Chapter 1
“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.
The face of the man in front of Malachi Blackwell is discoloured, tinted tomato red with a muted blue hue. Mal releases a minuscule amount of pressure from his throat, not for this poor man’s sake, but for the sensation of relief in his strained hand. From the look of the veins protruding from Jaxon’s temples, he might burst something any minute now though. He smacks Mal’s chest, but it’s clumsy and feeble. It feels more like a caress than anything.
This is why strangulation is considered one of the most intimate forms of homicide. It’s not because of the proximity, or watching the life drain from their eyes. It’s because it takes strength and time… it takes rage.
Just a few more minutes of pressure on his throat and Jaxon will be dead. His amber eyes are getting glassy, but the fear is still there, burning with life. Mal’s eyes, however, are lifeless, obsidian in the moonlight, but the edge of his mouth twitches as if he can’t fully control his emotions.
This is not how Mal envisioned his Friday night – killing a man in an alleyway behind a pub –the same place where all the stray cats and homeless drunks use to relieve themselves. The smell is awful, urine and stale alcohol mingle in the chilly air, along with old takeout food half-eaten and discarded on the ground, but in comparison, it’s no worse than that house he lived in as a child.
It was a dump, but he loved that home. He forgave the infestation of bugs that crawled over the kitchen table whilst he ate cornflakes. He also forgave the floorboards that creaked underneath his small feet when he crept to the toilet. He forgave all that, even the sounds of arguing and crying from the bedroom facing his. Only because in the darkness, he could see the stars.
“Stars can die too?” he asked years later in the dark planetarium auditorium.
“All things die,” Genevieve, his new mother, replied.
That truth terrified him. All things die.
Mal’s chest feels heavy, agitated even. He releases more pressure, allowing Jaxon’s airway to gain a narrow amount of oxygen, and oh how he swallows it up quickly. He won’t die now, but Mal’s hand remains conflicted on his throat.
“The first kill is a euphoric and piquant experience,” said Genevieve or one of her ‘children’. He can’t recall who said it, but he remembers those words ringing in his ears.
There’s something troublingly appropriate about having Jaxon’s life in his hands, and yet it doesn’t feel… right. Maybe it’s all been built up in his head, and reality can’t match up. Perhaps it’s just that – an illusion. It cannot exist, certainly not here under the starless sky and the rat twitching under the dumpsters, hiding, waiting to feast on the banquet on the ground.
“Let him go,” a voice calls out.
Mal’s head snaps at the sound, breaking his reverie. It takes a beat before he realises that this woman is talking to him and even longer for that fact to process. The woman is kneeling on the ground, still damp from the earlier rain, fifteen feet away.
“Let. Him. Go,” she says again, this time through gritted teeth, as she rises to her feet.
That’s right, he’s still holding onto Jaxon’s throat. His tired hands cling to Mal’s sleeve in desperation, his knuckles white and that vein pulsates recklessly. Mal takes one look at him and with a sigh of reluctance mingled with relief, he lets go and steps back. For some reason, maybe the light of the nearby streetlamp, the veins in Mal’s hands seem more distinct now, almost as if his blood won’t forgive him.
Jaxon sways to the side, as if gravity is off, too heavy somehow before lurching forward, falling back into Mal’s arms. Mal catches him and holds him up by his elbows. The man’s abused lungs revolt choking on sudden large amounts of oxygen. That’s what he gets for being greedy. He’s too busy wheezing to be aware of Mal’s hand slipping into his pocket.
It takes seconds to register that the man holding him steady is the same man who just strangled him. Once it does, he stumbles back. Mal lets him slip from his grasp, having what he needs.
“You… you’re… you’re crazy,” he croaks out along with other obscenities, stumbling his way past Mal towards the alley exit.
“Why the hell did you do that?” the woman demands.
Malcocksan eyebrow. He hadn’t planned on intervening. He was walking home, enjoying the chill in the early January air when he heard a name. Eloise Allard. He wasn’t sure who had said it. It sounded like it came from the wind whispering to him. He sharpened his nerves amid London’s noise, letting his senses fully absorb the air and sounds. The breeze that brushed by his ears carried muffled voices, arguing. It had his attention. As he approached the alleyway, the voices grew louder. He heard a smack, followed by a gasp, then a jumble of sounds as her bag contents fell out onto the floor. Before he even knew what he was doing, he had the man pinned to the wall.
The woman stares at him through thinly veiled suspicion. Her gaze is so indignant and unrelenting, breaking Mal upon a visceral level.
“He hit you,” he replies.
“You could have killed him,” she exclaims.
“He could have killed you.”
Her mouth quickly clasps shut. He got her there. The cheek that the man slapped is red. It doesn’t look different from her other cheek, which has a rosy tint from cold or anger, or perhaps both. Either way, it looks like it will heal just fine. However, who knows what would have happened if Mal hadn’t intervened between her and the local drug dealer?
Jaxon is small fry, Mal’s sure of it, but he will know people, bad people. The woman’s cheek twitches as she lowers her head. Mal suspects she’s ruminating over that thought and has come to the same conclusion herself.
He watches her profile as fluorescent lights from passing cars illuminate her face. She’s pretty, sublime even, with a slim, oval face, and brown wavy hair – professionally done – not a box dye job in the bathroom during a manic episode like his birth mother used to do. The way the fleeting light hits her from behind makes the subtle caramel highlights look like her hair shines like a halo, the depths of the colour luminous. Her eyes are large and round, green in colour. Her face is general, but especially her eyes, are somewhat calming. She lifts her head back up, looking dubious, but that only makes Mal smile. She’s unsure of him, but that’s okay. He’s unsure of her too.
She’s young – twenty-five, four years younger than Mal. Middle class based on her attire. Although she’s tried to dress down in dark jeans, a frilly grey blouse, and a black jacket, it’s her boots and handbag that give her away. The bag alone costs more than his monthly rent, and she brought it to a back-alley meeting with a drug dealer as if it were nothing. Her efforts to conceal the disparity between them were in vain. Jaxon saw right through her, and so does Mal. What he can’t see is why she met him in the first place, and what does each of them have to do with Eloise?
The woman grabs her bag from the ground and places back her belongings inside, letting out a frustrated grunt as she does so. Next to Mal’s foot is a piece of plastic. He bends down to retrieve it, eyeing up the driver’s license name and image. Amara Pedretti. The clicking sound of boots on the pavement lifts his head back up. Amara stands before him, her lips resting flat as she holds her hand out. He holds the card between his index and middle fingers. She snatches it from him, eyes glimmering with indignant rage.
She strides past Mal, her slender shoulder barging his, muttering as she passes. “I need a drink.”
There’s anger and resentment in her gait butMal will count it as a glorious win as long as she behaves herself and never mentions Eloise’s name again. That, he knows, is a fantasy. The reality is, he can’t just let her leave. There are too many questions running through his mind. As much as he’d like to put this night behind him and let this woman continue with her life, he can’t. He has to know what she knows.
As he contemplates his next move, the woman pauses at the mouth of the alleyway, looking over her shoulder as she speaks. “Well, are you coming?”
