Red Reaper - Soldiers of Fortune [book one]

Chapter FIVE

Lucky O'Cléirigh

....one week later....

"Lucky? Lucky, are you even listening to me?!" I pluck the headphones from my ears and pause the Russian language audio that plays through my phone as I look up from my computer's screen to see my boss, Chyna Wright, waving her hands in front of my face..

"Oh, yes! I am!" I blink at her, having no idea what she had just said, though assuming it has something to do with the latest case file she has placed on my desk..

I glance down to scan the page..

Oh no..

Nightmare's are real and I live them each and every day at work..

When I began working for 'ForenX' the city's largest forensic agency that contracts to the Darkport PD including the downtown homicide department, I knew that I'd be looking at some gruesome scenes.. But it's almost too much to take when it's the decomposing body of a young girl who's life had barely begun.. A girl who so very easily could have been me.. Abigail Brightly was just seventeen when she disappeared and she'd been missing for several months after her unexplainable abduction, vanished without a trace.. Until one day she was discovered by a couple of kayakers, floating face down in the bay..

There are no words for the kind of suffering felt by her family, or the sickness I suppressed on the day I was called in to image her autopsy..

It's gut-wrenching and heartbreaking work.. But I feel a sense of duty, as though somehow I share a kind of kindred spirit with girls like Abigail..

Perhaps it stems from the pain of being mistreated as a young girl.. Not by a stranger, but by the man who was supposed to protect and love me.. Lorcan O'Cléirigh was not a loving father at all.. He was a sick and twisted creaton, conjured from the depths of hell.. He may be long dead now, but the man still lives in my nightmares.. If not for my sister, I'd probably have ended up in a refrigerated draw at the morgue myself..

Sometimes I feel so much guilt to be the reason both he and my mother are dead..

Other days I am glad he is burning down below..

I am plagued by the questions, all my life I've tried to understand them.

Why me?

How could he do those things to me?

What did I do to deserve those terrible treatments?

The longer I think about it the more sick I start to feel. It's all just wrong.. Unthinkable..

Who could do something so unspeakably evil to somebody so innocent?

The world has never made sense to me through the lense of my life.. I am always skewed and off centre.. And I have never been brave enough to tell a single soul about those years and what I remember.. Not even Kirby, though I am certain she already knows..