The Perfect Soldier

I didn't want to leave Cat. She had allowed me to touch her in a way she hadn't let anyone before. I didn't understand why but she stirred something deep within me that I had never felt before. I wanted her in a way I wanted no other. To be honest, I had never truly wanted a woman. Women were simply a means for release, a release I needed as much as a fish needed water.

Catalina was indescribably perfect. She had the natural olive complexion of her Greek ancestry, coffee colored hair, not quite black but too dark to be considered a brunette that was streaked with lighter shades of chestnut and bronze. Her eyes held such a deep gemstone green they out shined the most polished emeralds. She was brilliant, athletic, and strong; maybe not in physical strength but in tenacity and will she was so very strong. Her independence was admirable but mostly she was pure.

Too pure, I thought to myself. She deserved far better than me and yet she seemed to desire me as much as I her. I had desperately hoped that my blatant display of sexual ferocity would scare her away, anything to make her push me away. I knew I couldn't keep myself from her unless she told me to stay away. After all, self-control had never been one of my strongest attributes.

As I thought of her my phone began to ring. It was her. She had seemed distant and somewhat upset when I left. Maybe my intentions had worked. Maybe she was going to tell me to lose her number and never come back. I had mixed feelings as I answered her call.

"Yeah,"

"Sorry if you're busy," her voice wavered. She still sounded distant, like she wasn't very eager to talk. She had no qualms with rejecting Michael so if she was calling to ward me away why did she sound so troubled.

A vacuum sounded in the background as she began to speak again, "my mom wanted me to ask if you'd like to come to church with us in the morning".

"Church?" I scoffed; I hadn't meant to but then there was the whole self-control issue.

I really did need to work on that.

"Church isn't really for someone like me," I replied as I thought of the anger I had felt last night and again this morning. I had to gash my hand open to clear the fury laden fog from my mind and keep myself grounded. Had I not been holding that glass I would have hunted that snake down and done to him as I had done to so many others. Cat may be too good for me to pursue romantically but that didn't mean I was going to let someone like Michael take what she wasn't willing to offer.

Speak of the devil. Michael emerged from the small hunting supply store and without another word I hung up the phone.

It felt like ages since I last did surveillance. It really was like riding a bike.

I had found his vehicle parked in front of an array of small mom and pop shops. I doubted he had gone in the dress shop so I tried the hunting and fishing supply store first. He was so entranced with flirting with the college aged cashier he hadn't even noticed me walk in.

Big mistake.

I casually browsed the aisles closest the register to listen to his plans for the day. I had to grit my teeth to keep from gagging as sweet compliments and halfhearted promises dripped from his tongue like acid.

Michael’s words were as sweet as medovik but laced with poison, beautifully enticing yet dangerous just like the green mamba.

Michael told the cashier that he was headed to a spot on the Tuckasegee River to fish as soon as he left the store. It would be easy enough to follow him. He had no sense of his surroundings.

I followed at a reasonable distance, once he reached his destination, I passed without slowing down. I wanted him to get comfortable before I closed in on him. I headed up the road.

He would be finished setting up and be standing in the river, pole and line in hand by the time I got there. I wanted it to seem like a coincidence.

A I drove my thoughts mingled through my past. It was a time of violence, murder and hate. No matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to clean the stains from my hands. There was just too much blood to wash away. With that thought screaming like a siren I allowed my memories to overtake me.

* * * * *

My mother was a French gypsy woman named Adalaina. Her hair was the color of obsidian and had dyed feathers and ribbons tied in braided locks that framed her face. Her eyes were a mirror image of the French sky after the first winter snow. My father saw her first at a street fair. She was dancing with a small Fox she had tamed. Her copper skin was swathed in blue silk. Bells chimed around her ankles in rhythm with her movement. My father tipped her performance well and slipped a note with the address to his flat in the hand sewn purse along with his contribution.

His journal read that he had half expected her not to show up. The gypsy people were reclusive and tended to stay in the company of their own, but she had trumped his expectations. It began a long romantic affair. She adored his thick accent and fearless nature and he loved every aspect of her. The only hitch in their relationship was that despite loving everything that made her, her he did not love her herself.

My father was what psychiatrists classify as a psychopath. He could not feel love, empathy, or compassion. Maybe that is why he raised me to believe that they were signs of weakness. He could fake those feelings when it suited him to do so but that was a very rare necessity.

Eventually his lack of emotion caused a rift in their life together. She began to fear him, his anger and his utter devaluation of life. They had never married in the two years together but she had moved in with him and slowly he had fully isolated her. By the time she had decided to end their affair she was pregnant with me. She hadn't wanted to tell my father but with his keen intuition he knew she was hiding something. So, he had her followed. She led her surveyor directly to an obstetrician.

When he discovered she was caring a child he was overjoyed, though only at the prospect of having an heir. He couldn't have cared less about a family. His joyousness fooled her. She began to trust him and love him as she had in the beginning. She assumed that she had exaggerated his perpetuance for violence. Sadly, she was doing exactly what his calculating mind wanted her to do.

He knew that my mother would raise me with the love and compassion he despised. He said in his journal that he could not allow her to ruin me. He never detailed what had actually happened to her, it only contained a brief entry that a week after my second birthday we had attended her funeral.

There was a cut out of her obituary included in the pages.

I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the accident was really an accident and how much of it was due to my father's tampering.

I wondered if I had missed her. Had I mourned her? Had I dreamt of the mother I had lost, awoken in the middle of the night crying for her? If so, who had comforted me? Had anyone comforted the mourning toddler that lost his mother, or had I had to learn at such a young age to fend for myself? Knowing my father, I knew the answer. Still those questions plagued me for weeks, kept me up at night and stunted my appetite. I only found temporary peace when I was fighting or claiming the body of the girl who had offered herself to me in place of my seeking violence.

I could still remember that first night. Seeing her in tears on my bed and wondering why. Why was she crying for me? Now with age I had come to understand that she had feelings for me. Had grown fond of the boy three years her junior.

I had always looked much older than I was. I was maturing much faster than other boys my age. The intensive martial arts training my father had me undergo served to further my physical development. It was no wonder really that the emotionally damaged girl had fallen for the aloof and sarcastic boy she had been hired to tend.

My father had hired her from the Abbey. They were more than happy to be rid of the girl who they claimed invited defilers and undesirables into her company. She was meant to be my tutor. Father had not wanted me attending public school, I had questioned why for some time but again with age realized it was because he did not want me receiving any normal socialization. Friends, romantic flames and doting teachers would impede his molding of me into what he admired as the perfect man and soldier.

After asking me why I sought to fight I explained that I enjoyed it. That fighting allowed me to release the pent-up anger and frustrations I held in my heart. She stood, tears streaming down her face but she did not make a sound. She allowed her gown to slip from her shoulders revealing her naked body.

She was ordinary, pale skin, thin but not quite fit. Her hair was an auburn brown and her eyes were the color of chocolate. She pressed her thin lips together, ''Use me instead," she had sobbed when she tried to speak. "I'm not pure," she confessed as if I cared, "it was taken from me by force, so I have no reason not to offer myself in the place of your fighting and if it will save your life, I see no wrong in it."

I didn't love her, couldn't love her, not emotionally or physically but when a woman bares herself to a man and offers her body with the full knowledge of the violent rage that swelled within him, who is he to turn her down.

The next three years I don't believe a single week passed that she didn't carry bruises as evidence of my release. I believe there may have been a few times I had inadvertently fractured a rib or dislocated an arm, but she never complained. She took my anger and frustration with silence. As I showered one night, washing her blood tinged fluids from my body I wondered if she ever found pleasure in my use of her. I hadn’t considered her before and wasn’t sure why at that moment I thought of her feelings.

The night she died, the night she was murdered by a man that pulled a knife on me was the first time I considered her when I called her to my bed. It was also the first time I killed.

I was sixteen years old.

Using her always satisfied my insatiable appetite for violence but that night was different. My curiosity plagued me. That night I called her to my bed and for once I kissed her. She was surprised and I could feel the difference in the beat of her heart.

I moved my hands slowly and softly over the slight contours of her body. She had gained some weight since being with us, it was the first time I had noticed. I experimented with the way I moved my hands, and where I kissed. I allowed her reactions to guide and teach me. All the times before this she had lain silently and without expression but now, she writhed beneath me, unable to contain her pleasure as I gently sent her over the edge to her climax. The experience was as different for me as it was her.

It wasn’t enough.

I needed to fight. I needed to feel the bones of my enemy crack beneath my fists. Smell the metallic tinge of their blood.

I had started that fight. I was determined to finish it and would have easily.

A little bar fight was nothing I couldn’t handle.

I hadn’t realized she had followed me. She stepped between us the moment the knife was drawn. I tried to throw her out of the way but he had already buried the blade hilt deep in her back, severing a major artery.

As she lay in my arms she spoke as if she was speaking to someone far away, "I have no regrets," were the last words she uttered. She was dead before the Ambulance arrived.

My rage overflowed. I felt the heat of his blood run down my hands as I sliced through his abdomen with his own blade.

At first, I hadn’t realized I had moved. With all my force I yanked the blade from her still body. With a single sweeping motion, the serrated edge slit through skin and muscle. He stood shocked as blood began to drip from his drenched shirt into the snow.

He died on the way to the hospital with his intestine laid beside him on the gurney.

Though I faced no conviction the consequences I faced were far worse.

My father put me to work.

He had started his own company after leaving the police force. He started a firm with a team of mercenaries. A private army that had no alliances. Whoever could pay the highest price bought the loyalty of my father and the men he hired. I then realized my father’s purpose for me. My entire life he was grooming me to be one of his soldiers and then to eventually take over his self-made army.

His journal described his desire to create the perfect soldier. The men that he had hired were cruel and relentless. They held no value for human life but they all had the same flaws. Greed, vanity and lust were the only factors that drove them. They could be easily swayed with the fastest cars, most money and prettiest, sluttiest women. They held no loyalty, not even to my father who had hired them and gave them everything that they had.

By seventeen I was doing one-man jobs. The one I can remember the most clearly was for an American judge. A man had photos of him soliciting an under aged girl for prostitution. The judge was planning on moving up in the ranks and those images could not become public. As all blackmail goes the blackmailer was greedy and wanted more every time the judge paid him. It was like feeding a stray dog, no matter how much you fed it, it would always keep coming back for more. So, the judge contacted my father.

My father sent his best man to do the job: me.

I traveled to more countries then I could remember, under even more aliases. Turkey, France, America and Amsterdam were some of my favorite. I always took a few days to relax, enjoy the sites, the food and the women. But none, at least none of the women were ever enough for me. I was always left wanting more. It was as if a hole was inside me and nothing, I did could fill the emptiness.

I started doing more jobs. I went from one or two jobs a month to one a week, more if there were multiple targets in the same country.

I never felt guilt over the people I killed. They were people the world was better off without. People that raped, murdered needlessly and used children to carry drugs, guns, and bombs. They were the sort of deplorable that even the mainstream media wouldn't talk about for fear of retaliation.

My father didn't feel fear, even thought of himself and his team as invincible. The better I got the higher his ego soared and the more risk he took with the jobs.

The last job we worked was five months before I moved here.

We were contracted by a rebel group in Afghanistan that was greatly outnumbered and under trained. They operated in a small village and were made up of farmers and craftsman from neighboring villages that were being ransacked by a secular group that sold merchandise do the Taliban. All they wanted was their homes safe. There was a diamond mine in the center of the three villages that made up the largest population of the area, it was controlled by the locals, which is why they were a target. They were going to pay us for our work in the diamonds and precious stones they mined

It was the most high-risk job we ever took. The objective of the operation was to find and infiltrate their base. We were to dispatch every soldier but one low ranking grunt and send him to his boss, the one who orchestrated the hits and sales, with a message to leave the villages alone or we would be back. We spent two months doing research, three months making contacts and another month doing surveillance. When our spy had gathered enough intelligence, we hopped a plane to Afghanistan.

Once there we spent a week reviewing all our information and setting up a plan. We had no idea there was a traitor among us. Someone had leaked everything, where we were staying, when we were leaving, the route we were going to take, every stop, every moment to the letter had been handed off to the people we were trying to exterminate.

I had a strange feeling over the 48 hours leading up to the job. I could have sworn that I kept seeing the same man several times, like he was watching us, but it was such a small village I just assumed it was coincidental. I should have listened to my instincts. If I did, where would I be now?

Probably exactly what I’m doing now. Stalking some perv that deserved their fate, though in this case the wretch wouldn’t die. At least not yet. I smiled to myself at the thought that the rugged mountain terrain would make an excellent backdrop for a hunting accident.

The evening of the hit we moved out with no problems. We made every scheduled stop at the exact time with no issue, and honestly that bothered me. We were a group of white men in one of the most war ridden areas of the world. White men, Christians or anymore that look like they may be American were attacked or kidnapped. I expected at least a civil disturbance, but there was nothing.

We were half way to the final stop where we would ditch the truck and head out on foot when we saw an odd hump in the road. We were all well educated in IEDs, improvised explosive devices, so we stopped to survey the area. It was open and it would be easy to drive around the suspicious spot to the left of the road. One of our men, Arick, got out of the truck to walk ahead with a metal detector. When he gave us the all clear we started on his cleared path. We heard a shot and I saw Arick fall.

I jumped out to pull him out of the open and apply first aid if it wasn't too late and I heard an explosion behind me. The force of the blast sent me flying forward. I hit my head on a rock as shrapnel impaled me from behind. The next thing I remember is waking up in a triage unit at a U.S. military encampment.

The captain at the base told me that I was the only survivor, that I had been badly injured by shrapnel and heat from the blast. The explosive specialist that was stationed with them said that the fire the bomb started in the truck had burned longer and hotter than any he had ever seen. I was questioned about what we were carrying on the truck for days. Just like my father had trained me to do I just repeated the same lie. We were an investor team that came to scout the mine and make an offer to partner with the village leaders. After nearly a week I was hurting too bad, too tired and too annoyed to just keep repeating it. With my father and entire team dead there was no point in keeping up the facade.

I told the captain that we were a team of mercenaries hired by the villagers to take out a gang that was in the area. That we had gone off the road in an attempt to avoid an apparent IED and our road scout had been shot by a sniper. I told them that the only thing on the truck was water and the gear in our packs.

When I had finished, they looked puzzled. They informed me that the gang we were hired to take out had already been dealt with by their unit more than 24 hours prior to our scheduled hit. I came to the conclusion that the guy we hired to be our boots on the ground had to be the leak. They informed me that a man fitting his description, down to the tattoo on the underside of his tongue had been one of the casualties in the U.S. raid on the insurgents’ base. That did however leave the question of why did the fire burn so hot and for so long. It had literally incinerated everything, and why had Arik's metal detector not picked up the presence of the bomb?

I spent two months, three weeks and four days with them. The captain told me he felt sorry for me, being raised to be a soldier not a person. He said that I had two choices, take the chance to be a normal teenager and live my life in the United States or go to the U.N. He told me that if he reported the real reason my group was there that I would have to account for our crimes. I would have to divulge all of my father's clients, past and future and give details of every hit we had ever made. I would be tried for war crimes against several different countries. I took the only beneficial option I was presented with.

The captain reported the story I had originally told him and that my father had been killed, leaving me orphaned. They got all the paper work in order and placed my guardianship in the hands of a young sergeant, David Martin.

David had grown up in a small town in North Carolina just passed the Tennessee state line burred in the forests and hills of the Smokey Mountains. It had a very small population and I could easily stay out of trouble.

David had been given a few weeks to go with me back to Russia to settle my father’s accounts, after all I would need money to start my new life in America. My father had far more money than I had originally thought, 3.2 million in U.S dollars to be exact. As soon as everything was finished, I left the only home I had ever known.

David set me up in his apartment while he was deployed though since meeting Cat I hadn’t stayed there very often.

She assumed that every night except the last had been an accident and maybe it had been for her but I couldn’t honestly say the same.

The first night I had gone to her house was simply to call her bluff. She was angry at me. I knew and truthfully, I didn’t need her help at all. Had it not been for the fact that not all of my home school credits transferred over I would have already been presented my diploma. Nothing she was currently learning was new to me.

When she fell asleep in my arms, I felt my heart skip a beat. I had never slept with a woman in the literal since. From the moment I lost my virginity I had only laid with women I was using and only during the act. As soon as I was finished with them, I would send them on their way. I had never felt an emotional connection to any of them and frankly I was sure they were too afraid to get close enough to create one, and yet there she lay.

Her eye lids fluttered as she dreamed, her soft breath warm against my bare chest. She hugged herself closer to my side so habitually I wondered if she maybe slept with a stuffed animal or a doll. Her innocence perpetuated her. I had wanted to move, to lay her peacefully on the bed and leave her and that house. Her mother had ordered me to stay due to the weather but I had trouble following even my father's orders. Despite all rationality telling me I needed to leave I couldn’t force myself to move. I felt like a devil holding tightly to an angel for she would be as close to salvation as I would ever come.

For a while I lay there, not touching her. I was too afraid to touch her. I had so much blood and filth on my hands I was afraid my touch alone would stain her. I watched as her silky hair fell into her face. She rubbed her cheek against my chest obviously trying to move the thing that was tickling her. Reluctantly I brushed her hair over her shoulder, my fingertips grazing her skin.

The pain and longing I felt in my heart were almost too much for me to tolerate. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to try to center my thoughts and fight back the desire that swelled inside me. For once it wasn’t the desire to defile the woman that clutched herself to me but rather the need to make her mine, fully and only mine.

Maybe my hatred and anger toward Michael stemmed partially from jealousy. No matter where it came from, he would know after today that she was protected. She would never be his.

I allowed my thoughts to trail away as I pulled up behind his SUV. A red Chevy Trailblazer with the haughty tag that was carelessly parked on the rocks. He paused in his fishing to glance over his shoulder. He looked surprised to see me but not afraid as I hoped. I doubted he had the intelligence to understand what my being there really meant. The look in his eyes said he knew why I was there but the lack of panic said he was very unaware of how much danger he was really in.

I surveyed my surroundings. There were so many ways one could come to an accidental untimely demise on this river simply by losing one’s footing.

"Oh, the things I could do," I mused to myself.

I hadn’t realized I had been grinning at the images that played through my mind until Michael spoke

"Guess you're here cause a Catty huh," he amused himself far too much. "She get my letter I sent her?" he asked in a condescending fashion. He stepped from the river to stand squarely with me. He wasn’t the first to think they could take me and I was sure he wouldn’t be the last. I was sure, however that he wouldn’t be much of a challenge.

"You must be really jealous," his words caught me off guard.

Was he really so egotistic that he thought Cat was simply playing hard to get?

"Why would I be jealous of you?"

"Because, you might be sleeping beside her but you haven’t actually slept with her, now have you? You're jealous because I actually have the balls to take what I want."

My anger began to swell. I fought the urge to snap his neck as he continued to speak, "Catalina Angelus, she takes that last name to seriously. she’s a prude but one good fuck will pull her out of that holier than thou act. I’ll be doing her favor".

I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

Before he could take his first step away from me my hands were on him. I twisted one arm over his back until I felt the pop of his shoulder separating from its joint. He was too shocked to make a sound other than an agonized gasp. I heaved him up right and pulled him close enough to me, arm still pinned at his back, to speak directly into his ear.

"If you ever come near Catty again, I promise you that a dislocated shoulder will be the least of your worries." My voice came out more as a growl than a whisper.

I threw him into the dirt and rocks at my feet and added, "I’ve killed worse men than you, don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll hesitate."

I drove away with the image of Cat's face playing at my mind.

I hope you enjoyed this peak of Escaping Fate. If your interest is peaked the full book is available on Amazon.