Description
In all his years, Nick Stavros had never known such pain, not just in his body, but in the very essence of his being. Every cell seemed to weep in sorrow, using the whole of him as their wailing wall. His head throbbed with a primal pounding, as if a wild beast had been caged within his skull, desperate to escape. His skin burned with shame; a hellish fire lit by the match of his own remorse. But it was his heart that betrayed him most. Each beat, too fast, too loud, too unforgiving, thundered through his chest like a judge’s gavel, delivering sentence after sentence of guilt. Sometimes, it felt as though it might rupture from the weight of it all, spilling his life force into the hollow cavern he had become. And how he wished it would. What mercy that would be. What blessed, beautiful release.
Eventually, they would find him—another morsel of news to fill a thirty-second slot on local MSM. A seventy-year-old man was found dead in a car at Airlie Beach. Cause of death: heart failure. No suspicious circumstances. His devoted wife would bury him in the cemetery plot he’d purchased a few years earlier, surrounded by his children and a few friends. Clean and convenient. Tidy, like the way he used to file boardroom papers and brush aside inconvenient truths.
None of them would be the wiser. None would know what a complete and utter arsehole he’d been. But Nick knew. He knew it in the marrow of his bones, in the sickened churn of his gut, in the echoing hollowness of a life unravelled. And he knew he wouldn’t be that lucky, not anymore. He’d been lucky once. Lucky in business. Lucky in love. Lucky that the lies he told himself passed for truths—for a time.
But luck had a way of running out. And when it did, it left a bad taste in your mouth.
He’d fucked everything up and hadn’t the faintest clue how to fix it. The mess he’d made wasn’t something you could apologise away or sweep under the plush carpet of a well-appointed home. It was too big, too deep. And now, here he was, an old man marooned in his own failure, stranded between the man he’d been and the man he couldn’t quite find.
A couple of weeks earlier, he’d driven to a nearby hang-gliding location, planning to drive off the edge of the mountain—a quick, clean exit. Nothing drawn out. No pills, no drama. Just one final acceleration into silence. But being the coward he knew himself to be, he just sat there, engine idling, hands on the wheel. Hoping. Wishing. Praying that the hand of God, or fate, or something beyond the puny power of his own will, would reach down and end it for him.
Yet here he was. Still breathing. Still broken. Same misery, different backdrop.
It seemed God wasn’t in the business of mercy killings. Not for the likes of him.
He blinked against the glare as his gaze drifted across the ocean’s palette of blues; deep indigo folding into cobalt, melting into turquoise, washing against the shore like a slow, rhythmic lullaby. And in that rarest of moments, his chest loosened. A breath, unbidden and unhurried, escaped his lips.
For a fleeting second, it was as if life pressed pause. The torment dulled; the ache softened. Just Nick and the sea. And with that, his thoughts backtracked, slowly and reluctantly, like a man retracing the steps of a crime scene he’d tried to forget.
