FOURTEEN
Luce
I was twelve-years-old the first time I had a train run on me. All six of them were friends of my father.
It wasn't the first time I got raped.
That honor was given to me at seven-years-old by dear old dad.
My mom had been passed out drunk in the other room. But even if she were sober -which she never was- she wouldn't have bothered to stop it.
So, when you start your story with those particular highlights, well, it went to follow that the rest wasn't white picket fences, hot cocoa, or Sunday cookouts.
I was a mistake, plain and simple.
I wasn't an oopsie.
I wasn't an unplanned blessing.
I was a fucking mistake.
I was never meant to come in this world.
My mother was thirty-four when I was conceived after a week-long bender in which she must have forgotten to take her Pill. I heard about the bender directly from her.
Damn tequila shots are the only reason your skinny, snot-filled ass exists.
I was five the first time I heard that, not quite understanding at that point of course.
The Pill part I speculated for myself, several years later when I understood such concepts.
But, yeah, I was an epic fuckup that she absolutely did not want. Why she didn't abort me was completely beyond my comprehension. When you were as against having kids as she was, being that her life was dedicated to chasing the promises found at the bottoms of bottles, I couldn't imagine what made her decide to have me.
To be perfectly honest, there was a chance she didn't know until it was too late.
It was a fucking miracle I wasn't born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Though, to be honest, there was an argument to be made for there being some of that damage leftover. Namely in my social skills - or lack thereof - my impulse control, and my somewhat strong tendency toward obsessive behaviors.
But, to be fair to a woman who didn't deserve any fairness whatsoever, all those things could have very much to do with my abuse later in life than the amount of booze she downed while pregnant.
My father, well, he was like every other scumbag I put in the ground as an adult. This meant that he was mainly, above all else, an incredible fucking actor. His whole life was a lie. His every smile, every word of encouragement, his every pat on the back, it was all a mask he wore so no one would ever look deeper and see the evil just beneath the surface.
Thankfully, I didn't see much of him when I looked in the mirror. If I did, well, I likely would have taken a blade to my face a long time ago.
I looked like my mother- tall and thin, all arms, legs, and torso. I had her dark hair, her dark eyes, her cheekbones. My jaw, well, who the fuck knew where that came from. Some grandfather five generations back or some shit.
But yeah, I'd rather look like my mother, the mess, the coward, the selfish bitch, than look like my father, the twisted, sick, perverse, child molesting freak.
There's no way to describe what it was like that first night, the night I came home from little league, beaming because, for the first time, I struck a kid out, face still sticky from the ice cream we got on the way home.
It was maybe the highest moment of my young life.
Followed by the lowest.
Because my father didn't fit the 'pattern.'
My father didn't slowly escalate.
It didn't start with inappropriate talk, then move on to touching, then masturbating, then oral sex, then the full act of penetration.
I learned later in life, during a brief stint in counseling with a therapist who didn't seem like a complete and utter quack for a change, that this was likely because I was not his first victim. Because almost all offenders escalated. They had to test the boundaries, make sure they didn't get caught.
Other little boys had suffered at his hand at some point.
And given that he was forty when I was born, that left several decades and an unknown amount of misery before he finally had me.
Little old defenseless me.
Right under his very own roof.
A convenient-to-grab sex toy anytime the mood struck.
And it struck often.
Almost nightly.
Starting that first night when I was held with my face in a pillow so no one could hear me scream.
And I did.
Scream, that is.
I screamed so hard that I felt like I had strep for a week after, that I bit my tongue so bad that it was flooded with blood and made speaking and eating impossible for days.
I screamed.
And cried.
And begged God to end it.
But he didn't.
I searched for meaning that Sunday in church, shifting in the pew because no matter what way I tried to sit, it hurt so bad that tears stung my eyes. I heard words of sin and punishment, my sad, confused, betrayed little mind trying to make sense of that, trying to see what I had done to warrant such punishment.
I tried after.
To be a better boy.
To keep my grades up.
To never get into scrapes with other boys.
To do my chores without being asked.
To keep quiet.
To never get in anyone's way.
It didn't do any good.
My sins, apparently, continued.
As did my punishments for them.
How did he keep me silent, that might be your next question. After all, in these times, how can a child not know their father isn't allowed to touch them that way?
The answer is both simple and complicated.
First, let's go with good old he was my father.
At seven, your brain doesn't think too far beyond that. Parents are, for all intents and purposes, like gods to their kids. They know all; they make the rules; they are who you go to with problems.
Likely because of my father's perverse tendencies and my mother's rampant alcoholism, I was very much raised with the idea of never 'airing your dirty laundry.' If there was a problem, it was handled in-house. We didn't drag strangers in to check out our soiled sheets.
So reaching out, at that time, never crossed my mind.
Second to that, I was taught nothing, not one single shred of sexual education. Not at home, nor at school. We didn't have cable. I didn't even know what sex was, let alone rape, until my teens.
Third, we didn't live anywhere near other houses. We backed up to the Adirondacks. We didn't have neighbors to talk to who might have noticed something was off about me.
And if you aren't taught that something is wrong, even if it feels wrong when it is happening, how the hell are you supposed to know it is abuse?
I did, however, have a pretty good idea of the fucked-upedness of that fateful night when I was twelve, when my father got all his pervert friends together, and they all took turns abusing me.
I had an idea a year later when he rented me out to one of those friends again, one-on-one because he needed to spend some time with me, because he wanted to 'bring me to heel,' because he was a sick fuck who loved knives and cigarette burns and whips.
I had an idea as I nursed wounds for weeks after one of his visits, having to wear hoodies in summer to cover them up.
His last visit was when I was fourteen, on the cusp of too old for all the old pricks to desire anymore. Maybe sensing the end of our time together, the knife seemed bigger, seemed sharper, and it meant to brand me forever, to make it impossible to forget him.
So my father held me down, cock hard at my screams, as another man carved the word 'slave' across my chest.
And I was.
A slave, that is.
I was a slave before then physically.
Afterward, I was a slave mentally for years.
But that night, that night when I was fourteen, bleeding openly from my chest, my whole body sore from other treatments I had already received, that was the night when grown men stopped putting their hands on my young body.
Because it was also the night I first learned how to take lives.
As my father exited the room to go get them a round of drinks to celebrate another night of successful rape, my 'master' moved to look out the window, chest puffed out in his satisfaction, the moon making him look even more sinister than he already did to my young eyes.
But he had left the knife on the bed, still slick and red with my blood.
I knew the knife.
Winchester clip point with a wooden handle.
I had been acquainted with it monthly for over a year.
I knew just how sharp he kept it - sharp enough to slice the skin from my body with the barest of brushes.
Sharp enough to do damage.
Permanent damage.
I don't know why that night was my breaking point.
Didn't matter how many times I sat in various therapists' offices and tried to pinpoint the breaking point. The best I could figure was, it was simply the last straw. And I somehow knew that it was the last time I would see my 'master.'
My father's other friends had lost interest in me over the past year, my budding manhood becoming less enticing for their particular proclivities.
And I knew this was the end for me and this particular sadistic bastard.
And I was sick and fucking tired of being helpless.
The second my hand closed around that handle, helpless was the last thing I felt.
I felt powerful.
For the first time in my life.
And that feeling was heady, overwhelming, to someone who had been nothing but a victim.
So when I rose from that bed, seven year's worth of pain, sadness, impotence, and rage rose up within me, a cocktail that had my blood screaming in my veins, my pulse pumping so hard in my ears that I literally couldn't even hear the scream when my knife slammed into his heart, sending a flood of warm, sticky, red blood down my hand and forearm before I could find the strength to pull it back out.
It was a done deal, of course. There was no way for him to survive it.
But I wasn't done.
I had years to make up for. I had scars covering my whole body from his knives, his cigarettes, his whips.
So I stabbed and carved that knife into his body until I was literally slick with blood, until his body was just a mess of open wounds.
Until I felt my father's hands close around my shoulders.
My hearing came back in a rush.
"What have you done!" he shrieked, sounding horrified.
As he should have been.
The image was straight out of a horror movie.
And I was no superhero. I was just a scared, traumatized kid.
So my immediate response was to freak out, to beg, to cry, to look for mercy.
I watched as he moved me away, kneeling down next to his friend, checking for vitals. It was ridiculous and ultimately fruitless being that the man was mincemeat, but he did it regardless.
And then he did the one thing he could have done to wipe away my own horror at the whole scene.
He turned over his shoulder with huge eyes, and he spoke.
"Why would you do this? He never did anything to you!"
It was right that second that I understood, not even having anything to truly understand, I did. There was no remorse in him for all the pain he had caused me. There was no regret. Because he genuinely did not think it was wrong.
There was no cure for his sickness.
Don't ask me why, but that was a blindingly clear revelation for me.
There was no fixing him.
And I remembered something in that moment.
I remembered when I was ten, and we walked into the yard to find a raccoon in the garden, hissing, snarling, wobbling around.
Rabies, he had said.
Incurable, he added.
You can't fix a rabid animal, son, he went on, you just have to put them down.
He grabbed gloves, picked the raccoon up by the tail, laid him on the block, and decapitated him.
A lesson was learned. And remembered, stored away for when I would need it again several years later.
My father was a rabid animal. There was no fixing him.
He needed to be put down.
Maybe it was instinct, pure memory of our hunting together out in the mountains, or maybe it was just what was easiest to do, but I gripped the knife with the blade out sideways, and I sliced it across his throat.
The blood spluttered out as he howled, hands going up to cup at it uselessly, like he could push it back in.
It wasn't clean.
It wasn't quick.
My experience with killing was with small animals only. I had no idea how much more pressure I needed to use to cut deeply enough for him to bleed out in less than a minute.
So he slowly drained of blood. I watched him go pale. I watched the life flicker in and out of his eyes. I watched as he became too weak to stay kneeling, and fell over.
I watched as he gasped out his last breath.
It took an eerily long time.
And it should have been sickening. I should have been vomiting all over myself and the floor, crying, something.
But I wasn't.
I was cold.
Detached.
Level-headed.
I walked out of the room and to the bathroom, diligently washing the blood off my body, off the knife, then carefully seeing to the cuts across my chest, my stomach lurching at seeing them reflected at me in the mirror.
I dressed carefully in jeans, long socks, hiking boots, a tee, and a black hoodie with white hood pulls. I stocked a backpack with money stolen from both men's wallets, a change of clothes, some food, a fire starter, a pot, and the knife. I rolled up a knapsack and tied it on top.
It was spring in the Adirondacks.
If there was ever a time a young boy could hope to survive there, that was when.
Sure there were no other options, sure the cops would be looking for me within hours, I also grabbed my father's machete out of the barn, and tore off into the mountains.
I spent enough time out in them to know it wasn't the best plan. First, because I was alone and could fall to my own death, or get caught in a damn bear trap and die of infection. Second, because my own stupidity and lack of training weren't the only things to contend with. For instance, not only were the Adirondacks home to cool things like beavers and marten, but one could also expect moose, black bears, coyotes, bobcats, and, as legend goes, cougars. Any one of them could put an end to a fourteen-year-old boy's life.
Spring would lead into summer where ticks came out by the billions, where mosquitos wouldn't give you a moment of peace. Summer would give way to fall where bears are looking to pack on the pounds for hibernation, making any meat source a good target. And winter, well, surviving on your own in the freezing depths of winter without losing limbs to blackness was big enough of a problem, doing so while not becoming prey to some desperate coyote or cougar was even more of a problem.
But there were cabins, I knew.
If you were strong enough to make it there, hunters had set up cabins. Survivalists as well. And, though you definitely didn't want to invade them, drug dealers who liked to grow their pot in the mountains, unseen, had cabins there as well.
By the time I found one such cabin, almost a month later, I was thin from hunger, thinner than usual which was saying something. I was skin and bones.
I could kill.
I was good at killing.
It was the tracking and trapping that I sucked at.
And those were kinda the more vital parts of acquiring protein.
I had been mostly surviving on wild blueberries, strawberries, Indian cucumber-root, and as disgusting as this was to admit, bugs, and small lizards.
I was getting weak.
And I was going to die if I didn't find shelter and a small supply of something protein-packed so I could refuel to seriously be able to hunt or fish again.
So when I came across the cabin, I didn't care to inspect what kind it was.
I didn't even notice the field out back.
All I saw was a small shanty that provided a place to rest that wasn't hard ground, that didn't expose me to the elements and predators.
Inside, I found a bed and a supply of canned beans.
It was stealing, technically.
But survival rules, my father taught me, allowed for such things.
I ate the beans straight from the can, leaving the cash that was useless to me in the place of said can as a thank-you to the owners for their hospitality.
And I went to sleep.
I woke up to a gun in my face.
"Ease up, G," the man behind the man with a gun said, looking down at me. "He's just a kid."
"Fuck off with that kid shit," G said, shaking his head. "I was running the street at his age."
I didn't really need more than that.
Drug dealers.
Most likely, pot farmers.
Of course.
I released the machete I had been gripping to hold my hands out, palms up. "I just needed food," I admitted, waving toward their pile of supplies. "I left money to replace it even."
There was a second of silent communication between the two hulking guys in their mid-twenties, indeterminate of heritage, but seeming mostly white. The one who wasn't G turned to me. "You lost up here?"
"I... ran away," I supplied.
"No shit," G said suddenly, pointing toward me, and doing so with the gun. "You don't recognize him? Man, he's that kid all over the news. They said you were abducted."
Well, that sure worked in my favor, didn't it?
No one was suspecting me of murder?
It felt like a weight was lifted.
"Wait," G said, head cocking to the side, eyes going a bit more wise than you would expect from a typical thug. "If you weren't kidnapped... and you ran away..." he trailed off, smile going a bit wicked. "You did it, huh? You sliced those guys up? Your pops and his friend? Damnnnnn, that's cold, kid." G was apparently loving this information. "So, what now, daddy-killer? You gonna just shack up in these mountains all your life? Become some backwards woodman?"
I slowly pushed up in bed, rolling a kink out of my neck. "I didn't think that far."
"No shit. You're like half fucking dead and this is the easy season."
G, you could tell from first meeting, was a filter-free kind of guy. He grew up on the streets of Baltimore, dodging bullets, and putting them in others. He was not one for mercy, not even to a fourteen-year-old kid. But he was one for mutual respect. And he, as rough around the edges as he seemed, was a businessman through and through.
His buddy, Mickey, came from the same neighborhood, but had a decent upbringing, had some love in his life that made him a bit softer to a trespasser in his cabin.
"So, you get that you just showed us your hand, right?" G asked.
"My hand?" I repeated, feeling my spine stiffen.
"Daddy killer," he repeated. "I mean, what? He whoop your ass a time too many?" I meant to show no reaction. I didn't want anyone to know. Because while I only barely grasped the fact that what he had done to me was genuinely wrong, I still felt some sort of shame surrounding the whole thing.
But sometimes you didn't need to say anything to give something away.
"Oh yeah?" he asked, mouth pressing into a firm line. "He was a fucking kiddie diddler? That was his thing?" he asked, tone angry. "I don't mess with that shit. Those fucks deserve to be put down. You did God's work there, kid. Though, it would have been just as poetic for him to end up in the penn with some burly ass biker with five kids at home he loves and hasn't been able to protect in a decade who doesn't take kindly to people on the streets who could prey on kids like his own. Ass full of countless dicks, that is the only fair payment for those shitheads. Aight. Aight. Well, your situation sucks. Know what else sucks? Dragging my ass out of the city where I got a fine piece just waiting to suck me dry every night."
"G... for fuck's sake," Mickey hissed, shaking his head apologetically.
"Oh fuck off. He's old enough. Yeah, so I don't like leaving a chick who could suck the paint off my truck, less she get any ideas of doing some shopping around in my absence. And I sure as fuck don't like ruining these kicks in that fucking wilderness," he said, waving a hand toward the door. "But we got product to protect up here."
I was fourteen. I barely had enough 'street knowledge' to understand what he meant by 'product,' but I was still somehow putting it together.
He didn't want to make the trek out of the city to come and check on his pot. But it needed to be watched. So people didn't come picking. So the weather or bugs didn't destroy it.
And I was in no position to turn them down.
First, because I was going to die in the wilderness without shelter and possible food coming to me.
Second, I couldn't go back out of the mountains because I was technically missing.
Third, as G said... I had shown them my hand.
He owned me.
"You want me to watch your pot," I guessed.
"In exchange, you can have all the food we can have one of the boys trek up here. And this shack. I mean... dunno what the fuck to do with you after summer, but that's not our problem. For now, you can keep a roof and a full stomach. It's more than you'd get out there. And if you come out of these mountains, begging for food or money, it's only a matter of time before you're found. Then they'll question you. You're weak still, kid, you'd crack and give it all up. You'd be put away. Maybe in juvie. Maybe in a nuthouse. But away. That what you want?"
"No." I wasn't trading one prison for another, not if I could help it anyway.
"Good. Then Mickey here will give you the lowdown on growing the product. And harvesting it and shit. You'll do it. And you won't smoke any of it," he added with a look. "And you can stay here and eat and get some meat on your bones again, think about your future. Hell, I'll even be nice and give you a little slice once we get the product on the street. Deal?"
Was there really any way I was going to turn that down?
In my situation?
There wasn't really even a choice.
"Deal."
So then I became a pot farmer.
I got my crash course from Mickey. I was told to help myself to the food around and that more provisions would come up with Mickey and some guy named Ace in a couple weeks.
"You know, we need to make sure you didn't croak on us or some shit," was his reasoning for the visit.
I took care of the plants.
I harvested and packaged it for distribution.
Then I pack-muled it back with Mickey and Ace early that fall to where G was waiting in some nearby town.
I pulled my hood up, and kept my head down, eating the McDonalds they bought me, pretending to not be listening.
"You can't send him back into the woods, G. I know you're a vicious fuck, but he's just a kid."
"He's a killer," G said nonchalantly. "He can handle himself."
"Being a killer won't help him not freeze to death in the fucking mountains, G. He dies, we have no one to help next season."
Appealing to G's business sense, Mickey knew, was always the best bet.
"Alright, fuck, yes," G said, sighing somewhat dramatically. "He can come crash. But he doesn't leave the fucking building, got it? He's the new house cat."
And I was. I was shuffled into the back of his SUV whose blackout windows made me relax slightly. Then we drove into New York City, a place even a child daddy-killer could disappear in. I was shuffled into what had to have been an abandoned office building in Washington Heights. I was given a room, a bed, some clothes - everything black like I preferred anyway- a laptop, a cell, and a - believe this shit or not - pile of dirty magazines.
"Know your old man fucked you up," G had said when I eyed them skeptically. "But therein lays your salvation. Tits, ass, and pussy. That's all you need in life man - a good bitch, and money to spend. So, ah, yeah... don't leave the fucking building."
That was about all the supervision I got.
I learned this wasn't odd about two days later when I finally ventured downstairs to the sound of the men in G's operation hanging out. Half of his dealers were my age. It was no wonder he didn't see me as a kid.
And that day, I stopped seeing myself as one too.
And if I wasn't a kid anymore, I was responsible for myself. That meant I needed to get my head right; I needed to learn about this world I was suddenly in.
So I read the manual, and got started on the laptop. I researched my father's murder. I researched a phrase I didn't understand about my father's friend whose name turned out to be Bill.
Allegations of child molestation.
Then I understood. I read article after article, website after website, about the topic.
Child abuse.
Molestation.
Rape.
I understood the concept that, while I had personally experienced them hands-on, I hadn't understood them intellectually.
I puked for twenty-four hours straight once it sank in. Once I realized how fucked up it truly was.
That December, just shy of Christmas, G came into my room, dropping a stack of money on my desk without a word.
The 'slice' he had promised me.
My 'slice' was five grand.
Five thousand dollars.
I may have just turned fifteen, but I wasn't stupid. That was a lot of fucking money.
And because I wasn't stupid, I knew better than to do what all the other dealers G had did - blow it. No. I stashed it. I carved up the floorboards under my bed, stashed it in a backpack, and piled all my shit under the bed to make sure no curious eyes and thieving fingers got ideas.
That winter, I studied the internet, the things I could find.
By spring, I was ready to head back into the Adirondacks. I stacked a backpack full of books. I brought as much food as the three of us could carry. Then I holed up for six months in the shack in the woods.
Then back to the city.
Where I learned about the dark web from some of G's men who bought their guns there, who found new buyers for product there.
Then back to the mountains.
Shower. Rinse. Repeat.
Until I was eighteen, fresh back from the mountains, excited to have my laptop back because I was eyeballs deep in my obsession with the dark web, with all the secrets that lay within it.
I found the men.
You know, the other men who had run a train on me six years before? Yeah, I fucking found them.
And I had an idea...
See, even though I spent half my year in a cabin in the mountains, the other half was inside the belly of a criminal enterprise. G was a ruthless leader. I had seen a lot of torture and dying in the years I spent with him.
Necessary evils, Mickey had defended with a shrug.
And those words, they buried deep. They rooted. Eventually, they stretched out and broke the surface again.
Necessary evil.
Yes, I believed that.
I believed that some evil was necessary in life.
Like taking out baby rapers.
So you might call it fate then.
Almost as soon as the thought first formed in my mind, there was a crash.
And all you heard was people yelling.
NYPD. Get down. Get your hands up, motherfucker. We got you now, G.
I heard them making their way around the lower floor, knew they would be coming up next.
I threw myself down, ripping the floorboards up, grabbing the backpack that had needed to be upgraded to a hiking one to hold all the cash, shoved the laptop inside, threw the straps on, grabbed my cell, tossed myself out onto the fire escape, and made my way up.
Because G was smart. The roof was only a three-foot jump from the one next door. That one was only four feet from the next. And once you were two buildings over, you could rush down the fire escape there, and disappear down a back alley.
I had no record.
I was the house cat.
No one knew who I was.
I barely ever went outside.
Once I was on the street, I was safe.
I was getting ready to make the jump to the second building when I caught sight of G on the street below, looking up at me, his hands cuffed behind his back. I froze, unsure, feeling like a traitor. G might not have been a father, or even a proper big brother figure, but he was someone who gave me a way out, who saved me. It felt disloyal to run.
But he looked at me for a long second before his face broke into a smile. He gave me a reassuring nod before he was led away.
It took away the guilt.
Six months later, after finding he had been sentenced and shipped to - gotta love the irony here - the Adirondack Correctional Facility, I took my new fake, top-of-the-line IDs, and I took my ass for a visit.
I owed him that at least.
"Got your balls finally, kid," he said as soon as he sat down, grinning.
G wasn't the kind of man who was miserable he got sent upstate. Because G had spent a lot of his young adulthood in and out of jail and prison. To him, it was almost like coming home.
But he got a dime this time, and his whole organization got rounded up with him, so I wasn't sure he would be taking it in stride.
"That shit was fucked," I said, it being my emotionally crippled way of expressing my sympathy and my sadness at losing my sort of makeshift family.
"Fucked, yeah. Inevitable, maybe," he said, shrugging. "I got my hustle going here already. Shit will be comfy cozy for the next ten years. What about you?"
"What about me?" I asked, confused. Was he... worried about me?
"Asking some odd questions lately," he said, giving me a look because we knew we could be overheard. I knew exactly what he was talking about. Because most normal eighteen-year-olds don't ask about where to buy lye in the neighborhood. And any hardened criminal would know what that was about.
"It's time for some people to... show their penitence."
He snorted at that. "Thought you handled that as a kid, yo."
"Two out of eight," I agreed, nodding.
"Shit," he hissed, looking disgusted. "Aight. Tell you what," he said, all business, making me stiffen a bit. "I got my hustle," he said, and I knew better than to ask what it was. "But I want my commissary filled every week," he said, and I had a feeling there was going to be something interesting to follow. G wasn't the type to ask for shit for free. He wasn't expecting me to take the money I earned over the years, and funnel it to him through his prison account. "Remember that place you vacationed every summer?" he asked, obviously meaning the shack.
"Hard to forget."
"Maybe I took a cue from you and your clever hiding technique." He knew about my stash under my bed. That didn't surprise me. You couldn't piss in his place without him knowing. And I was away for long stretches of time. So he was telling me that he had something - money or pot or both - stashed under the bed in the shack in the mountains. "Do the math. Cap on my commissary is one-fifty a week. Fifty-two weeks a year, ten years."
Almost eighty grand.
That number maybe should have been shocking. But one had to figure that each pot crop each year made G pure profit of over two million. And that was only part of his operation. He also bought from others and sold.
"The rest..." he said, waving a hand casually. "You did me good. You've been through shit. I support your life goals. Make it happen."
"What about when you get out?" I asked, not wanting him, the person who gave me a shot in life, to leave with nothing.
His smile, though, was wicked. "You aren't the only good saver, kid. I got me plenty to get back on my feet. Don't you worry. You do you. And don't forget my commissary. Oh, and kid," he said as he went to stand, turning back. "Eddy's on 23rd." At my quizzical look, he shrugged. "Answer to one of those strange questions you were asking." Where to get lye. I felt myself smile, unable to help it. "Cash is always smart." With that, he was led toward the door. "Don't forget my commissary."
I never did.
G got out for good behavior in eight years.
But every week, I was putting in the one-fifty. Fifty-two weeks a year, no excuses. A little over sixty-two grand, all said and done.
What was stashed under the shack in the woods, under the actual shack itself, it turned out, since there was nothing under the floorboards but dirt, was over two-hundred k.
It funded my mission as I tracked down and killed the men who hurt me and countless others.
Then, worried, I took off to China for a spell, studied some more, did some more research.
Then I came back.
I got good.
I got so good that I never needed to run anymore.
I got so good that I could lure them to Navesink Bank, bring them back to my place, one after another, and never even have one cop sniff around me.
I had the dark web to thank for that.
And I had G and Mickey to thank for the dark web.
They became my number one and number two contacts in my pager system. I didn't hear from them often, but every once in a while, they heard about, as G insisted on calling them, a 'kiddie diddler,' knowing those were my favorite bastards to take down.
G got free and started a new operation in the city. So far, never getting caught. I didn't know, and didn't need to, who he had farming the pot in the mountains where I had spent so much of my time. I wished him nothing but the best, as odd as maybe that was given he wasn't exactly a good man.
That being said, neither was I.
I was as bad as they came really.
But I did some good, just as G and Mickey had done.
Eventually, I did seek out counseling, when the dreams made me wake up retching, when I couldn't sleep for weeks on end. Most were quacks, complete and utter wastes of time and money. But there were two or three who gave some insight, who helped me get over some of the shame.
Some.
I was convinced there was no way to get rid of it all.
There was a part of me that would always be that little boy with his face in a pillow, the slightly older, but still small, boy with six men using him brutally, the young teen who had his body carved up by a man while he raped me.
I would always be that kid, somewhere underneath.
There would always be that ugliness, those wounds that could never truly heal.
And I had done a good job most of my life never letting anyone see that, never letting anyone see what I kept behind the vigilante persona. I never let many people see the damage, both physical in the form of the scars, or psychological in the form of the memories.
"Until you," I concluded, taking what felt like the first deep breath I had in over an hour. That was how long it took to give her all the dark, ugly details of my life. An hour. We were almost going to be late.
Evan pressed her lips together, taking several long, deep breaths. She had tried, I would give her all the credit in the world, not to show any emotion during my story. She had held her breath or slow-breathed. She had blinked frantically.
In the end, her emotions won out. The tears streamed as I spoke, ones she didn't even bother trying to swat away because just as soon as she would, new ones would replace them.
But she didn't sob.
She didn't ask me to stop.
She took it in.
Then she did the healthy thing, she purged it through her tears.
It was the only way a well-adjusted person could receive that information.
I didn't blame her.
In fact, I had reached out as I finished to swipe away the remaining streaks on her cheeks.
She moved inward, curling in against my chest, nuzzling her face into my neck, planting a sweet kiss to the side of the column of my throat.
"I meant what I said," she said, arm around my back squeezing me tight.
"What, doll?"
"I meant it when I said it doesn't matter," she said, making my stomach tighten. She couldn't have meant that, not really. Right? "I'm sorry that happened to you. That is wrong on levels I can't even express, Luce. But it is even more proof of what a good man you are. That you were able to survive that, to break the cycle. So many abused kids become abusers. But not you. You were stronger than that. And you didn't curl up in a ball either. You went out there and you systematically rid the world of all the others like your father and his friends."
"By killing them," I specified, not wanting to mince words.
"A fitting punishment," she insisted.
"Why?" I asked, the word choked-sounding.
"Why what?" she asked, kissing me under my ear.
"Why would you accept a guy like me, Ev?"
"I don't seem to have a choice."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I asked, stiffening. Did she think I would somehow... force her to stay with me? Christ, did she actually think I was someone who would...
"It means I'm in love with you, Luce," she said, shocking the shit out of me enough to completely shut up my swirling thoughts. "So of course I accept you. Sad, dark, twisted," she went on, shrugging. "Scars and all. I love it all, Luce."
I had led a colorful life.
I had seen things most would never see.
I had done unspeakable things, but had seen just as many wonderful ones.
I had had a family.
I had made friends.
Never before.
Never once before, not in my entire life.
No one had ever told me they loved me.
I mean, how could they?
I wasn't a lovable man.
I knew that. I accepted that about myself.
But here was this woman, this amazing, beautiful, confident, sweet, strong but vulnerable, skilled, worldly, woman in my arms, naked, fresh off of hearing about all the sordid shit I had done in my life... and she still said it. She still felt it.
She loved me.
Fuck.
What was I supposed to do about that?
As a knock sounded at our door, there was a strange, small voice that said maybe I was supposed to love her right back.
The problem was, I didn't know dick about love.
I didn't even fucking know what it felt like.
But maybe, possibly, it had something to do with the swelling feeling in my chest as her eyes went big when her mother's voice called hello through the door.
Yeah, it could possibly feel something like that.