Cleansed: Handled, #2

By Romilly King

Sometimes you have to go back in order to go forward – Gray is going back to handle the man who saw him as an angel, and unleashed the demon in him.

 

I am a Handler; I deal with serial killers, legally, ruthlessly, and in the presence of my Witness, because justice must be seen to be done.

 

Handling is an intimate procedure. I only perform for an audience of one; for my Witness, with his hot eyes and his innocent heart, and the pure white soul that I dirtied up so beautifully.

 

Now someone else is watching, the man who refined the monster in me.  I can't allow that to continue, particularly as he threatens the Witness who has caused the frozen lump in my chest that I laughingly refer to as heart to sporadically beat.

 

This isn't about retribution; this is cleaning up the past so I have a chance at a future.

 

Cleansed is the second book in the Handled trilogy, it is a dark gay romance dealing with adult themes and contains graphic scenes that may upset some readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balloon Ride Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215499054

Romilly King

Romilly write's character driven gay romances that focus on the dynamics of intense relationships.  Romilly's plots tend to dive deep into the more fascinating aspects of human behaviour - basically there will be a lot of kinky stuff!

Book preview

Chapter One

Gray

The interior of the carriage house is thick with shadows in the evening light.  It’s cold and quiet, and the old brick floor is dark red, as though the blood Nathan spilled here has spread out and stained the entire surface.

Watched, did you?  Here, were you?

How fucking dare you!

The rage is a hot ember inside me, spluttering fitfully but ready to explode and set the whole world aflame.

That’s the problem with me, if I ever let go of what I hold inside I could burn the world down.

You should have stayed away.

I had no interest in you.

You weren’t worth thinking about. You were in the past.

My shoulders twitch, a phantom pull at the muscles of my back, and a ghost of a sensation ripples across the tight, scarred skin.  Winter does my back no favours.

Nathan steps into my peripheral vision, telegraphing his movements, making sure I see him.

You ready? my witness asks.

I nod. I’m looking forward to the challenge. Two at a time is always interesting.

That’s one way of putting it.

It’s logistics, I say with a shrug, Handling a pair is bound to be more complex.

Are you nervous?

Still with the stupid questions, Nathan, I say, I thought I had broken you of that habit.

Not a chance, a smile tugs at his pretty lips, I gotta keep you at least moderately pissed at me, or this would get too weird.

He’s not wrong.

Nathan and I dance around each other in a way that has become not just integral to my life, but fun.

That word feels strange in my head.  It’s not something I am used to. It's a word label that I struggle to apply to many things in my life, and it is also wildly inappropriate.  What I do is not meant to be fun in any way. 

It’s meant to be just enough to satisfy me, and more than enough to satisfy justice.

I am a handler, I am allowed to gain satisfaction from my job so long as the public doesn’t enquire too closely into what that entails.

Satisfaction, not fun.

Then along came Nathan, with his hot eyes, and his teasing, and his stupid comments and his loyalty. And part of it has become, fun.

Not tonight though.  Tonight is not about fun.  Tonight is about not so much throwing down the gauntlet as punching someone in the face with it.

The rage inside morphs into devilish glee.

I’ll give you something to watch, you fucking animal.

The glee strokes my arousal.  I have been hard on and off for days preparing for this.  Keeping it restrained inside me, letting it build.  There will be so many sources of delicious pain coming at me tonight - mental, physical, historical. It’s going to be fucking epic. 

My heart rate rises and I nearly groan at the tension inside me.

We need to go. Nathan interrupts my slide into full blown arousal.

He feels it, I know he does. His gaze is wary, and he bites his lip when I turn to look at him.  I want to throw him down now and fuck him on the floor of the carriage house, but it’s too soon. 

He drops his eyes from mine.  I guess he has at least an inkling of what is coming, and his response is perfect, bashful and yet all too aware.

I haven’t laid a hand on him in so long.

That ends tonight.

Nora is waiting for us, he speaks again, urging me gently. 

I nod.  This is our first handling since the cock-up that nearly killed Nathan and me.  Nora, my former witness and current boss, has insisted that she needs to go over the proof of guilt before we are cleared to finish the case.

I pull myself back from the trembling edge of excitement.

Have you locked the courtroom? my voice comes out rougher than I expected, deeper and grating.

Yes, all prepped, all locked up, and ready, Nathan glances back at the door to my kill room, its access panel faintly glowing.  It takes up the entire back wall of the carriage house, tucked under the mezzanine floor where the stables used to be.  Its matt black walls and single flat entrance look startlingly modern against the rustic quaintness of the old carriage house.

We’ll leave the one light on in here, I say glancing around at the big open space. It will take both of us to bring them in, and I want some light when we arrive.

Nathan looks grimly at the single light hanging from the open beams of the roof.  It highlights the exact spot where he suffered and bled a mere six weeks ago. 

I appreciate that it must be difficult for him to be reminded of what happened in this place, but it seems to bother him less than I thought it would.  My witness surprises me in multiple ways.  He has every right to be traumatised by what he went through, and yet he appears to have processed it.

Good little witness.

Come on, man.  We need to move if you want to get this done tonight, it’s a good forty minutes back to the city at this time of day.

I give the carriage house one last glance, the shadows pile up in the corners, the few windows that remain unboarded are blank, black eyes in the whitewashed brick walls.  It’s nearly full dark now, the quick January night has rushed in and later there will be additional eyes out there in the darkness.  Watching me.  It seems they have always been fucking watching me.

Come and see.

––––––––

Nathan

It has been a long six weeks.  My body is fine.  My head is fine - surprisingly.  My heart? Well the jury is very much still out on that. 

Gray, whose moods and tells I am still learning, sways between tight-lipped focus, as we upgrade the security at his courtroom in the carriage house, and eager hunter, as we take on a new case and he stalks through the political jungle of Washington DC, in pursuit of his prey.

Nora wanted us, as a team, back on the ground as soon as possible. No time to dwell.  Fortunately, the new case has been just as fascinating as the last one, but without the unfortunate ritual elements that should have got me into a lot more trouble than they did.

I was surprised when Gray upgraded the security on his courtroom but left the actual carriage house and the larger land area of the estate unchanged.  During our last case not only had he been identified as a handler by the prime suspect, but The Mistake, his family estate, his home ground and site of his courtroom, had been found and entered. Given what went down I thought that he would lock the place down tighter than a duck’s ass, and that’s watertight.

A handler’s courtroom is a very personal space.  They are all different, they are all personal - Gray’s is all sealed surfaces, black floors and stainless steel accoutrements, a cross between the clinical and macabre - and they are the only places where the rare individuals who carry out capital punishment are allowed to be themselves. 

I would not have been surprised if Gray refused to ever use the carriage house again and had demanded a new courtroom.

He must have a very firm attachment to the beautiful old building on the banks of the Potomac. 

When I asked Gray why he hadn’t changed anything outside of the courtroom, he had sneered, My family has walked this land for two hundred and fifty years. If anyone wants to come and find me here, I’ll be fucking waiting. 

I had dropped the subject.  Rapidly.  Gray’s eyes had glittered yellow fire and the tyger I always sensed in him had been right up in my face, snarling and ready.

There were times in the last six weeks when I felt Gray was only barely holding in a towering rage, and it had to boil over soon.

Nora felt it too.  She and Gray had a stand-up row in her office when she ordered him to reinstall the monitoring cameras in his courtroom. 

He had ripped the old ones out the day after he got out of hospital and he refused to let them be reinstated. 

Visual monitoring inside the courtroom was never part of the deal, he had snarled at her when she said she wanted them back in place.

They are not for your benefit, they are there to cover our ass, she had yelled at him.

Not my fucking problem.

If I had been a braver man I would have put a hand on him to try and calm him. But our relationship wasn’t stable enough, and I was treading carefully around him.

I had kissed him, once, since the night we nearly died. The kiss had been beautiful, and I treasured it, and dreamed about it.  It gave me hope I had no right to entertain. 

It hadn’t been repeated. The desire was still there though, and rising by the day as we moved through what felt like endless foreplay. The sexual tension between us slowly ratcheting itself up through hot looks, pure chemistry, and the oh so detailed memories of what we had done in the past.

We were at that point where every time we were in the same room together the electricity between us practically crackled.

When Gray refused the cameras Nora had cajoled, manipulated, and eventually resorted to ordering Gray to allow the department monitoring capability in his courtroom.

In the end, he had given into his anger and had picked up the monitor on her desk, and thrown it at the wall.  When he did that I had grown a pair of balls and stepped in to block him from Nora herself.  She might be a harridan, but she was also an old lady, and our immediate boss, she deserved some respect. 

I like to think he wouldn’t have hurt her but I wasn’t willing to bet on it.

Nora had been Gray’s witness for decades, so she was used to his outbursts but even she was tight-lipped and white around the eyes from the rage that emanated from him.

I got his anger, I really did. He hadn’t known the cameras were there and finding out that there was a higher, even more intrusive, level of oversight than even he suspected must have been infuriating.

His whole life was overseen.  He was chipped so his every move was tracked. He was denied the freedom other citizens took for granted.  He even had me in his courtroom with him when he did the one thing the government wanted him to do, but he had a relationship with me, of sorts. I wasn’t a faceless entity removed from the reality of it all, I was in there with him. Going through it with him.

He had locked eyes with me when I stood between him and Nora and denied him further opportunities to let out his anger.

Get out of my way.

Not this time, man I had dragged up a weak smile I get your issue, but this isn’t right.

Don’t defend her, she would throw you under the bus in a second if she needed to.

I know, I nodded, my eyes pleading with him But I signed up for that. I expect that.  What I didn’t sign up for was to stand by while you threaten someone who can’t possibly take you on.

You underestimate her if you believe that.

I felt I held up well under his yellow eyed glare, but I still sagged with relief when he eventually stepped back. 

No cameras, he said with utter finality.

We’ll discuss it another time, Nora had recovered rapidly, I’ll postpone it for now while I speak to Dr Goodlove, maybe he can come up with a workable solution.

Our ultimate boss rarely intervened in field work, and I wasn’t sure how keen he would be to placate Gray, but at least it bought us some time. Then the new case had come along and we were thrown right back into the world of careless killing and casual cruelty.

I glance across at Gray as he drives us from The Mistake back to the city.  His eyes are intent on the road and I can feel the thrumming excitement in him. I feel an answering clench in my own guts.

Tonight, once Nora gives us the go-ahead, we handle two killers, and I am worried, and excited, and God help me, enthralled by Gray at this time.

This case wasn’t hard to solve but it was logistically difficult, not just because it’s a couple, but because they are high profile.

That seemed to please Gray from the moment we were assigned it. He likes to take a stab at the establishment and this stab is very much warranted.

I clench and unclench my hands, feeling my energy spiking.  I need to calm down and do my job, but the thought of how Gray will be tonight, in all his dominant glory, unleashed, unmasked, free to be himself with justification, it’s a heady thing to anticipate. 

God help me, sometimes I think I am as deviant as he is.

––––––––

––––––––

This is the story of Alicia and Harry Beauregard, as Gray tells it to Nora, in