Page 22 of The Cruelest Chaos

I clench my hands on my knees, digging into my pants, but I still don’t make a sound. Even when I feel my flesh ripping in two, opening up the wounds that haven’t healed, I don’t let anything come out of my throat except my own breath.

Soon, he’s not waiting any amount of time at all, just flicking the whip over and over and over. I hear it whistle right before it hits my flesh, and he walks around me, so he’s standing at my back, watching it get destroyed as he hits me. I’ve stopped jumping, stopped flinching.

Stopped breathing.

Stopped feeling.

My back is numb with an undercurrent of fire. I have my eyes still closed, my hands still fisted against my pants, but I still don’t say a word. Make a single sound. He keeps going, back over where he started, and my stomach clenches as my body tries to brace me for the impact over the fresh wounds.

He pauses, and I know there must be quite a bit of blood. Through the numbness, I can feel the warmth of it, dripping down my back. I clench my fists, ready to scream while he waits, but I know why he’s doing it.

It’s a mental torture, having to keep my fucking mouth closed while I bleed inside and out, dying for him to keep going so this can really stop. But if I say a word, it’ll be over too soon. And I can still think of them: Sid, Brooklin, Ria. I can still imagine their lives in my head and my hands, what might happen to them if I don’t fix everything. Their fates rest on my shoulders. I’ve already fucked up Sid’s. I let my father fuck up Brooklin’s. And Ria? The others weren’t entirely my fault; I can acknowledge that. But Ria…she’s fully my responsibility.

And just before Father Tomas flicks the whip again, right over my spine, making my body convulse, arching backward, I think of her.

Ella.

My new plaything.

I want to get my fucking hands on her again and tear her apart, just so I can destroy something with no consequences. No guilt. Her life seems to already be fucked, and I had nothing to do with it.

I can’t save her, nor do I want to. But use her?

Yeah. I want to fucking do that.

Ten times in a row, Father Tomas hits my spine, and on the eleventh one, I press my fist to my mouth, but it doesn’t matter. It’s no use. A strangled sob comes out of my throat, my eyes watering.

He stops, immediately, and I hate it.

I hang my head, keep my eyes closed, drop both palms to the cold cement floor as I pant. I want to lie on it, on my back. Cool my aching wounds. But I know, logically, that’ll hurt worse. I don’t move, trying to catch my breath, trying to focus on anything but the pain.

“Maverick?” Father Tomas says quietly, and I hear him come to stand in front of me again.

When I open my eyes, I see blood dripping from the end of the leather whip, into a small puddle on the cement floor.

My lips curve up into a smile.

I pick my head up, meet the priest’s gaze. “All done, Father.”

He frowns, sighing. I see what I think is my blood flecked against his neck, just a few spots of crimson. It makes my chest tighten. My dick hard.

I want to cover Ella in that blood. And hers.

“I’m going to need to tend to those wounds, Maverick,” Father Tomas says in resignation.

I wonder about him sometimes. He always seems so sad to do this, but when I first wanted to be hurt, needed to be hurt…he’s the one that showed me images of self-flagellation. It was a concept that, as a child, after I started calling myself Mayhem, I had never heard of. The whips? Yeah, I’d seen that. But doing it to myself?

That was new.

It seemed incredible.

But I told him I would never be able to do it hard enough on my own. He had said nothing. A week later, he brought the whip. He didn’t force me, but he was twenty-two to my ten. Maybe I should see him as perverse and corrupt as the rest of us, but I guess when you’re raised with monsters, those with the dullest teeth seem the most angelic. It’s like the movies, where you put a bigger villain in so when you compare him to the other villain, that one seems like an upstanding kind of guy, even though he’s a rapist or murderer or whatever.

Now I’m two years older than Father Tomas was then, and I think about the things I could do to people. Things I have done.

Yeah, Father Tomas isn’t a bad guy. He just happened to cross paths with demons. To survive that, you gotta bleed, and you gotta make other people bleed. Otherwise, you’ll end up as carrion.

“Nah,” I tell him, refusing his offer. “I’ll clean it up myself.” A lie, of course. I’ll take a scalding hot shower and hope I don’t get an infection. But if I do? What better way to continue my punishment than with a near-death experience and a hospital visit.