The Death of Life Read online

  THE

  DEATH

  OF

  LIFE

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Death of Life (The Little Things That Kill Series, #2)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2 Ari Wilburn

  Chapter 3 Ari

  Chapter 4 Tina/Sophia Alvarez

  Chapter 5 Ari

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 Ari

  Chapter 8 Ari

  Chapter 9 Ari

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 Ari

  Chapter 12 Giana

  Chapter 13 Ari

  Chapter 14 Ari

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16 Ari

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18 Ari

  Chapter 19 Ari

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 Ari

  Chapter 22 Ari

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24 Ari

  Chapter 25 Ari

  Chapter 26 Ari

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28 Ari

  Chapter 29 Ari

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 Ari

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33 Ari

  Chapter 34 Ari

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36 Ari

  Chapter 37 Ari

  Epilogue Ari

  Author’s Note to the Reader

  Want more from Pamela Crane?

  Acknowledgments

  About Me, Author Pamela Crane

  A Final Word

  A preview of A Secondhand Life...

  Want more from Pamela Crane?

  THE

  DEATH

  OF

  LIFE

  PAMELA CRANE

  Tabella House

  Raleigh, North Carolina

  Copyright © 2018 by Pamela Crane

  Tabella House

  Raleigh, NC

  www.tabellahouse.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  www.pamelacrane.com

  ISBN: 978-1-940662-169 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-940662-121 (eBook)

  Other books by Pamela Crane:

  The Little Things That Kill Series

  The Scream of Silence

  The Art of Fear

  The Death of Life

  The Mental Madness Series

  A Fatal Affair

  The Admirer’s Secret

  The Killer Thriller Series

  A Secondhand Lie

  A Secondhand Life

  Pretty Ugly Lies

  This book is dedicated to all those fighting for justice in an unjust world. For the foster children, the victims, and the beautifully broken, my story is for you.

  The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

  — Mark Twain

  Chapter 1

  Durham, North Carolina

  Three months ago ...

  It was the end of my life. The beginning of death. You don’t know pain until you’ve felt the pinch of a blade against your neck, the edge shivering against your skin, ready to slice you open like a ripe peach—and you’re the one holding the knife.

  I was a tremble away from killing myself.

  Two years ago I first noticed the shift within me. The slither of self-loathing snaking its way through me. My desire to live slipping away. Life had become unbearably heavy. A burden I wanted to drop like a dead body. Me being that body, of course.

  But I didn’t give up on life back then. You’re stronger than this urge, I told myself. You have a reason to live, I whispered in the deep of night, but no one was there to hear me. No one heard my cries from the shadows. I thought I’d be okay, normal. But in my churning gut I knew better. A reason to live had died with my soul. As for the one who had shredded my soul? He was the man kneeling before me, sobbing. Beside him on the floor sat a roll of duct tape and some old rope that I’d found in the garage. I’d planned to bind him, but I didn’t end up needing to.

  He was a willing victim. All he wanted was the guilt to end.

  All I wanted now was blood. The blood of one person in particular—Scott Guffrey.

  For two years I fought the urge to kill him. For two years I battled with my sanity, trying to understand why. Why he had done what he did—a crime against humanity, a theft of innocence. For two years only silence echoed back at me.

  That was when I realized the only path to numbness was in death. Scott’s death. My own death. It felt conclusive, the right thing to do in a world full of so many wrongs.

  Now I had him. After drinks at the bar, it didn’t take long for Scott to get falling-on-his-ass drunk. “You can’t drive home like that,” I’d told him when the bartender with the sequined top announced last call for alcohol.

  “You gonna drive me?” I stepped back from his yeasty beer breath as his head wobbled uncomfortably close to mine.

  “Sure. Let’s go.” Guiding him like a lamb to the slaughter had been too easy. I almost felt bad. Almost. After talking to him for a couple hours, his humanity peeked out. I’d seen this easygoing, entertaining side of him many times before—always quick with a joke, good for a laugh and a pair of arms on moving day. A reliable friend to everyone; who didn’t like Scott Guffrey? But we both knew the truth. That’s the problem with getting to know your prey—you almost begin to like them. I had to keep my head clear. He was no human. Scott was a monster, and monsters needed to be put down.

  Here we were, an hour and several emptied shot glasses later, after Scott had passed out on his scratchy blue sofa watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on a 46-inch plasma television that had been state-of-the-art over a decade ago. I thought the hardest part of the whole thing would be binding him without waking him, but it turned out to be shockingly unnecessary. I had forgotten what a heavy drinker—and sleeper—he was. Plus, it didn’t hurt that I had slipped a roofie in his Jägermeister.

  Sure, it would have been easier to kill him while he slept. But that wouldn’t have been fair. I wanted him to know why he deserved to die. I wanted him to feel the gavel of justice pound down on him, the heat of my fury as I took his life like he had taken mine. A cup of cold water flung in his face forced him awake, sputtering slurred obscenities.

  Then I froze as he fell to his knees on the poorly laid faux hardwood floor, still woozy from the Jager shots I’d been pouring down his throat for the past hour. I leaned over him and aimed the tip of the blade at his heart, then ... nothing.

  I couldn’t do it. My knife was stoic, but my limbs were flaccid.

  Going through with killing him—it a demon I was afraid to unleash. A creature that maybe I couldn’t harness. I thought I was prepared for this moment. I spent weeks mentally hardening myself. Now that the time had come, I couldn’t follow through. I was weaker than I thought.

  “Look what you’ve done to me,” I blurted. His eyes remained fixed on the floor. “Look at me!”

  His body jumped at my demand.

  His eyes peered hazily up at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I wish I could take it all back.” Tears pooled in the sunken craters of his cheeks.

  He’d aged two decades in the past two years, I suddenly realized. His curly blond hair, once so abundant, was thinning and shot with gray. His ruddy complexion had been the picture of healt
h. Now his jutting brow and cheekbones threatened to poke through the sallow skin of his gaunt face. Most striking of all, his blue eyes, once as bright as sapphires, were dull points of light set in black pits. I wondered if, like me, he suffered from chronic sleeplessness. I begged for it to stop—the disconnected thoughts rattling through my brain like a runaway freight train hurtling hell for leather toward an abandoned trestle. Why, oh God, couldn’t I have peace? I hadn’t done anything wrong ... until now. Scott, on the other hand, had plenty of guilt to keep him company.

  In the drunken tears I saw a glimmer of true remorse, an acceptance of responsibility for what he’d done. I wondered how genuine it was when the shame was swimming in alcohol, but did it matter? An apology couldn’t fix my broken mind, stop my nightmares, or deliver me from the darkness that engulfed me. Maybe death was too good for him. Maybe I was the one who needed it more than him.

  It sounded so good at that moment.

  I pressed the knife to my own throat. All I could think about was the past two years of anguish and suffering, and I knew killing him wasn’t the answer. Killing myself was. But why should I be the one to die? I didn’t deserve the punishment for the crime. Scott did. He should repent to his Maker, not me. The whimpering fool kneeling before me, he was the one who should pay the price. And I would help him pay it. For the rest of eternity in hell.

  Then after this I would join him.

  I knelt down and gazed into the mirror of his hazy eyes at the reflection of my own broken soul. I turned the knife on him, the blade a whisper away from his cheek.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” I demanded.

  A grown-ass man weeping on the floor. He was pathetic.

  “Please,” he begged. “Do it. I’m ready.” The slur of alcohol left his speech now. There was nothing like a near-death experience to sober you up.

  “What?” I asked. I hadn’t expected him to say that, to want to die.

  “I’m tired of it all. Of thinking about what I did. Of all the regret. The guilt. Just ... make the pain stop.”

  He was begging now, and nausea bubbled up in my stomach like shaken soda spurting from a can. I couldn’t let him get another word in, partly because I was afraid I’d chicken out. Partly because I wanted to chicken out. He would be my inauguration as a killer, a milestone I didn’t want to celebrate. But today I had to.

  “As you wish.”

  I grabbed his hair to steady him and swiped the knife across his throat. He dropped face-first like a sack of potatoes at my feet. I scurried back to avoid stepping in the blood pooling around him.

  I didn’t know how to describe what I felt at that moment. There’s no way to put in words the emotions roiling through you when you realize you’ve done something you can’t take back. When you realize you’ve just played judge, jury, and executioner in a single action, a swift motion of the arm. It was both horrifying and empowering. For a brief moment I feared myself—what I was capable of. Then the moment passed.

  Looking down at the body of the man I just killed, his blood seeping into the gaping seams between the flooring, a haze of emotions swept over me. It was overwhelming, empowering, frightening ... all too much at once. The sickness rumbling in my gut intensified, and my heartbeat quickened with a sense of panic that someone would show up and find me here with a dead man at my feet.

  Relief—that sole word captured how I felt as I slipped out the back door into the pre-dawn gloom. No morbid pleasure in his death. Every day for two years a part of me wanted to die. Every morning I struggled to draw that first breath. Every evening I tossed in my bed mourning the life I lost because of him.

  It was over. I had killed the thief who stole my hope. My soul had been dead for two years. But now suddenly I felt alive. Life for death. Death for life.

  Chapter 2 Ari Wilburn

  Present day

  Durham, North Carolina

  If you’ve never lived life “in the system,” you wouldn’t understand the dread that follows you with each sunrise. That dread soon becomes a part of you, burrowed so deep that you can’t find the place where you end and the dread begins. While normal children in their normal lives wake up knowing what a normal day will bring, the luxury of “normalcy” left the moment my parents put me in foster care.

  At age ten, not only did I lose my sister, Carli, to a horrible accident planned by a sadistic child trafficker who wanted to send my father a message, but my parents simply couldn’t stomach having me around. With the blame of Carli’s death hefted on my small shoulders, Mom and Dad banished me from the only family I knew and loved. After that, love became a distant memory. I spent my adolescence yearning for death to free me from the chains of life, and my adulthood stumbling around for purpose that I didn’t really think existed—until I started a suicide support group and met a sex-trafficked girl named Tina Alvarez.

  I’m sure it’s not the healthiest of friendships—both of us emotionally bankrupt and lugging baggage so heavy that it would scare most people off—but when you’ve been friendless your entire life like we were ... well, when someone comes along who gets you, who wants you close, who cares about you, you don’t let them go. Call it desperation, call it impulsive, call it what you want, but Tina was my salvation and I was hers. Our shared hurts magnetized us in a connection that only two wounded birds like us understood.

  Friends come slow and easy for most people as they pick and choose and ease in, testing the waters with their toe. For me and Tina, it was like we’d scrambled into the same leaky lifeboat, doomed to sink, only to realize that by happily clinging to each other, we could survive.

  Together we found Tina’s trafficker, George Battan, and put him behind bars, but in the process we unearthed more secrets than answers. My own parents had a connection to George, but the extent of their involvement was uncertain. And Tina knew George ordered the death of a little girl named Marla Rivers, another victim Tina was trying to help escape, but the evidence simply wasn’t there.

  Rich criminal masterminds had a way of keeping their hands clean of such atrocities. But I’d dig until I hit pay dirt that would put him behind bars for life.

  Have you ever wanted something so badly you’d do anything for it? Disown your family? Sell your soul? Kill? I’ve wanted a lot of things that I’d do just about anything to get. Breaking out of the foster system. Avenging my sister. Reuniting with my parents. Uncovering the truth about my family’s secrets. Finding purpose in life. Until recently I never knew how far I’d go to get what I wanted. As a disgruntled teenager I’d almost killed myself for freedom from my self-loathing. As an adult I hunted down a killer to find peace for my murdered sister. But finding my purpose ... that was an itchy question. How could I scratch the surface of finding purpose in a life that tried to drown me in its misery?

  It’s corny but true, that every dark cloud has a silver lining—that spot where the sun pushes its way through. Tina Alvarez was my silver lining. And Tristan Cox was my sun. Sometimes I think that I was destined to meet them, if you believe in that sort of thing. And after twenty-four years, I met my true self for the very first time.

  My purpose was to investigate the truth, unravel the answers. Closure was all I ever wanted for my own life, and now that I saw hope return to Tina’s once dull eyes, I knew it was a gift I could give to many other victims of suffering.

  Purpose became my lifeboat. It was my rebirth, my second chance. For some unfortunate souls, they never live, only enduring an endless torrent of days mildly better than dying. I was one of the lucky ones, at last prying off the fangs of pain so that I could genuinely live.

  The sun rose this morning with nothing better to do, and I rose with it, feeling the warmth of a new day where my apartment wasn’t so crappy, my car wasn’t such a piece of junk, my life wasn’t so bad.

  I threw off the beige comforter as goose bumps spread down my bare legs. Wearing only skivvies and a tank top, the cool morning chill made me reach for my robe sitting on a teal
chair I had found at a thrift store and refurbished, along with a desk I had antiqued with white chalk paint. When you have no money, it’s amazing the skills you can learn. The aroma of bacon wafted from the kitchen. I smiled, imagining tattooed, manly-man Tristan Cox wearing an apron over tighty-whities while flipping pancakes at the stove. Sliding into my Cookie Monster slippers—I was amazed to find my size—I headed for the kitchen where Tristan mixed scrambled eggs and cheese. No tighty-whities like I had pictured, but just as sexy in his skin-hugging T-shirt and loose sweatpants that hung just low enough to make me drool. Or maybe I just really liked bacon.

  “Need some help?” I offered as I grabbed the spatula and began tossing the strips of bacon—crispy but with little hillocks of fat around the edges, just like I liked it—onto an empty plate lined with a paper towel to soak up the grease.

  “Hey, get back in bed. I wanted to surprise you.” He grabbed my shoulders and attempted to guide me away from the stove that dated back to the 1980s, along with the rest of myi outdated kitchen.

  “How sweet of you,” I purred, lifting on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “But I’m already up.” I could never fall back asleep once I stepped out of the warm cocoon of my comforter, no matter how long I toss and turn. “How about I set the table?”

  The table was one foot away and consisted of my kitchen island.

  Pulling two mismatched plates and different-sized coffee mugs from the cabinet, I placed the settings on the narrow periwinkle bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. My one-bedroom apartment wasn’t much, but it was at least affordable on my meager salary filing paperwork at the Durham Police Department while I took criminal justice classes at Durham Tech. My dream was to become a professional private investigator, which required a license I could get only after I completed the coursework. But with a detective for a boyfriend and a job at the police station, I was on the fast track toward making it a reality. At least I hoped it was the fast track. I wasn’t exactly a patient person.

  “So what’s on the agenda for the day? Kickin’ ass and takin’ names?” I asked as I poured us both coffee, Tristan’s black and in the smaller mug, mine more vanilla creamer than coffee in the larger one. If there was one thing I was selfish about, it was my coffee. I slid onto the wobbly bar stool and sipped the hot brew waiting for Tristan to join me. The chair leg tapped against the floor as I shifted in my seat.