Beautiful Victim Read online

  Beautiful

  Victim

  By

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  Claire C. Riley

  Beautiful Victim

  Copyright © 2018

  Written by Claire C. Riley

  Edited by Amy Jackson = seriously awesome badass!

  Cover Design by Eli Constant of Wilde Book Designs = also an awesome badass!

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or have been used with that person’s permission.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work that went into it and for purchasing this from a reputable place and not stealing it like a seriously un-cool pirate!

  I mean, seriously, I know that no one really reads these parts of books, but you SHOULD! They hold lots of useful bits of information. Like what, you might ask. Well, how about that it took me around 80 hours to write this book. Or the fact that my cover designer mocked up this cover in one night and it’s my most favorite cover to date? Still not interesting?

  I guess I’ll never convince you then, huh?

  Okay, well, if you are reading this (like I hope) then don’t pirate books okay? It’s an asshole thing to do. No one wants to work for free.

  Not even artists.

  About the book:

  Beautiful Victim

  The perfect villain… or the perfect victim?

  Growing up, Carrie was Ethan’s one true love, his fixation, and his constant obsession. Friends to the bloody end, they were each other’s rocks while navigating through their dark and monstrous childhoods together. But then Carrie died, and Ethan was almost destroyed by the secrets that were revealed in her wake.

  It’s now fifteen years later, and Carrie is back from the dead…and Ethan is forced to confront a truth he’s tried to deny himself for all these years.

  With his obsession renewed, the situation rapidly spirals out of control as their story escalates toward a dark and startling conclusion. Because now Ethan has a singular focus:

  Keep the girl, no matter what the consequences!

  The truth should set you free, but what happens when the truth is the one thing that can destroy you?

  Can Ethan’s obsession for the girl he’s always loved ever really be more than that? Or is the idea of her the only thing left to fight for…because perhaps, the illusion of Carrie was the only thing he ever really had.

  Beautiful

  Victim

  by

  USA Today Bestselling Author

  Claire C. Riley

  Onwards and onwards…

  The part before the beginning of the end…

  There’s so much blood.

  I’ve never seen so much blood before.

  It paints the walls, dripping from the ceiling. It’s a living, breathing thing that’s being absorbed into the very foundations of the woodwork. Drops and drips. Splatters and puddles. I don’t know where I begin and the blood ends. We are one and the same.

  “We have to go.”

  I nod. But still my feet don’t move.

  My heart is pounding.

  My stomach is rolling and turning. I think I might throw up. The horror embeds itself into my skin. It will never let me go. I’m its prisoner. Now.

  Forever.

  The blood and me. Together.

  I clench my hands. Nails breaking skin. I feel raw and bruised. My eyes are burning. My body is on fire. I wonder how long until I incinerate. Fade away into nothing.

  Only the blood…

  “We have to go. Now.”

  Urgent. Desperate.

  Sad?

  No, not sad. I shake my head. I scratch my arms. I grind my teeth.

  No. Not sad.

  Blood smells.

  I didn’t know that before now. It smells so bad that I want to stuff my nose with cotton balls to stop the scent from crawling its way inside.

  But I still can’t move. I can’t turn around and walk away. I can’t run from this. I can’t even leave the room, so how are we going to escape?

  We can’t.

  That’s it, isn’t it? This is going to be with us both forever. There is no running from this horrible, horrible thing. It binds us together. Her and me. Me and the blood.

  But it’s the right thing. In my heart I know that.

  I look away from the body and down at my shaking hands. Hands I don’t recognize as my own.

  Whose hands are these that can do so much damage?

  Who is this person that destroys without hesitation?

  I don’t know who I am anymore.

  Maybe that’s okay. I didn’t like who I was anyway.

  “Are you all right?”

  Am I all right? No, no I’m not all right.

  I feel sick again. I swallow the bile that tastes like devastation and vengeance. It’s bitter. It shreds me apart.

  I’m leaving the room. Feet moving past the death and the gore. Putting distance between us and the sins we have committed. But it’s useless. The running. The sin is me. I am the sin. We are constant companions. It will ruin me.

  It will take over my life.

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  Does she believe the lie?

  Maybe she wants to.

  I want to.

  But I don’t.

  Lies fester. They annihilate. And in the end their food can’t sustain us.

  The blood sticks to my shoes. It coats my skin. It’s everywhere.

  But I love her.

  That has to be enough.

  Lies.

  They are everywhere.

  Chapter one:

  It’s 8:15pm.

  I’m normally home from work by now, but there was an extra delivery today and the guy wouldn’t stop talking to me. I know this guy’s entire life story now, and all I said to him was “how’s it going, buddy?”

  Apparently he took that as a cue to give me the lowdown on his shitty divorce and how his mother-in-law always hated him anyway. I should have told him to stop talking. I should have told him I was going to miss my bus. But I didn’t, because I’m polite. Now I’m sitting, waiting for the bus, the cold rain pelting across my back and shoulders like a hundred toy drummer boys. Their little sticks beating out a tune on my skin.

  Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat rat-a-tat…

  I look across the road and see a man hail a cab. He has a black umbrella in his hand, held high above his head to protect his slicked-back haircut and expensive suit. Fancy asshole.

  A flash of yellow in the dark night and a cab pulls up to the sidewalk. He climbs in, never even seeing me—never looking my way—and then he’s gone. On his way home, no doubt. To his big house. A beautiful wife and 2.5 kids.

  So typical.

  So normal.

  The American fucking dream. Right?

  I’m invisible. I’m a ghost. I’m a shadow among men, and I sit in the dark, wet night all alone.

  The rain continues to beat down on me. Tiny fingers trying to reach inside. To touch me all the way down to my sad, sad soul.

  Rat-a-tat rat-a-tat rat-a-tat…

  I’m soaked through, my jeans sticking to my legs like a second skin. I don’t like the feeling. It makes me uncomfortable. I feel claustrophobic in the rain. Invisible walls closing in on me. Clothes sticking. Skin soaking.

  The bus pulls up and I stand. One foot
in front of the other as I climb the small steps, feeling the trickle of the raindrops move down between the crack of my ass, and I grimace. I pay the driver, move to my seat, and sit down. The windows are fogged up and I use my wet sleeve to clear a section so I can see outside.

  The air is thick and heavy on the bus. Too many breaths. Too many people. Too much rubber and steel keeping us all trapped.

  The bus begins to move. It lurches forward, wheels splashing through the rain, wipers furiously swiping at the window. The driver whistles, happy fucking fellow that he is. Not a care in the world as he drives us from one place to the next. “Onwards and onwards,” he says each time he stops and someone gets on or off. It makes no sense. Maybe that’s why he likes to say it. Because nonsense is better than reality sometimes.

  It’s time to get off and I stand. I ask the woman next to me to move her stroller out of the way, and she does. She’s attractive, pretty features, and the kid is cute. I smile as I pass them but she scowls and looks away.

  Screw you, lady.

  Whatever happened to manners? Whatever happened to being kind and helping your fellow man? Everything is messed up. Nobody cares about each other anymore. We’re all just bustling through our lives without thinking of the next step. The next day. The next moment. As if there will always be a tomorrow.

  But there won’t be—not if we continue to live like this.

  We need to grab life with both hands, tug it to our bodies and make it ours.

  Seize the fucking day and all that.

  “Onwards and onwards,” the bus driver calls as the doors shut behind me and I’m thrust back into the rain. I wonder if it’s intentional, the way he gets the phrase wrong every time.

  I keep my head low to keep the rain from going down my shirt, my chin to my chest, and I walk to my small apartment.

  I pass dark men in even darker corners. Sad, lonely people walking toward sad, lonely futures. Gotta love my neighborhood. Dealers on every corner. Pimps sitting in cars while their women duck into back alleys. There’s always crying coming from someone’s window. A child. A housewife. A dog. A baby. Crying and crying and crying. It never fucking stops.

  My apartment is smack in the middle of misery. But I like it here; at least it’s fucking alive.

  I pull my keys from my pocket and look back over my shoulder as someone walks past. He could be black or white or anything in between. I don’t see anything but his eyes as they connect with mine. I hold his stare until he passes and then I put my key in the lock and go inside.

  The door shuts behind me, and the crying continues.

  Upstairs.

  Downstairs.

  It surrounds me. Suffocates me. Just like the rain.

  I climb the stairs, passing closed doors, the soft squeak of my sneakers sounding out with every step.

  My door is red. Like the color of blood.

  Dripping from the ceiling. I swim in the blood. I can smell it. I can taste it. She laughs because it means she’s free. I cower because it will destroy us.

  Red, red everywhere…

  I hate the door. It’s chipped and dirty, and someone sprayed graffiti on it many years ago. I can’t even read what it says anymore, and that annoys me. Irritates me to my core. I’ve stared at it for hours, trying to work out what it says. It was either that or burn it down. Because it’s red like blood. So red it burns my eyes. I know it’s not important, not to anyone but me. But to me it consumes. It takes over.

  I could paint the door. A nice brown. Maybe yellow.

  But I don’t.

  Because red is the color of memory.

  “Are you all right?” No. I’m not. I never will be again…

  I stare at the faded black words of the graffiti, tracing a finger over the letters that make sense. Something and then an r and then something else and an e. Rainwater drips from my hair and into my eyes, and I blink it away.

  A door opens on the floor above me, and I look up the stairs, wondering who it is. I live on the third floor of a five-story building. There are twenty apartments with no vacancies. The people in my building aren’t all bad. They’re not all drug dealers and pimps, hoes and crackheads. There are some families, mothers and fathers trying to make a decent life for their children. Bad mistakes in their youths led them down this dark path, and I can sympathize with that.

  But it’s not enough, I want to tell them.

  Because it’s not enough, and it never will be.

  Your kids will all cry behind locked doors too one day, I think.

  One of the prostitutes from upstairs comes down. I know she’s a prostitute because she fucks all night long. One man after another. One fuck fades into the next. I hear her bed slamming against the wall and scraping against the floorboards at all times of the night. I hear their grunts of shame and I hear her moans. Her cries of pleasure and sometimes pain.

  I sometimes jack off to the sounds when I can’t sleep. It feels dirty. And wrong. And then I’m grunting in shame too.

  Her eyes meet mine and I attempt a smile. But she doesn’t smile back. So I open my door and go inside, shutting her out of my world.

  You don’t belong in here with me anyway, I want to say.

  None of them do.

  This world is only for me.

  Chapter two:

  My apartment is small, but it’s clean.

  I like my things neat and orderly. I like to know where everything is.

  I put my things away when I’m done with them. I dust, I vacuum, and I mop my floors. I bleach my toilet after I take a shit and I keep my windows clean and shiny.

  Cleanliness is next to Godliness, they say. But I say fuck God. What does He have to do with anything? I just like things to stay where I put them; I like to know that things won’t go missing.

  I kick my soaked sneakers off at the door, and then I bend over and put them on top of the rusty radiator.

  Hopefully my sneakers will be dry by the morning. I notice there’s a hole in the side. I don’t want to have to buy new ones. I like my old ones. I like each scuff and stain. I like the way they are faded in the middle, yet the color is still bright at the edges. I like how comfy they are and that they are stretched enough for me to be able to slip them on and off without untying the laces. I hate wasting time with unnecessary things like tying laces.

  I’m dripping all over my floor and I make a quick exit through my living room, with its secondhand furniture and faded wallpaper, to the bathroom, with its cracked mirror and chipped tiles. I drag my clothes off and put them in my hamper.

  I dry myself with my only towel—first my face and hair and then my arms and chest, and finally my legs and feet. The rest of me I let air-dry. My dick is the only thing I like to feel wet.

  I can pretend I’m inside her that way.

  Walking back through my apartment, I go to my bedroom and I grab a hoodie and sweatpants. I shiver when I put them on. The soft burgundy material gives me goose bumps as it slides over my cold skin.

  I’m hungry, so I go to the kitchen and I pull out a pan and grab a can of soup from the cupboard. It’s minestrone. I don’t really like minestrone, but I like the idea of it. It’s a mix of everything and nothing, an odd combination of flavors and textures that don’t really go together, and yet people still make it and buy it and eat it.

  And it’s bizarre, I think. I wonder why they eat something that is so conflicted.

  I don’t know, and I can’t work it out.

  So I buy it. And I eat it. And I try to work it out.

  Perhaps it reminds me of myself—so muddled and conflicted in a world less ordinary. Or perhaps it reminds me of life, and how nothing really makes sense. How blacks and whites, and males and females, and animals and humans and any other combination you can think of all mix together in the large soup pan of life, and it shouldn’t work. But it does.

  Somehow it just fucking works.

  We are the people. And we are all different. But we will make this work. Even if it leaves a
bad taste in the mouth of some and not in others. Because that’s life, I guess. When it all boils down to it, life is just one giant accidental fuckup. We all fell in the pan and we try to make it work the best we can.

  A baby starts to cry somewhere down the hallway, interrupting my thoughts, and I frown. Because maybe I’m completely wrong; maybe my thoughts are all total shit and nothing really works at all. Maybe, in the grand scheme of life, we’re all just fakers trying to make it through.

  I look down at the pan and I tip the minestrone in it, and while it’s cooking I stare out the window at the black, washed-out world, and I think about a lot of things.

  I think about work, and I think about my wet sneakers. I think about the lady with the stroller and how she should have smiled back at me and how her kid will turn out to be a spoiled jerk just like she is. I think about the crying from behind the doors. The wails of anguish that evaporate out the windows like steam.

  And then I let my thoughts drift to her.

  Red is the color of memory…

  I only let myself do it once a day, because any more than that and I’ll crumble—a shattering I can’t come back from. I’ll fall apart knowing that I can’t have her. The desire for her is too much. It always was.

  The itch for her is strong today. There’s been too many things which have irritated me, and I need her soothing balm to help me relax.

  I think of her face as my hand slips down my pants. I’m still wet where the pants haven’t fully absorbed the water yet. Still wet.

  I think of her hair and the way she twisted it around her fingers.

  I think of her eyes that had a spark to them.

  Her fire that engulfed me.

  Her voice that lured me.

  Her, her, her…

  I cum in my hand abruptly, and I stop stroking myself.