Torched

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

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  29

  30

  .

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  Copyright © 2015 by Shay Mara

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Inquiries: Shay@ShayMara.com

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  : Prologue :

  Darkness enveloped the car as Mitch slowly maneuvered over unpaved back roads. His brother, Vince, fidgeted with a phone in the passenger seat. We were surrounded by dense forest, dozens of miles from any hint of civilization. By all appearances, it was the perfect place to dump a body.

  My body.

  I cracked the window a few inches, but even with a crisp breeze, the fresh air was suffocating. There was nowhere to look, nowhere to run, so I simply leaned my head against the window—letting my bleached blonde hair form a curtain to shield me—and closed my eyes. My skull cracked against the glass with every bump that we hit, but I couldn’t feel anything aside from numb resignation.

  The end was near.

  I’d been dragged into a vehicle with no explanation of where we were going, and driven to the middle of Butt-Fuck-Nowhere, Pennsylvania. It had all the makings of a Dateline special written all over it, minus a gripping life story that would make for good ratings.

  At seventeen, I was simply a girl who hadn’t lived long enough to make any kind of impact. No one would miss Chloe Belman, never mind mourn her, the maniacs about to murder me had made sure of it.

  Death itself didn’t faze me, a permanent nap didn’t sound all that bad at the moment. The actual process of it did, but over the past hour I’d also made peace with that aspect by reminding myself that the pain couldn’t go on forever. Eventually, everything would just fade to black and it wouldn’t matter anymore.

  It was the circle of life, people lived and people died. One day, we’d all return to the soil, some of us just a lot sooner than others.

  Mitch pulled over and turned the car off. With no power to its headlights, the moon shining overhead was our only source of light, softly illuminating trees that had to have been hundreds of years old. I wondered what other horrors they’d witnessed over all that time.

  “Get the fuck out,” Mitch ordered, as he and Vince undid their seat belts. I hadn’t seen the point in putting mine on.

  I took a deep breath and did what I was told, readying myself for the first painful blow. It wasn’t likely, but maybe they’d have a tiny bit of compassion and make it quick. The sooner it started, the sooner it would be over.

  Vince grabbed me by the arm and roughly pulled me around to the trunk of the car, leaving me confused as to why they hadn’t stuffed me in there at the beginning of the ride. Then again, the things Mitch and Vince did—especially to me—rarely made sense.

  Mitch stepped around the car and unlatched the trunk. “You fucked up, little girl,” he hissed in my ear. “How many times have I told you to mind your own goddamn business?”

  I dropped my head, unable to stomach the idea of apologizing or pleading for their mercy. What could I apologize for anyway? We were here simply because I’d walked in on a business transaction that I hadn’t actually realized was happening.

  That was it, the extent of my wrongdoing. But I’d seen the drugs, and the face of a man picking them up, and I knew that was a hell of a lot worse than burning dinner or mixing colors with whites, both of which had earned me beatings in the past. If they’d become that irate over a plate of food or some ratty t-shirts, I couldn’t imagine the rage they were feeling now that I was a potential liability.

  “You know what happens to snitches and bitches who can’t keep their mouths shut?” Mitch asked, his tone oozing with condescension.

  Yeah, I had some idea. That’s why we were here. The only thing that remained to be seen was whether they would pull out guns, knives, rope, or all of the above from that trunk.

  I gasped as Mitch nudged it open. To my horror—and sick relief—it wasn’t empty. I wouldn’t be stuffed in there because it was already occupied with a bloodied corpse, loosely wrapped in clear plastic tarp. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or woman, the head looked like it had been through a meat grinder. It took all the fortitude I had not to start thinking about who this person was or how they’d gotten there. If I wanted to make it through the night, I knew I had to detach myself from the reality of it.

  But the smell… Jesus, the smell was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I had no idea how long it took a dead body to start reeking like that, but it couldn’t have been fresh.

  “Oh my god,” I whimpered, feeling my head start to spin and lose all sense of balance. Was there actually a chance that I wasn’t the one who was going to die? That this wasn’t my burial?

  “Shut up unless you wanna end up like this,” Vince snapped, reaching under the plastic and pulling out a shovel.

  “Move your ass,” Mitch ordered, pointing toward the woods.

  My worthless legs wouldn’t move, overpowered by the clusterfuck in my head. I felt bile rising to my throat, but kept it from spilling out in a geyser of vomit. The only thing keeping it down was a hopeful awareness that this might not be the end of the road for me. Jane or John Doe in there hadn’t been so lucky.

  Lucky? Was that what I was calling this?

  “You wanna play with the big boys? Fine,” Mitch snarled as he shoved me forward into the forest.

  I didn’t want to play with the big boys, I hadn’t wanted any part of this life I’d been straddled with. But in that moment, I also decided that I didn’t really want to die. It would have been nothing more than an easy escape from the perpetually shitty existence I was stuck in.

  There had to be a way out. Accepting death was a hell of a lot harder when the ugliness of it was staring right at me, a hundred times worse than anything that had gone through my head on the ride here. Even if no one knew or cared, I didn’t want to end up like that guy.

  Or girl. The Henslow brothers didn’t really discriminate when it came to who they hurt.

  I took a deep breath and tried to hide any sign of weakness as they guided me about twenty feet into the woods.

  “Right here,” Mitch said, pointing to a leaf-covered spot on the ground. “Start digging.”

  Start digging? Was he insane?

  What a stupid question, of course he was.

  I took another deep breath and started shoveling. For the next hour or so, Mitch and Vince watched intently as I huffed and puffed and moved dirt to the side, getting about five feet deep. I knew they were waiting for me to break, but I refused to give them the satisfaction. Instead, I ignored my audience and started strategizing.

  I realized
I’d been doing it all wrong up until this point. If I couldn’t get away from their lunacy or house of horrors, I had to at least change how I survived it.

  I wanted to bury them alive instead. And then pour in some gasoline, light it on fire, and watch as their bodies turned to nothing more than charred flesh for the crows to pick at.

  One day… One day I would give them exactly what they both had coming. And I wouldn’t feel the slightest bit bad about it, because the world would be a much better place without these two pieces of shit fouling it up.

  Sweaty, freezing, and sore, I hadn’t even noticed that I’d been left alone to my thoughts until the sounds of branches crackling snapped me out of it. I looked up and saw Mitch and Vince standing at the edge of the hole. I couldn’t see much else, but they had to have dragged the body over. The smell of putrid, decomposing flesh hit my nostrils with a vengeance.

  “That’s good enough,” Mitch snarled, crouching down and holding out his arms. “Get out of there.”

  I reached out and let him pull me up. Vince bent down and tore open the corpse’s button-up shirt—which answered the gender question—then stood back up and handed me a switch blade.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked, pretty sure I didn’t want to actually know the answer.

  Mitch started laughing, the evil in his voice piercing me to the core. “You’re gonna write a message. Just so you have a visual before the maggots get to him.”

  “R-A-T,” Vince added, “there’s room on his chest. Start cutting.”

  I didn’t know what room he was talking about, dried blood and bullet holes covered most of the torso. I also didn’t understand why they felt the need to desecrate the poor schmuck’s body any more than it already had been. They’d made their damn point.

  But I wasn’t about to start arguing now, my only mission at the moment was to get the hell out of there—intact—and the only way to do that was finishing this disgusting task.

  Fuck it. The guy was already gone, right?

  I pulled up the hem of my shirt and held it over my nose with one hand, but I could still taste death coating my tongue. I snatched the knife from Vince and bent down, doing my best not to look at the dead man’s face. What was left of it anyway. I’d never intentionally cut into flesh before, but once I’d made the first vertical swipe, it wasn’t that hard to keep going. It helped that he wasn’t screaming in agony.

  After hastily slicing the letters into his skin, I threw the knife to the ground in contempt. I no longer felt nauseous or scared, I was just downright pissed. And in some fucked-up sense, I was also proud. If this hadn’t broken me, nothing would.

  I wiped my forehead with a sleeve, picked up the shovel, and motioned toward the body. “I’m hungry,” I stated calmly. “Toss him in so we can finish this.”

  They glanced at each other and then back at me, both of them rendered speechless.

  I snickered, then fished out a crumpled soft pack of cigarettes from my pocket and lit one. It was an intentional act of defiance, one that normally would have earned me split lip since I’d been forbidden from smoking. This time, though, Mitch’s thin lips turned upward and he gave me a curt nod. “I think I might’ve underestimated you, little girl.”

  Little girl. Little girl. I fucking hated that term and he knew it. He was pushing, trying to make me react. Any excuse to beat the shit out of me again.

  I didn’t.

  My head held high, I met his stare. “Yeah, you did. Next time you don’t need to make such a big fucking production of it.”

  Another act of defiance, this time with the smart mouth that had gotten me in trouble more times than I cared to remember. He didn’t blow that time either.

  Instead, he slowly walked to me, took the pack of cigarettes from my hand, and lit one himself. I stayed motionless as he pressed his repulsive body to mine, skimmed his fingers over my breasts, and leaned down to whisper, “You grew some balls along with these tits, baby. Maybe you’re good for something other than that tight, teenage pussy after all.”

  My skin prickled, every nerve in my body firing off in protest to the lustful and creepy undertones in his voice. It hit me that the night wasn’t over, I’d have to do my established duty back at the house. But it didn’t matter, I’d set my plan in motion and the man was falling right in line, even if he didn’t know it. Neither of the Henslow’s had the slightest idea what kind of monster they were about to unleash.

  It would take time, and a hell of a lot of patience, but one of these days that monster would put them in the ground too.

  It was a fucking vow.

  : 1 :

  Philadelphia, PA

  Three Years Later

  The beeping.

  God, the beeping was incessant. How the fuck did anybody sleep in a hospital?

  Forget rest, all I’d managed to score was a grinding headache, now that whatever pain meds I’d been given were wearing off. It was like the cherry on top of a shit-flavored sundae, made up of a concussion, broken ribs, fractured eye socket, throbbing jaw, and gnarly stab wound in my left shoulder. The purple and blue scene under my hospital gown wasn’t much prettier.

  All courtesy of Mitch Henslow—certified spawn of Satan.

  In all fairness, I was getting the better end of the deal. Vince was dead and Mitch was cooling his heels behind bars. Minus the flesh wounds, I’d made it out of their house of horrors alive. Now I just had to get out of the hospital before I ended up in the morgue—or a jail cell—myself.

  I already knew that the frazzled DEA agent outside my hospital door wouldn’t make it easy. I couldn’t hear what was going on, or who was on the other end of her conversation, but through the window I could see that she looked flushed and her hands were flying in all different directions.

  She’d been in the room earlier and introduced herself as Agent Tricia Rhodes, then jumped right in and peppered me with all kinds of questions. I hadn’t been in much of a chatty mood.

  That and I wasn’t an idiot. Cops and Feds weren’t exactly my… people.

  I did manage to get some information out of her. Apparently, Mitch and Vince had been on the DEA and ATF’s radars for a few weeks, after being fingered for a multi-state drug and weapon ring by a jailhouse snitch. He’d also mentioned a rumor about sex trafficking. Unfortunately for the law, a felon ratting out another felon wouldn’t make for a reliable trial witness. And that same felon being shanked in prison days after talking was even less helpful. The fact that Mitch had a huge network of allies, kept his guard up consistently, and always operated in stealth mode hindered their efforts even further. So, here they were, with basically nothing to go on, trying to use me for information to build a case.

  It wouldn’t happen. Not on my back.

  I’d played dumb, acting like the stereotypical twenty year old I definitely wasn’t, and after about ten minutes of her nonsense—feigning memory loss and naivete—I told her I didn’t feel well. She sighed at the thinly-veiled request to get lost and stomped off. That was several hours ago, but she was back out there, no doubt trying to formulate a new plan of attack to get me talking.

  A few more minutes of muffled, exasperated conversation later, she knocked and poked her head in apprehensively. “Can we chat a little more?”

  I nodded and watched her stalk across the room. She turned on a recorder and took a seat in the chair next to my bed.

  “How are you feeling, Chloe?”

  “Like hell,” I said with a forced smile. This really wasn’t the time to act as bitchy as I felt. Looking like I had something to hide would just make it harder to get rid of her.

  “I bet you are,” she commiserated. “You’re lucky it wasn’t much worse though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have any other memories come back?”

  I looked her straight in the eye and lied. “No. Sorry.”

  “So you still don’t remember anything between the time you were at the house and waking up here?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t.”

  Her brow scrunched. “We also found some scraps of fabric at the warehouse, Chloe. None of it yours.” Rhodes studied me intensely for some kind of reaction. She didn’t get one.

  I shook my head. “I don’t really know what that means.”

  “It means there were other girls there. Surveillance cameras picked up what looks like a group of women running away from the area of the warehouse. We don’t know if it’s connected, but the FBI’s trying to identify them. Were there ever other women in the house with you?”

  I shook my head again and focused on believing the words coming out of my mouth. It was exponentially more difficult to lie when hooked up to heart and blood pressure monitors. “I told you, I was only there for a couple weeks. I didn’t see anybody except Mitch and Vince.”

  I’d lied about my memory, last name, and the timeline, but hadn’t bothered to lie about the fact that I knew the Henslow’s and had been in their house. The cops would find my DNA there at some point either way. I figured my best option was going with a bunch of half-truths that would sound plausible enough to appease the authorities’ curiosity. As much as I hated the term, I knew I had no choice but to play a victim.

  But Rhodes had a job to do, so she kept pushing. “Maybe you can tell me more about the last few weeks then. How often did you see them? Hear them in the house? Did you hear any suspicious conversations or see anything that didn’t look right? Even the most insignificant detail could help us, especially if you saw any drugs there.”

  Oh, nothing I remembered was insignificant. Suspicious conversations? Check. Things that didn’t look right? Check. Drugs? Check. The only problem was that I hadn’t been just an outside observer in reality, and it had actually been a hell of a lot longer than a few weeks.

  I closed my eyes and leaned back, acting like I was combing over all of my memories. Really, I was just counting to twenty. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I don’t know anything. They picked me up outside the club and kept me in the basement. No one else ever came down. They took me up to the kitchen once or twice to cook for them, but it was the middle of the night and there was no one else in the house. I kept asking what they were planning to do, but they just laughed and told me to quit asking questions if I knew what was good for me.”