Your Darkest Dream (Blackwood & Friends #2)

Prologue

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Prologue

8 Years Ago

"Nathaniel! Stop! He's dying!"

His mother's words met his ears as if shouted from a distance but their effect was enough to halt his fist mid-air, suspending it as if frozen in time entirely.

The man he was holding, the fabric of his soiled shirt bunched in his fist and his back pushed against the wall, was gasping, his bloodied mouth opening and closing as if choking on the air he was desperately trying to inhale. There was blood, so much blood, coating his face, covering Nate's fist, and the tang of it filled the air. His gut churned vehemently, his chest heaving with the surge of fury he was still feeling. Desperately, his father clutched at his soiled shirt with one meaty fist that bore the grazed knuckles that stood testament to what he had been inflicting not moments before, and Nate released him. Barrett Everard Southill slid to the floor in a crumpled, bloodied mess as his mouth and lungs worked in desperate, wheezing gulps.

"He's dying!" his mother said again, but she made no move from the other side of the chamber, and Nate turned to her sharply while his father continued to rasp and gurgle at his feet. The sight of her made his jaw clench. His father had done a fine job that evening. Delilah's face was bruised and swollen, her lip cut open badly enough that blood streaked down her chin and stained the front of the bodice of her gown. Anger surged through him again and he just resisted the urge to kick the man that was, he realised, actually dying by his feet.

Something sinister and dark boiled within Nate at the prospect of his father dying, of him leaving this world, but he snuffed it as abruptly as it had reared its ugly head. He ran his hand through his hair, uncaring of the slick blood covering his fist, some of it his own. "Get a doctor," he ordered, "and the magistrate."

He knew Barrett would die this night, why delay the inevitable? If it meant his mother would live out the rest of her days without his fists, his malicious words, then Nate would happily pay the price of prosecution. When Delilah did not move, simply stared in mute, wide-eyed terror at her son and her husband, Nate balled his fists at his sides. "Go!" he snarled, harsher than he meant to, and that seemed to spur her to action. She fled, her steps loud and clumsy on the landing of their small holding in the Yorkshire country.

A wet, gargling sound drew his attention, and Nate turned back to his father. He studied Barrett for a long moment, observing how the man took his one good arm, the one that Nathan hadn't twisted so hard that it had cracked and broke, and clutched his chest. His breath was a sharp rattle now as he frantically tried to draw it into his lungs, his eyes so very wide and wet as they watched his only son, his only child. What Nathan saw in those eyes however was not something akin to desperation, was not a plea for help or pity. There was nothing but undiluted rage fringed with traces of terror as Barrett began to realise that his life was rapidly coming to an end. An end that was caused by the boy who had become large enough to retaliate; a boy whose mind was a raging, improbably dangerous void of hate on the brink of toppling over entirely and Barrett had given him the final shove that evening when he had returned home after weeks away at school to find his mother...

Nate dropped to his haunches before him, feeling the vehemence and hate leave his body then, and he settled on the wooden floor, resting his elbows on his drawn-up knees. His face smarted with a piercing ache from the last blow his father would ever deal him, but he ignored it. His fingers began to shake, yet within himself he felt nothing. Only a tingling numbness as he studied the man who had brought him into this world, who had beaten him to a breath of his very own life countless times, and Nate knew he was glad for his death.

Barrett's breathing became shallower, slower, and his body seemed to slump further against the wall. Moments later, he took his last breath and then his chest stopped moving altogether.

Silence so deafening settled over Nate he did not even register the own beat of his heart, the ragged sound of his own breathing.

This moment would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life if he survived for much longer and did not face the gallows for this crime. Even if he did not, he knew his father's death would become an incriminating burden for an eternity against his now blackened soul.

And he could live with that, he realised. He would live with the knowledge that he had killed his father.