Page 4 of Beneath the Surface (Tendrils of Love #1)

T hey dragged him forward, water sloshing at his hips, his knees gouging furrows through the silt.

The tall one pinned his arms behind his back, using the twine as a leash, yanking until Quinn’s shoulders screamed in their sockets.

The broad man worked him over with methodical cruelty: fists to the ribs, open palms to the ears, a knee jammed into his gut hard enough to make him retch up lake water and bile.

He tasted blood—iron and copper, thick on his tongue, mixing with lake water and the bile rising from his gut. Their voices receded, replaced by a dull ringing, each syllable warped as if underwater:

“Fucking stay down—”

“Hold him—”

“Let go—”

“Don’t let the faggot up—”

Quinn’s head burst above the surface, vision a wash of hot red.

The air rattled with his gasps, snot and spit stringing from his lips.

His lungs shuddered, seized in a fit of coughing that made his chest blaze.

Then—WHAM—another hit, this time from behind, a paddle of bone and muscle slamming into the base of his skull.

For a split second, he felt his jaw go numb, his eyes rolling up, a thin white haze crawling across his sight.

Sound wilted. The world snapped tight to a single point: the pain, sharp and radiant, blooming through him in concentric rings.

Each time they hit him—a punch to the side of his face, a boot in his ribs, the slap of cold water as they forced his head under—his body shrank inward, curling to a hard, bright core.

He heard teeth crack. Then the taste of blood moved from his mouth to the back of his nose, bright and electric.

He gagged, unable to catch breath—his hands useless, legs splayed, body twisting as they worked him with a bleak, industrial rhythm.

Blows landed not with thuds—he could only hear the distant ringing—but with wet, vibrating shocks that traveled through his skull and into his teeth, as if his jaw held a tuning fork.

His gums split somewhere, and blood ran down his chin, hot even as the rest of him numbed.

He was shivering so hard it made the pain scatter, the nerves stuttering and spasming even where the fists didn’t land.

At some point, the big guy grabbed his head and dunked it under again, holding it down until he thrashed, a single panicked animal, the lake water freezing his sinuses, the silt scraping at his eyeballs, the wet slap of the surface above his ears like the world was laughing at him.

He felt his pulse stutter, then surge, then dim, a cheap radio losing reception as his body sucked deeper into the freezing mud.

His hearing went next: the men’s shouts thinned to an insect drone, the lake’s voice a distant gurgle.

His face was pressed sideways in the muck, cheek mashed into sand and decomposed needles, the taste so sharp and mineral it nearly shocked him awake.

He tried to breathe and got a mouthful of mud instead, the silt gritting between his teeth and scraping his tongue raw.

There was a strange, bitter aftertaste, like root rot or old tobacco, and Quinn almost gagged on it before realizing, dimly, that he was already gagging on his own blood.

He couldn’t measure time anymore. Sometimes the world would go black, silent, the lake’s chill blossoming into a numb, humming peace—the kind of peace you read about in near-death anecdotes, a lightness, as if his body was unhooking from itself, drifting up toward the pale sun smeared across the sky.

Then a boot or a fist or a scream would drag him back, fire through his chest and neck, and the agony would explode again, so bright he wanted to claw his own face off just to make it stop.

He could smell them: sweat and stale beer, the sour tang of old cigarettes in their jackets, and beneath it all the sweet, almost fruity stink of lake algae, pressed into his nose as they drowned him by the handful.

He tasted blood and snot, felt the knots of twine cutting into his wrists and ankles, sensed the icy lake water seeping into his body through his wounds and his natural entry points.

A heavy hand fisted in his hair and wrenched his head out of the water.

The light above was white and liquid, spattering through the trees in a thousand forking rays.

The tall one leaned in and whispered, “Go ahead and scream, faggot,” and spat on his face.

“No one’s gonna hear you but the lake.” His teeth ground against the shell of Quinn’s ear. “And it don’t give a fuck.”

The next punch caught him in the jaw, a perfect, glass-cutting hook that detonated white light behind his eyes and left his ears ringing, inside-out, like a bell struck underwater.

His teeth clacked together so hard he tasted enamel, thick chips floating in the blood and spit pooling inside his mouth.

Hands, rough and calloused, shoved his face deeper into the sand and pebbles.

The grains jammed up his nose, gritty and sharp, so every breath flayed his sinuses raw.

He tried to scream and got only a stuttering gurgle, lake water sluicing into his throat, choking any protest.

They worked him with a rehearsed precision.

One held his arms, twisting them behind his back until the sockets threatened to let go; the other hammered his ribs, then his spine, then the back of his skull with a steady, hateful rhythm.

The pain was everywhere, a million tiny fires, and Quinn’s vision filled with shooting stars.

They batted him around like a sack of potatoes, all leverage and deadweight, their boots skidding on rocks slick with his own blood.

Once, when the broad guy missed and hit the side of Quinn’s head with his knee, he saw a spark—just one, a single blue-white supernova—and then the world blinked out for a moment, quiet as a prayer, before roaring back twice as loud.

He tried to scream. His jaw worked open and shut, but nothing came except a thread of blood and spit.

His eardrum popped; for a heartbeat, he heard the lake’s voice, old and wordless, humming through the bones and the mud, as if the water itself was alive and hungry.

Then the men’s voices returned, ugly and slurred, vibrating through the cartilage of his ears and into the hollow of his skull.

He was just a conduit for pain now: a vessel for their hate and the lake’s chill, gushing it back out in blood and urine and the soft, pathetic noises leaking from his lips.

When their focus centered on his crotch and they began brutally kicking him between the legs, Quinn vomited.

The blows came hard and vicious until he was sure they would smash his genitals up inside his body—or the rough tread of their hiking boots would simply rip them off.

Blood smeared his thighs and turned the water red as it swirled around his face, rushing up his nose, forcing him to smell his own abuse—a mix of briny urine as his bladder released again, and the coppery scent of blood.