That was how they got me. Before. So many years ago when I was just a lad.
They knew where I lived.
So, I stayed off the grid.
And far, far away from the nearest church.
My apartment was a converted loft in the heart of the industrial district north of town, the entire second level of a warehouse that had once been used to store imports from China, but now housed The Fallen arsenal. Technically, Bat was in charge of munitions and weaponry for the club as Sergeant at Arms, but he’d outsourced the more illegal items to me to be hidden in the way only I knew how to hide.
I’d bought the warehouse with cash from an old man before he kicked the bucket, converted it myself over the span of two years. It kept my nineteen and twenty-year-old self out of trouble, and in the end, I had a home that suited my needs.
There were no windows.
I didn’t need light.
There was no television, no computer, no comfy lounge area.
A bed, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a massive gym.
The only indulgence I allowed was my library.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves in the area that should have been the living room. One deep, slouchy leather armchair and a side table where I sat at night under the dim light of the reading lamp in the otherwise pitch-dark apartment to read.
I didn’t read fiction.
Mostly, I read religious texts and science tombs. Technology, too, when it came to weapons, and history, if it was about warfare.
Yeah, religious texts.
The staunch fucking atheist reading about God.
Fucked up, but then again, I never claimed to be otherwise.
I read everything I could get my hands on about God, about faith, about why people subscribed to such nonsense. I read about the Catholic culture in Ireland, and happily, of its decline in the twenty-first century.
I read so I could understand.
I understood so that I could harness the demons of my past in thick rope and chains at the back of my mind and hope they never got loose.
Why can’t I touch you?
Bea had said last night after I’d thoroughly ravaged her sweet body and made it intractably mine.
I didn’t want her hands on my body. Honest as fuck, I didn’t want her sweet words in my ear either, but I couldn’t control that so well. Bea was everything light and good, of course, she wanted to lavish that on me. I could ignore those words, mostly, turn my head so they blew unheard past my year like a shout into the wind.
But touch?
My skin was only so seasoned. The feel of those soft, small hands tipped always in some outrageous shade of pink? They would devastate my walls, pull them down stone by stone until my barriers were all in ruin.
I couldn’t be exposed.
Not again.
Memories rattled in their chains, flashes popping behind my lids.
The scent of dank, molding earth sharp in my nostrils, the feel of mud beneath my knees as I bent prostrate in prayer before a false god.
Pain, explosions of it across my flesh as if my very body was a battlefield, the Somme, craters blown out of muscles and fissures cracked into bone.
My hand slapped out against the wall of the warehouse beside my door to brace against the onslaught. I tried to tamp down the nausea that swelled high in my belly, lapping acid at the base of my throat, but I knew it was futile.
Seconds later, I turned my head and threw up on the frosty grass beside the gravel walkway. The putrid mess steamed in the freezing air, a reminder that my body wore more than just the scars they’d carved into my skin. I was diseased by my past. It was a cancer inside me, eating away at everything good I tried to produce. Sometimes, like when Bea tried to touch me with her soft, tapered fingers, I could literally feel it gnawing at my bones.
I spit out the last of the acidic waste, then wiped the back of my hand across my mouth before I started to unlock the door to the warehouse. It was heavily alarmed with motion sensors, cameras, and multiple locks. A Fort Knox for me and my demons, as necessary to keep things out as it was at times to keep me locked within.
But then I saw it.
Such a little thing.
Someone else wouldn’t have taken note. But I was The Fallen enforcer. I’d killed more men than I could ever tattoo the names of on my knuckles, and I knew I’d kill a hundred more. I was a predator through and fucking through. There was little in my environment I didn’t catalogue, few times I missed something however small a change, in those settings that were both familiar or unfamiliar to me.
So, I noticed.
The patch of darker grass beside the derelict garage at the edge of my property.