciousness. “I hope your dick rots off,” I slur.
“Close but no cigar, baby.”
“I’m not your baby.” My lips feel swollen twice their size. “Don’t do this, please.” Why am I begging? I can’t. I won’t. “Just kill me.” That, I will beg for.
A phone rings far away, but then Austin answers it and I realize it’s the drug making it sound further away than it is. “Bring them into the house,” he says and I wonder if he means my brother. He lifts me into his arms and I’m too boneless to fight. Dark spots fill my vision. My last thought is that if I’m lucky, I’ll never wake up.
∞∞∞
Austin
My groin throbs. Melina’s stab barely missed being a direct hit, thank God. I’m furious with myself for not expecting her to fight. She lulled me into a sense of security these past five days. Again with her I behaved stupidly. I rest her body on an oriental rug in the entry to the formal living room.
“Boss?”
I glance up at Andreas. Moon and Gomez are in full black suits standing behind him. “Leave us,” I tell Andreas. I know he’s wondering why I’m standing here minus pants with blood covering my leg, but he does as I ask and leaves quickly.
“I take it the news she’s going home didn’t go over as well as planned,” Moon says lightly.
“Fuck you, the bitch stabbed me with a fork.” Hell it’s deep and throbs all the way to the end of my dick.
Gomez laughs. “My kind of woman.”
I want to wipe the fucking grin off his face. Instead, I lean over and begin gently removing Melina’s T-shirt.
Gomez whistles. “Nice ink.”
I roll her to her stomach and again Gomez whistles. “Quite the art.”
It is and it’s beautiful. The tapestry is everything I wanted and maybe more than I bargained for. I leave her there, tearing my gaze from the ink and walk out after telling Moon I’ll return with pants. I grab them from the kitchen counter and carefully pull them up. It was a fucking fork, but she put enough force into it to go through skin and muscle. I zip and leave the top unfastened and then return to the living room.
Moon and Gomez look at me and then focus on Melina. She’s mine, I want to shout. Damnit, I want to ink it on her fucking forehead. I walk closer and stand over her. Her mussed hair begs for my fingers. My body begs for her lips. Anger and guilt war inside me. Without thinking about what I do next, I roll her to her back, unzip my jeans and pull out my cock. A few seconds later, the yellow stream covers Melina’s chest, her legs clear to her feet, and back up to her chest. Moon gives a short curse and Gomez laughs. I couldn’t care less what they think. Covering her in my piss releases something deep in my chest. I’ll kill her brother and then find her. I tuck myself back into my pants and roll her up in the carpet. After lifting her in my arms, I turn to the men. A tuft of hair is all that shows of the woman inside the carpet. That and the smell of my piss.
Gomez steps forward. “Fernandez is mine,” I tell him. “His sister is the message. Make sure he knows this is only the beginning.” I place the only woman besides Cindy I’ve cared about into his arms.
“You’re fucked in the head, Austin,” he says with a gleam in his eyes. Gomez the psychopath has no idea who and what I truly am, but he recognizes the monster because he carries his own. He turns to the door and Moon follows.
“Have someone look at the wound on your leg,” Moon says over his shoulder.
“I’ll live.”
Moon turns and eyes me up and down. “Fernandez will come after you.”
“I’m counting on it.”
They leave with Melina and I head to the whiskey. By the third glass, doubt sets in. My feet move of their own accord even though I know where they’re taking me. I open Victor’s safe and remove the 10 by 10 metal box. The lock broke years ago. The dented metal is green with paint flakes scratched off here and there. Victor gave me the box on the one-year anniversary of me coming to live here.
I lift the hinged top and move aside the top newspaper clipping. I placed the latest one in here a few days after Victor and Cindy’s funeral. The other clippings are about me. I go to the bottom of the box and pull out the thin strip of paper. It shows a burned down home on the outskirts of Austin, Texas.
Fire kills two
Investigation underway
There’s more about my mother and her latest boyfriend. The article makes them sound like nice people, which is a complete lie. I feel nothing as I look at the burned image of the place I lived. Half the time there was no running water. More often than not, we had no electricity. That was usually when my mom was between boyfriends. My mother’s drugs were as constant as my starving belly. I don’t have a single good memory of her or the house.
I lay the clipping down and move to the next.
12 year old responsible for burning parents alive
That’s a joke. My mother’s boyfriend was never a parent. But then, neither was my mother. The men she slept with also knew I was available. My mom pimped me for money so she could buy drugs. The pain of violation is one of my earliest memories. The smell of those men haunts me to this day. Hot, sweaty, disgusting body odor. Their grunts. Their fists when I fought or screamed too loudly. For the most part my name stayed out of the newspapers because of my age. This first article is different because the judge hadn’t chided the reporters for using my name yet. Like I really gave a fuck then or now.
Joseph Watts
The name is no longer connected to me. Victor had it legally changed to Austin Miller after my first kill. Joseph Watts disappeared and now a bigger monster stands in his place. I don’t even know if the name change was legal but my driver’s license, passport, and other documents show my name as Austin Miller. It’s who I really am.
I burned down the house following a particularly bad experience with my mom’s boyfriend. He fractured my arm. It would have been one of many fractures never treated. I escaped outside after he raped me. Using my good arm, I stirred a pile of fire ants with a stick. The ants in their scurrying panic gave me the idea. I walked into our small shed and carried out a can of gasoline. I poured it on the ant hill and lit a match. Their suffering meant nothing because my life was just like theirs.
I sat on the bottom step of the front porch waiting for the sun to go down. And then I waited for my mom and Lucas, her boyfriend, to pass out. I sat outside rocking back and forth until it was time. I went inside and banged a few kitchen cabinets for a few minutes. They didn’t wake up. There was a small crawl space under the house, and I slowly poured the gasoline through the vent directly beneath my mom’s room so it soaked the ground. The floor above was old wood and sagged in places.
I felt nothing as I struck the match and shoved it through the vent. I felt nothing when I backed up and watched the house burn. What bothered me was the lack of screaming. I wanted to hear them suffer, and instead they died of smoke inhalation. Or so the newspaper article says.
That’s the type of boy I was. The man I am now still wants to hear the screams.
I lift the last article, which is about my sentencing. I was sentenced to six years in juvenile and I would then be transferred to an adult facility until I was twenty-five. The newspaper was wrong. I spent one year behind bars before Victor took me away. The picture in this article is me with my face covered by a blanket and only my legs showing. The guards were ordered by a judge to keep my face from the media. I remember the day clearly. I didn’t speak in court even to defend myself. What was the point? I killed my mother and her boyfriend with no remorse and even today I feel nothing.
After months of testing, sociopath was the diagnosis. Today they call it antisocial personality disorder. What a crock of shit. The original diagnosis is what attracted Victor. He needed a killer and he found one.
I remember checking his bedroom door one night a few months after they brought me into their lives. It was unlocked. How he and Cindy slept with me, the child killer, down the hall is a mystery. The fact is, they never gave me a reason to kill them. Victor knew what I was and provided people for me to kill a year after he brought me into his home. It feeds a need inside me and he knew it.
Slowly, I place the articles back in the box and then search in my pocket until I carefully pull out a piece of paper with a single strand of long, dark hair inside. I fold it into the article about Vincent’s and Cindy’s deaths and close the lid on the box.
I’m such a fucking fool for sending her away. I bring the bottle of whiskey to my lips and take a deep swallow. Who needs a fucking glass? I lose count of how much I drink after that.
You claimed her, my drunken subconscious yells hours later. Go get her.
I claimed her because she’s mine. I’ll kill her brother and take her back. Hell, if she doesn’t want to come, I’ll lock her in the basement for the next forty years. That’s what a good sociopath would do.