Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (13 page)

Charlie woke to the sound of screaming. At first he thought his dreams, fuzzy half-remembered images of his parents, had chased him into the waking world. But once their faces faded from his mind’s eye and he was on his feet, gun at the ready, the screaming continued.

The campfire beside him still licked skywards. He couldn’t have slept more than an hour or two. He blinked his aching eyes wide and stared into the dark, crouching painfully on his bad leg, perceiving the spread of fires across the treeless plain upon which the army had camped. By their glittering combined light he picked out silhouettes against the stars and the great swathe of the Milky Way.

The screaming came from his left. He ambled away from the fire. Darkness consumed him within a few paces, and he had to step carefully over the uneven ground. A misstep into a rabbit hole would mean a broken ankle. His leg was almost healed, but an injury now would put him out of action. He had no illusions: weakness would not be tolerated this late in the game.

He forced himself to slow despite the urgency of the screams and inched his way by starlight.

It’s so peaceful,
he thought absently.
The wind in the grass, the silver trees under the moon
.

It took him a moment to realise that in transit, the screaming had become entirely academic. The horror he had felt in his heart on waking—the instinctive gut-yanking fear that came at the sound of genuine human anguish—had faded to a blank nothing.

Christ, I don’t feel anything.

He was close now, only yards away. The screaming clawed at his ears and threatened to give him a headache. But his pulse was entirely steady. He realised he sought the screaming for curiosity’s sake alone.

No, that can’t have happened. Not to me. She sounds like she
hurts
so much. I… I don’t feel a thing.

He paused in the darkness and gripped his head. Suddenly everything seemed so confused, the past few weeks a daze. How could it all have happened in so short a time?

Could it really have been only last month that he and Dad had been on their way to Kent with a cart full of preserved apples? Everything seemed so much brighter in his memory. They hadn’t had anything in all the world but that stupid old cart and the clothes on their backs, but they had had each other.

New Canterbury had taken all that away from him. That grey old sack of shit, Lucian McKay, had been the one to put a bullet through Dad’s chest.

It had been him upon whom all of Charlie’s rage had been fixed. James had promised revenge when he had found Charlie crawling through the forest. So Charlie had taken the grey bastard north with them, intent on keeping him alive just long enough to let him see the army in all its glory, to know that his friends would soon join him in oblivion.

But when the time had come to take his revenge, James had let McKay and his friends go free.

He turned his back on me just like them. But I’m still here, marching right by his side, like it was nothing.

What else could he do? He had seen enough second-guessers cut down over the past few hours to know that there was no slipping away, no backing out.

Do I really want this?
Can
I do this?

For a moment he wasn’t sure. But then he remembered what the
good people
of New Canterbury had done to him when McKay had dragged Charlie screaming into their midst. Their trampling feet, saliva raining down on him, a turbulent writhing mass looking to carve off pieces of him. They were no different.

We’re all killers.

His fingers twisted through his hair, and he bent over in the grass, clawing at his scalp.

Suddenly the screaming seemed real, actually there. Somebody was crying out to the darkness, a living breathing person. He ran the rest of the way, reaching a clearing in the grass. A fire just large enough to throw off a few slivers of light crackled to one side. Charlie stopped at the sight of Jason crouched over a tiny pale figure.

The girl couldn’t have been more than fourteen. A dress that looked as though it had been made from old floral sheets lay torn under her. She writhed under Jason as he held her to the grass, the long knife in his hand finishing its work and cutting away her underwear.

She yelped as the blade nicked her pelvis.

Jason tensed as Charlie took another step forwards and turned the blade towards him. His face creased into a wide, aggressive grin. “Charlie, boy,” he hissed, snaking his tongue out into the night as though tasting it. His eyes glittered with starlight, but there was nothing in them to lend them any semblance of life. Black, snake eyes. “Want a piece of this one?” He grunted, wrapping his hand around the girl’s throat until her scream faded to a dry wheeze. “You can have her when I’m done. If she quiets up.” He shucked his pants down around his ankles, a bare lithe arse glowing in the moonlight. He leaned down upon her, and while his hand around her throat kept any sound from escaping her mouth, Charlie saw the scream perfectly captured in her round bulbous eyes.

She implored Charlie with her gaze, jerking with each of Jason’s thrusts, tears trickling down her face into the grass.

Charlie stepped forwards, his hand held out towards Jason, but he paused.

He’ll tear me apart in seconds.

Jason was James’s lapdog for a reason. He had cut down more people than the rest of them put together. This one had never been recruited. There was no question in Charlie’s mind that James had never had to convince Jason of anything. He only unleashed him.

Charlie’s fingers wavered for a moment and then, shaking his head, mouth ajar, he let his hand fall back to his side. A strangled whimper escaped the girl’s mouth as he stumbled away into the night.

Beth tasted blood. To keep from crying out, she had bit down on her lip so hard that she had cut deep. She let loose the tiniest groan. It was all she could do to hold in the panic whorling in her chest.

Malverston loomed close by. She sensed him through the haze swirling around in her head.

When the blade first touched her skin, she had been sure she would pass out. It hadn’t been the instrument itself, a scalpel fit to bore through leather hide without a mote of resistance, but the look in Malverston’s eye.

Why me?
she wanted to scream.
Why not one of the others?

But she knew why. She had always been his favourite. There had been no shortage of passing temptresses over the years, born of the same vein as Malverston himself, happy to lie with him if it meant a life away from the wilds.

Yet he had never taken so much as a second glance. He had eyes only for Beth.

She knew it stemmed from her hatred of him. She would lie with him, but all the while she’d picture stabbing him through the heart, tearing his eyes out with her bare hands, peeling his manhood with a paring knife. Even if she could never do it, the thoughts were always there, and she was always ready, a single breath away from murder.

And he knew it. That was why it was her: she was something to conquer, something to whip and beat down and break—even if it meant slicing pieces off it with a scalpel.

The cuts burned, arcs of liquid fire traced in her skin. Her dress stuck to her skin where blood had run down her elbows, her shins, her shoulders. Nodding with satisfaction, Malverston stepped daintily around her and studied her with the precision of an artist and made nicks and incisions with passion and flair.

God, he’s killing me. Don’t let it end like this.

She had no idea how long she had been tied to the chair, but nothing had stirred nearby, not even a single distant footstep. They were truly alone, and she had a feeling he was just getting started.

She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of being beaten by a sack of lard, even if he took everything away from her.

“Curious, that I might have been wrong,” Malverston whispered in her ear. “Beauty is more resilient than I thought.” He giggled. “That’s my girl.”

He stepped away, the scalpel held up to the light, showing beads of scarlet blood upon the blade. His eyes roamed her body as he smacked his great flabby lips and nodded with approval.

The same look he’d given her since she had been no older than Melanie. Twelve years old, taken into that den of sweat-stained sheets and stuffed with the fruits of the Moon’s labour, candlelit and luxurious and suffocating, while her mother and sister starved at home. Not that her mother had ever lifted a finger. Being family of the mayor’s favourite girl had its perks, after all; they had had food when the rest of the town starved, and they had got medicine when plague struck.

Gotta keep my princess plump and delicious
, Malverston had whispered.
Can’t have you slopping around with diseased ingrates. The things I do for you, my darling. The sacrifices I make…
The same words, every time she fought tooth and nail for those favours, gyrating over him, wishing she could choke the life from his wobbling form.

Presently, Malverston retreated farther towards the cart and set the scalpel down.

Everything inside Beth threatened to break in that moment. The pain amplified, the sheer horror of it all washing over her anew. She had worked so hard to blank it all out, to crawl into the furthest recesses of her mind and into her few memories with James in the peach fields—when, just once, she hadn’t had to think of Melanie and her mother.

But the pain—she bled from dozens of cuts. How deep did they go? She could barely move, didn’t dare turn her head lest those on her shoulders and neck widen further.

No! I won’t give in to him. I won’t!

She did the only thing she could think of: she bit down into the bloody groove in her lip, bringing back fresh pain. There was no thought in the pain. The most horrible thing was that the pain was better; it was easier to hurt.

Malverston pursed his lips. “Now, now, don’t look so glum. I thought we were having such fun!”

She glowered, biting down harder to bring out the fire in her eyes. She hoped he felt at least some of the hatred; all the brimstone and rivers of lava of the underworld gushed out from inside her head, beamed at his liquor-soaked beard and wicked, boyish face.

For a moment she thought that maybe his expression flickered, something akin to anger and frustration peeking out from behind his mask of superiority. Then he returned to the cart and picked up a mirror, turning it around to face her. “Maybe you’ll change your mind when you see for yourself,” he said, the flicker replaced by a victorious smirk.

Beth’s reflection rotated into view, and she released her hold on her lip. Her breath whooshed out of her mouth as though he had sank his fist into her gut. The cuts weren’t nearly as bad as she had thought, nor as bad as they felt, but they were everywhere: dozens of crescent moons cut into her face and neck, arms and shoulders, belly and thighs, even the delicate skin of her feet; brilliant dripping crimson against the marble pallor of her skin.

She knew they would scar. If she got out of this, she would be forever marked.

I’ll remember this every time I look down at myself. Every time I see my reflection in a pane of glass or pool of water. I’ll remember being here, in this chair, with him.

In that moment, Beth wished for death. It would be better than living trapped in this place, replaying the here and now over and over until she grew feeble and the world had moved on.

She muttered, “If all you want is them, why are you doing this?”

There was no mirth in Malverston’s eyes, nor mocking glee; just cold stones set in a rounded, immobile face. “Because nobody embarrasses me. You betrayed me, slut. You showed me up in front of that little shit—not for yourself or mummy or your little brat sister, but because you
wanted
him. That slick of nothing, that nobody—one wave of my hand and he’d be slime on the sole of my boot.” He blinked. “You betrayed me.”

She leaned into his face. “You’re pathetic.”

A plastic smile pulled his lips to one side. “We’ll see, when I stop cutting and start carving.”

Beth’s pulse raced, for she saw no bluff in his eyes, but she squashed the panic with everything she had. If she was going to die, it would be on her terms. “You can’t lie to me, George. I see you. You need something to hurt for you, something to play with, because if you stopped now all you’d have is fear.”

His lips tightened and he returned to the tray. She steeled herself for fresh pain, taking note of her toes and fingers, her ears and nose, and wondered which of them she was about to lose. While his back was turned, she sobbed silently.

Then, footsteps. Malverston, a few paces away, froze midstride. They listened as the steps grew louder, echoing through the empty hall, rising the stairs.

Renner, chief slimeball—one Beth also planned to gut like a fish when the time came—appeared before them. His beetle-like eyes flitted from Beth, to Malverston, to the tray, and back to Beth. “We need to talk,” he said, a sigh charged with thinly veiled delight.

If it were him in Malverston’s shoes, I’d be dead by now. He wouldn’t have just cut. Not this one.