Angry God by L.J. Shen

“You told my son he wouldn’t get the girl if he got revenge. Well, lucky me, I already got the girl. I get to have both.”

I ate the distance between me and Harry Fairhurst in two steps, deliberately stepping on his fingertips. He arched his back, yelping. An injured animal. I removed the mask from his face so he could have a front-row seat to what I was about to do to him.

“Baron,” he whimpered, his face red, swollen, and blotchy with hysteria. “Thank God you’re here. Vaughn clearly needed a voice of reason.”

Nice try, motherfucker.

I crouched down, digging my heel into the fingers of his healthy hand and meeting his gaze. I heard them crack under my shiny loafers. As soon as he saw what was behind my eyes, his face turned from panicked to ashen. I wasn’t here to strike a deal or to relieve him of his destiny.

I was here to collect a debt.

Vengeance.

My son’s pride. My son’s life.

And it’s been long overdue.

“You can’t…you don’t know…p-people will…”

“Find out?” I finished the sentence for him sardonically, flicking his chin up and forcing him to hold my gaze. “Fat chance, considering you’re currently in the midst of committing suicide.”

“But I’m not…”

I grabbed him by his blond hair, cut expensively and touched up to disguise any grays, dragging him to his dining table and sitting him down. His skull and forehead were bright red. I plucked a grocery list notepad and a pen from next to the fridge and placed them on the table, grabbing the seat opposite him. My son’s dagger burned a hole in my hand.

“Start writing.”

Ten minutes later, his suicide letter was done. The handwriting was legit, and he got a nice incentive to play along, seeing as I gave him a deal he couldn’t refuse.

“Write the letter and go peacefully, swallowing a bunch of pills. Don’t write the letter and I slit your wrists in your bathtub and watch you bleed. Either way, you’ll be dead before dinnertime, and it will look like suicide. The awful, messy way or the peaceful way? Up to you.”

He chose the pills.

When he was done writing, he looked up from the notepad expectantly. His eyes were red, hollow, soulless. I tried not to think about what they’d seen when he was alone with my son. I tried not to think about a lot of things in that moment. My wife—my beautiful wife that I loved more than life itself, who gave meaning to my existence—liked Harry’s work, and I’d let him into my life. Into my house.

If she ever found out, she was going to kill him herself. Then fling herself off of a rooftop. I knew Emilia LeBlanc-Spencer better than she knew herself.

There was only one person she loved more than me.

Our son.

“Medicine cabinet?” I angled an eyebrow. I wasn’t prone to big speeches. I wanted to get it over with. I heard a truck parking outside the house, the sound of the vehicle automatically locking, and knew it was the glazier who’d come to fix the window. We had to slip away from the first floor quickly. Luckily, Fairhurst was too far gone inside his own head to notice potential help could be on the way.

“U-upstairs,” he stuttered. He smelled of piss and desperation.

Thank fuck.“Let’s rock n’ roll.”

The glazier walked in through the half-open door exactly a second after we went up the stairs. We slid into Harry’s en suite, and I locked the door behind us. Emptying the cabinet’s shelves, I grabbed everything at hand—paracetamols, aspirin, nefopam, ketamine (wasn’t sure what business that had being there, but I couldn’t complain. This shit could kill a horse with a bit of enthusiasm and the wrong quantities), and the usual variety of Xanax, Ativan, and other benzo drugs.

I emptied the pills across his gray marble counter and nodded toward them. “Any last words?”

“I…” he started.

“Kidding. I don’t give a fuck.”

“No, you don’t understand. I don’t have any water.” He side-eyed me with a pouty frown, the piss stain on his pants drying and stinking up the entire bathroom. I heard the guy downstairs whistling to himself, working quickly, and knew he had no idea we were upstairs. His invoice had no doubt already been paid by my PA. As far as he was concerned, he was all alone.

“You have a fucking sink in front of you,” I retorted.

“I do not drink tap water.”

“You’re about to die, you idiot.” I grabbed the back of his head and smashed it against the mirror above the sink, turning the tap on in the process. Blood trickled down his forehead when his head bobbed back up. The mirror in front of him was shattered.

“That’s seven years of bad luck. Your death couldn’t come at a timelier moment,” I chirped.

I began shoving pills into his mouth. I didn’t have time for this. I wanted to call my son and see that he was okay, talk to my wife and assure her everything was fine.

After his mouth was full of pills, I pushed his head under the water, forcing him to gulp down or choke up. I repeated the action three times, until I was sure he’d swallowed enough drugs to kill a Game of Thrones dragon. His bloodstream would soon be more contaminated than Chernobyl circa 1986.

When it was done and dealt with, Harry sat on the edge of his massive bathtub, clutching the edges to the point of white knuckles. I leaned against the sink, watching him die impatiently.

“So this is how it ends?” He looked around him, quietly stunned.

I crossed my arms. Expecting small talk from me after what he’d done was a fucking stretch.

“Ever wondered what it feels like?” He scrubbed his cheek absentmindedly. I don’t think he noticed his hand trembling. “Death, I mean?”

“No,” I answered. “I lived through it during my teenage years and most of my twenties. I know exactly what it feels like.”

“Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“No more than I believe in unicorns.” I stopped to think about it. “Actually, unicorns could potentially exist. Some dumb, millennial scientist is bound to fuck with a horse’s DNA and manage to get it to grow a horn and a pink, fluffy tail. Of course, you won’t be here to witness it. I’d send a picture, but sadly, USPS doesn’t deliver to hell.”

“I always thought…”

“Shh,” I pressed my index to my lips. “Your thoughts don’t interest me. You’re a pedophile. At least have the dignity to die silently.”

He was quiet for exactly two minutes, then spent the next ten minutes compulsively blabbing about his dark childhood—with his drunken father and MIA mother. I spent the next ten minutes flicking dirt from under my fingernails and checking the time on my BVLGARI. When the minute hand on my watch signaled it had been twenty minutes since the asshole gulped down a pharmacy, and I heard the truck downstairs disappearing in the distance, the glazier with it, I picked up Vaughn’s dagger.

“What are you doing?” Harry looked up from the floor, blinking. He looked so broken, a part of him was already dead. He’d accepted it. It surprised and frustrated me that it hadn’t happened yet.

“Turns out, the pills aren’t quite fast enough for my taste,” I said roughly, picking him up by his neck.

“You promised me you wouldn’t let me bleed out. We had a deal.”

I propped him back on the edge of the bathtub, grabbed his wrist, and cut a deep gash. He shifted his gaze from his wrist to his other arm—the one with the cast—mouth agape, eyes flaring with alarm.

I’d cut a gash that would drain his body of blood. And he couldn’t even try to stop it because my son had broken his other arm.

Poetic. Precise. Perfect.

“I did? Well, I don’t negotiate with child molesters, much less those who hurt my child. Have a nice death.” I gave his chest a shove, watching him collapse into his bathtub, jerking and convulsing like a fish out of water.

I seized his shaving razor through a towel to avoid leaving fingerprints, took out the blade and threw it into the bath, not bothering to close the door after me.

I felt heavier than when I’d walked in.

That’s how I knew I’d done right by my son.

Some hours later, I parked in front of the cottage I’d rented downtown near Carlisle Castle. Vaughn wasn’t answering his phone, and I was ready to burn the world down. I’d shoulder a million deaths to protect him and Emilia. All I asked—all I fucking asked—was to know they were both okay at any given time.

I walked into the cottage, dropping the keys onto the rustic kitchen island that bled into the open-space interior, and spotted my wife sitting on the couch, cross-armed, fire in her peacock blue eyes.

She stood up and stormed toward me. I opened my mouth, my expression automatically easing at her sight.

“Sweetheart. I was going to—”

The slap came out of nowhere. It wasn’t the first time Emilia had slapped me. But this time, I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve it. Upon closer inspection, I could see she had tears in her eyes, dark circles beneath them, but the rest of her was as pale as a ghost.

“Baby…” My mouth fell open when she dropped to her knees, burying her face in her hands. I lowered myself to the floor as my mind caught up with her actions. The word no carved itself into every cell in my brain.

She couldn’t know.

I’d tossed the magazine, and she hadn’t been in touch with Harry lately.

“How could I be so stupid?” she wailed.

She knew.

“And how could you hide the magazine from me? What did you think was going to happen? God, I did this. I did this to my own son. How could he even look at me?” She sniffled. “I put a painting of his sad eyes in front of his room. I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster.” I scooped her into my arms on the floor, kissing her forehead, threading my fingers through her hair. “You’re the farthest thing from a monster. You heal monsters. You set their hearts on fire and make the bad shit perish. Vaughn loves you very much. I do, too. This is why we couldn’t tell you. And I only recently learned myself.”

“Is he okay?” Her question came out muffled.

I felt my dress shirt soaked with her tears. I hated to see her like this. I’d kill a few more Harry Fairhursts with my bare hands if it meant making her happier.

“He is fine,” I said with conviction I didn’t feel, because where the fuck was he, anyway? “Absolutely fine. He is thriving. He is healthy. He is in love.”

The wreckage storming through her body subdued a little. I was on the right track.

“And Harry?” She unglued her head from my shoulder, looking up and blinking at me.

It never ceased to amaze me, the effect her eyes had on my heart rate. She was a wingless angel—divine and saintly, but not in a prude way that made you want to fuck her dirty just to prove she was less than perfect.

I dragged my thumb across her lips. “Dealt with,” I said.

She closed her eyes and took a ragged breath.

“Did Vaughn…”

“No. I did.” I refused to let her finish the sentence, knowing how much it pained her to even think it. “Vaughn went back to his girlfriend, Lenny. He is fine.” A lie. Who the fuck knew where my son was right now? “We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d take the blame.”

“I am to blame.” She shook her head.

I shut her up with a bruising kiss. “No. Harry Fairhurst is responsible. The responsibility for child abuse is on the abuser. Vaughn was surrounded by top-of-the-line nannies on the rare occasions he was out of our sight. We sent him to the best establishments. You gave him everything you could. Despite what happened to him, he grew up to be a boy who adores his mother so much, he couldn’t even tell you to remove that stupid painting from the wall opposite to his door. This is the mark you left on him, Em. Not the ten minutes he was out of your sight. Not the time he moved to Carlisle Castle for the summer after begging us to go there. You couldn’t have known.”

As I spoke the words, I realized I couldn’t have prevented this from happening, either.

I couldn’t shoulder the responsibility, because I’d tried to protect my son with the ferocity of a thousand blazing suns. I knew that, because I, myself, had been abused.

In a very different way, but nonetheless.

“The best thing we can do for him is pretend it never happened, that you still don’t know. Allow him his dignity, Em. It’s the most important thing a young man can have. Now, let’s go home and leave the two lovebirds to clean up their own mess. We’re due back to see his exhibition, anyway.”

I picked her up and took her home.

My trophy.

My girl.

My heart.

My everything.