Cold-Blooded Beautiful (The Beautiful Series) Read online

I could hear my own breathing, heavy and harsh. The anger took a toll on my body. My mind. I squeezed my eyes tightly against the flashbacks and violent images that always took over. I didn’t want to go back to the way I was, I didn’t want to only feel how brutal and savage life was, so I fought to clear my head of the violence. It was much easier to face my demons with Samantha. She always had this calm tender way to redirect them. Maybe it was her voice, or the warm feel of her skin, I didn’t know. Maybe if I didn’t push her to talk to me, she would still be here.

  Oh, look. Psych-central, I’m making my way to stage three, bargaining. Whoever it was that made this theory, got it down perfectly. If I could just get her to answer her phone, I could tell her how sorry I was.

  If only I never told her about the shootings and about Thomas…

  If I could have just kept my mouth shut about David and her father…

  If I got the chance to tell her that they were both in custody…

  Still bargaining and negotiating with my demons, I found myself packed, showered, and seated on a small jet bound for England that was taxiing down a private runway. I had been sent home like I was expelled from school.

  This sucks.

  Twenty bucks says my plane will crash. Scratch that, wouldn’t matter. I’d be the only poor sap to survive, and everybody would blame me for not having my phone set on airplane mode.

  Digging into my pockets, I switched my cell to airplane mode. There still were no messages from her, and I couldn’t send her any more, since her voice-box was full.

  I sat on the plane for precisely seven hours, twenty-nine minutes, and forty seconds, staring out the window, watching the earth spin far beneath me. How fucking insignificant does that make a person feel? A small crumb of stone sliding away from the base of an enormous mountain. Never having been part of the whole or its foundation. Just tumbling over the dirt and rubble, alone.

  Every time the flight attendants tried to shove liquor down my throat, I growled at them. A weasel-eyed, greasy haired, oil faced man sat somewhere in front of me, and complained incessantly that the warming blankets weren’t warm enough, and that his sherry wasn’t dry enough. I screamed into that air that if he didn’t shut up, I’d experiment with how far a human being could shove their foot up another human’s arse. After that, nobody spoke to me. I didn’t need to go visit my mother, I needed to find a damn cave far away from civilization and just be left ALONE.

  I landed at Heathrow, and winced at its vast whiteness. There were too many stark lights. Too many bloody people milling around, getting in my way and stopping abruptly, just to have me slam into the back of them. I toyed with the idea of screaming the word BOMB, until my throat bled, but thought better of it, knowing it would then take me forever to get back to the states, or get my voice back. Grumbling to myself, I trudged all the way to the luggage pickup, and waited years for the piece of shit to start spinning and spitting out the bags.

  You know mine came out last, right? With a loud sigh, I lifted up my bag and trudged alongside the crowds of people living their happy little existences.

  In the middle of the bright lobby stood my mother, holding an enormous handwritten sign that read: WAYWARD SON!

  Bloody hell.

  My life was already a nightmare; this was a horrible thing to do to me. I hated my brother for it. Most of all, after that long plane ride and thinking; I was starting to hate Samantha for it, too.

  Mum’s hair was a lot grayer than I remembered, yet it suited her beautifully. She had lost some stones too, which made her look somehow older and grandmotherly. Tears filled her soft gray eyes, and her smile widened when she noticed me walking towards her.

  “Oh, Kade, look at you,” she whispered softly, dropping the sign and holding me at arms length. Then she dragged me into a hug, and smacked me on the back of the head, “You need to visit me more. Dylan told me you needed an intervention, how are you really, love?”

  “I’m fine, Mum, just bitter and angry, as always. Come on, I need to get away from all these people.”

  Mum hooked her arm in mine and nodded quietly, wiping away her tears with her free hand. “Sure, love. My car is in the Meet and Greet.”

  In the car, it began.

  The queries. She all but held an interrogation light up to my face, trying to get me to tell her everything. I ran my hands down my face, doing my best to ignore the dramatic meddling. This was supposed to help me? I tried to stay calm, I tried to focus on things that Sam would say or do when my thoughts got too violent. I tried. So fucking hard.

  “Did you love this woman?” She asked as she pulled into her driveway.

  Joy. A question that was easy to answer, but would open up a universe of hell for me. “Yes,” I muttered.

  She froze, like I knew she would, and held her fingers up to her lips as if someone had told her the Queen was coming to tea.

  “Don’t bloody act like that,” I snapped, climbing out of her car. Grabbing my bag from the back seat, I fixed my gaze on her, “I do get it, you know. I get how every-bloody-one sees me. I just wish that everyone would leave me alone. I’m a grown man, and yes, I bloody well loved her, and I still do. Let me deal with it on my own.” God, with everything that I had ever put my mum through, I didn’t want to fight with her about this. I didn’t want to hurt her any more than I already had, but she needed to let me be.

  “You keep up with your ways, Kade Charles, and very soon, doctors are going to be able to place the bloody word syndrome, after our family name!” She yelled, storming into the house. I followed after her, a heavy yeasty scent of fresh baked bread filling my senses. Slamming her keys down on the hallway table, she spun around and jammed her hands on her hips. Her eyes narrowed at me and I knew the mother of all shame-on-you-tornadoes was about to sweep through the house. “Those doctors did not encourage me, Kade. They had me planning your funeral. They had me burying my son at sixteen. Look at you, now. Dylan says you’re finally getting help and healing…what this has done to our family…”

  She was revving the engine for the guilt trip, her one-way ride into my already stress-filled-damaged-guilty-as-hell-self-condemned-soul, when a strange man walked up next to her. He was wearing what looked like a pair of silk pajamas.

  Okay.

  Does she see the strange man?

  The one standing next to her in his pajamas?

  Strange man put his arm around my mother’s shoulders. Hmm. She didn’t scream bloody murder. What the bloody hell was I missing?

  Was he the dog walker? Gardener? Mail carrier?

  He bloody well better be something of the like, because he was way too young to be anything else I was thinking about, standing in my childhood home in his bloody silk I-just-shagged-your-mum-pajamas.

  “Kade, love,” she said when she finished her guilt flavored monologue, “this is Henry Moors, my significant other.”

  “Your significant other what?” I demanded. I pointed a finger at him, “He bloody better well be the dog walker!”

  “Kade!” She huffed. “I haven’t had a dog in five years.” She turned to Henry, and patted him on the cheek lovingly. “Ignore him, dear, my eldest son has less personality than our bath towels.”

  Our bath towels? What the fuck were these people trying to do to me? “That’s it, I need air. Nice to meet you, Henry. Have fun with shagging my mum. Mum, later.” I walked out her front door, slamming it so hard that the windows rattled back an angry response.

  Without a clear thought in my head, I just walked.

  Of course, once I stepped foot outside, it began raining a thick mist of icy cold daggers, it was England after all. With tightly clenched fists shoved deeply in my pockets, I stormed blindly through the streets, acknowledging nothing and no one. I only glimpsed shadows of copper-haired figures taunting me in my peripheral vision. My clothes and hair becoming heavier and heavier the more the sky’s tears soaked through them.

  I only stopped walking when a tall gate stood in my way, and a dark loo
ming mountain of a building stood like a god behind it.

  Realizing where I stood set my heart thundering against my chest, trying desperately to climb up my throat and eject itself from my flesh. The moment my eyes locked onto the abandoned edifice was voltaic. Blood rushed through my heart and surged through the vein in my neck, causing my cheeks and forehead to blaze with heat.

  Demanding and harsh, the building stood menacingly over me. Saint Benedict’s. The place I lost my innocence. The place where Thomas took my life. Where all my demons were born sixteen years ago.

  Fingers clasped into the chain links, muscles pulled my body up and over the fence; I walked across the overgrown campus and up the crumbled and cracked stone steps. Time to face these demons head-on.

  Fuck you, Thomas.

  Fuck you.

  And fuck you Sam, for leaving me.

  Chapter 8

  David stood in the corner, smiling with eyes like one of those sinister, scary as hell circus clowns. Expensive over the top slacks and a crisp blue Armani shirt. He regarded me with a silent condescending stare. Looking at me as if I were already an obituary in his morning paper, over the loss and utterly bored. Everything in me froze. Time stilled and moved along in exaggerated sluggish motions. Long elegant fingers lifted the velvet box that sat in the bouquet and opened it, revealing my once beloved diamond studded eternity wedding band. “Time to come home, wife,” he whispered darkly, plucking the ring from the box.

  Tilting his head, he looked straight into my eyes. His normal golden brown iris’s were void of all color, just deep black pools of dilated darkness, and his smile…his smile was chilling, making an icy tremble crawl down the back of my neck. Those were the eyes, and that was the smile of a killer. My killer. The man who desired to cause my very last breath.

  The instant, I stepped back towards the door, David was closing the distance between us. With one hand, he was raising a gun to my face. The other clutched a dirty brown sack. A glint of light reflected off the diamond band that dangled mockingly from his pinky, as his index finger teased the trigger.

  My legs immediately weakened and turned cold, as I clawed at the door. My hands numbed as I desperately turned the knob and fumbled with the lock. Adrenaline kicked in, hormones raced and released into my bloodstream. I could hear my heartbeat, pounding in my ears, and I willed it to slow down. I needed to neutralize the threat. Gun in hand, get it out. Take control of the weapon. Achieve a position of advantage.

  First thing I did was try to scream my damn head off.

  David closed in fast; gun rose higher and slammed his full weight on me, crushing me against the door knocking the wind out of me so my screams could not be heard. I slammed my fists into his face, raked nails along his skin, “Shoot me then, shoot me! I’d rather die than go with you!” My fists and nails met with hard solid flesh, unmovable, and impenetrable.

  His laughter rang harsh and savagely in my ears. The hand holding his gun wrenches a handful of hair at the nape of my neck, violently yanking my face closer to his. Hot wet lips smash savagely over mine with such brutality that my bottom lip tears open on one of his teeth. There’s not an ounce of tactical training that I can remember. It’s just pure instinctual fear and a screaming rush of adrenaline that had me punching and biting back. The hard metal of the gun pressed against my skull, as his free hand grabs wildly at my wrists, trying to stop the onslaught of my defense.

  Pulling away, his face is covered with blood. Whose blood exactly, I couldn’t tell you. I tried for another blow to his face, but it was stopped by a vicious elbow that he slammed my face against the wall with. The hit to my head rang loud in my ears, and made my vision double. A thick warm cloth closed over my head and plunged my eyes into darkness; the theft of fresh air stifled my breathing. I screamed out, but a heavy pressure slammed against the coarse, salty tasting bag gagging me, as a mouthful of the coarse fabric was shoved into the back of my throat. Sharped edged plastic wire ties closed around my wrists with a loud zip, while I retched and coughed until the material was gone from my airways. My throat scorched and ached, tears flooded my eyes, stinging and biting my lids. Anger and panic ripped through me when I tried to move my hands to lift the hood off, only to feel the sharp pain of the tight plastic ties that bound me.

  “Shhh…” A low voiced hissed, seeping warm breath through the material and into my ear. Hot sweaty hands forced my shoulders down until my body was lying facedown on the cold tiled floor. The slow, strong roll of his hips over my ass again and again had me choking, and I struggled frantically to break free. “I love watching you fight, pet. If I only knew months ago how much of a challenge you’d be, I would have tried to break you sooner. This is quite fun, wife, I might even keep you alive as my pet,” he hissed. His hips continued their relentless obscene taunting thrusts, and even through our layers of clothes, I could feel the bruises form and my skin scrape with the friction.

  Sick fuck.

  Sick. Sick. Sick fuck. I struggled to scream, to push the heavy material out of my mouth with my tongue, but the end result was me just gagging on the cloth as it filled my mouth more.

  A heavy pressure on my head crushed my face against the ground, as I struggled and kicked out my legs, then the sharp precise burn of a needle into the flesh of my arm brought me to the precipice of oblivion. My thoughts shrieked in utter horror, as the surge of whatever poison flushed like pure acid through my veins. The heat coming off his skin seeped into mine, as he gathered my torso roughly in his arms and dragged my body along the ground. My legs and arms weakened until I could no longer move them on my own volition. The floor tiles scratched and scraped beneath me, as he towed my body to whatever destination he wished.

  I had no say.

  He was supposed to think I was dead.

  David’s going to kill me, and Kade is going to break completely.

  “Kade,” I garbled weakly into the darkness of the cloth, as I plunged into a black hole of nothingness.

  Please, God, just don’t let Kade find my body. Please, please, please don’t hurt him again like that. Please don’t hurt him again.

  Please.

  Just let him think I left.

  It’ll be easier…

  To forget me…

  If he…

  Hates…

  Me…

  Chapter 9

  While Samantha Matthews-Tucseedo, who-bloody-ever she was, continued her bloody fucking life without me, I stood somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean from her, under Europe’s cloudy skies, on the cracked foundation of my past.

  Saint fucking Benedict’s, where high school students come to die. England’s best educator for the criminally insane and mass murderers. My beloved bloody high school. Bitter, much, you ask. Fuck yes, I’m bitter. Tragedy makes people bitter; it makes you petty, hateful, and vicious. My doctors had told me eighty-five percent of all gunshot wounds are fucking survivable. Only a half an inch difference would have made all the bloody difference between life and death for me. If only Thomas had raised his hands a bit more that day, aimed that gun a tad bit higher, I would have never had to deal with any of this suffocating grief.

  With muscles coiled, I pulled myself though a glassless window, falling into an empty abandoned corridor. My shoes echoed a loud slap against the cracked floor. Sharp concrete scraped against the flesh of my hands. I smelled blood instantly, yet all I felt, was numbness.

  I walked with a purpose, a destination. Decay peeled at the walls, rot and mildew crawled along the ground. It was the place that nightmares lived, a backdrop for horror movies. Thick vines of ivy crawled through the windows and scaled the walls long ago. Desks and chairs were everywhere, toppled over, encased in strands of ivy.

  For sixteen years, I’ve lived with emptiness and darkness in my heart. Since Thomas shot a hole through my chest with a 9mm, complete with a motherfucking exit wound, and the bullet blasting into the wall behind me. It was a black hole too, one of those massive objects in space caused by the gravita
tional collapse of my world. A star exploding as a supernova so intensely, it sucked everyone into my darkness. I let the violence of that day define who I was as a man. I spent my adulthood hidden inside the walls of my house, writing about the horror of violence. Yet, there were never adequate words to reveal the hell and destruction of what it really was. There would never be any way to explain the absolute primal agony, mental, emotional, and pure fucking physical agony that comes with such torture and grief. Every goddamn night after the massacre, I prayed for my ending. I hated every breath I took, each and every single healthy one. I should have died that day. I was the first one hit, he blamed everything on me, fuck, Thomas said it was all my fault. Said it was everybody’s bloody fault.

  The abandoned school walls spun around me, blurred and pulsed. An icy breath of life flickered through the corridor, and a lone loose door swung slowly in its upward draft. The cold vacant hallway welcomed me like an old friend. I could hear the echoes of the other students, voices loud and laughing, unknowingly walking towards the last chapter in the book of their lives.

  Suddenly, I was sixteen again, awkward in my body, carefree and innocent, unaware of the horrors that my life had in store for me.

  I could taste the last smooth drag of my Marlboro, before I held it between my thumb and middle finger and flicked it into the street. Thomas and I, always sneaking drags before each class. He was laughing about something that morning, chuckling about some project he was going to be a part of, and how excited he was finally to show me what the bloody hell he was talking about.

  “This is a killer project, mate,” he laughed. “Best thing I ever bloody thought up, and it’s all for you.”

  Distinct, astonishingly precise details were coming to life around me. Inconsequential bits and pieces of the minutes before, the last few beautiful moments of my youth. Standing there in that abandoned school, I remembered them all. In. Exact. Horrifying. Flashbacks.

  Running up the stairs, the soles of my Converse hit the ground, echoing, echoing their tap-tap-taps.