Page 59 of When to Call a Blitz

19

Knox

(Present)

Raven cries as I tell her my story. I drag my fingers through her hair, trying to soothe her. It feels like so long ago but also like it just happened yesterday.

“Knox, oh, my God. I’m so sorry.”

“Me too, Little Bird. My mother deserved better than that.”

I push those memories back down into the empty hole in my heart. Mom occupies a space within me that nothing will ever fill. A part of me died alongside Vivian Bane that day.

“What happened after that?”

I swipe a tear from her cheek as she nuzzles into me. This is it. I can spill my guts to this woman and hope like hell my fucked-up life doesn’t send her running. The only people who know most of my history are Ace, his mother Ruby, and Lazz. I look down into those shimmering green eyes and decide to trust her. Trust that she can handle knowing how fucked up I am. Trust she won’t see me any differently than she does right now. Trust her to still want me when she sees my demons.

“My father began my training. I was taught many fighting arts such as dim mak, jujitsu, and atemi, to name a few. I loved learning different disciplines. It was my escape. A way to leave my prison in the cellar for a few hours. Forget the things I saw. A way to be free while still trapped.”

I think back on that time, me, just a tall, skinny kid who already saw too much ugly in this world. I learned how to detach myself from my mind. It was my only escape from that hell.

“It became a passion for me. Fighting. My father would lock me in the cellar and send in men. Men, Raven. Grown, trained men to attack me. Some tried more than attacking if they caught me asleep. It was constant. I learned, though. To protect myself, save myself.”

I’d spare her the gory details. She doesn’t need to know the way I’ve been molested or that I’ve spent years trying to push it from my own mind. In the end, I use the memories to fuel my rage, my survival.

Survive.

My mother’s words always stay at the edge of my consciousness. Pushing me. Fueling me. Haunting me. Helping me endure to my ultimate goal, taking out Vaughn Bane in the most gruesome way I can fucking conjure. I’ve spent hours upon hours imagining his death at my hands. The feel of the flesh on his neck as it presses between my fingers, the smell of his blood as it coats his skin.

“My first assignment for Albatross was given to me when I was nineteen. It was my initiation. Pass and live. Fail and die. Live and extinguish someone else. I was sent to dispatch a politician. He was blocking my father from purchasing land for a new development. The first man I killed was for land.”

Raven strokes my jaw as she adjusts herself to lie in the crook of my arm. I squeeze her, drawing her closer into my side.

“He saw through the slick businessman façade my father put up. He didn’t like him, and he was standing in the way of what my father and Albatross saw as a multimillion-dollar deal. I followed the politician for a few weeks doing recon.”

Raven’s fingers trace lazy circles along my bare chest.

“He was a good man. He had a family. Two small girls and a wife. I hated myself for what I was plotting to do. I hated it. I had no choice, though. I had to survive.”

Survive.

“The night came that I was ordered to take him out. The easiest place was at his home. I didn't want to do that to his wife, though. I didn't want her to be the one to find him. I followed him as he left that evening. He was going to a council meeting regarding the land development my father was interested in. It was the final vote. Without him there, no one could vote the development down.”

Scenes from that night flash through my mind so vividly, I doubt I’ll ever forget a single moment of it. God, I was so scared. Just a kid, a kid given the choice of kill or be killed.

“He parked his car, and I circled around the lot. When he was walking toward the town hall, I pulled up, blocking his way and rolled my window down. There was a moment, a few fleeting seconds, where our eyes met. He saw the gun, and I watched him exhale slowly, the realization of his fate laid before him. I had two choices. His death or mine. I squeezed the trigger, shooting him in the head.”

I rub my temple, the memories flooding my mind. I chose myself. I chose my life over his for revenge.

“I was numb as I sped off, driving back to the estate. I sat in the kitchen for hours, staring out the window into the dark, feeling nothing. I felt nothing, Raven. I should have felt terrible, but I didn't. I was hollow. My father came in a few hours later and never uttered a word about it. He told me to go to bed, and I headed for the cellar. He stopped me and told me to go to my room. It would be the first time I saw my room or slept in my bed since I was sixteen."

I entered my room that night for the first time in years. I stood in the doorway, just looking at the things that use to be my life. Gifts from my mother, magazines about dream cars, childish things. Unimportant things. My father wanted me to know that everything I had, everything I was or would be, was because he made it so.

“The memories of that night never left me. I had taken the life of a good man for something as trivial as real estate.”

My finger traces a path down Raven’s arm as I continue, her warm embrace and quiet presence spurring me on even though talking about what I did only makes the memories more vivid, more real.

“I stole a father from his children for land. I know it’s nowhere near close to having their father there, but I do transfer money into their mother’s account every month. It doesn’t absolve what I did, but I hope it can help them. Ace set it up to seem like an annuity from a life insurance policy so it goes undetected. His wife doesn’t know it’s from the man who murdered her husband.”