Crescendo - B*M* Book #1 SAMPLE

Chapter 2 | Spark

WARNING: THIS STORY WILL BE REMOVED ON WED MAY 10th! Why? I'm publishing the fully edited version of the novel on itunes and Amazon! Thank you all so much for your support. The book will be released next Saturday, May 13th and YOU can score your copy now for just .99 cents!

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Dante

We are supposed to strive toward freedom like rats on a wheel working for cheese. Time off for "good behavior," they say. Parole is the goal—but when the unexpected release of a convict is deemed "reintegration into society," it all but implies that we have all been successfully rehabilitated the moment we walk out of the reinforced steel doors.

It's all bullshit, of course. Just a way for the DA to be able to sleep at night, knowing that his inept office allowed yet another monster to slip through the hands of justice. Some poet somewhere probably wrote something deep to describe the cruelty of it, but I'll settle for this: you can't cure rabies with four walls and an armed guard. By then, the beast can't even hear you. It doesn't want to hear you. Why? It's already imagining the uneven cadence of your heartbeat the moment it lunges for your throat.

Once tasted, blood is an impossible addiction to shake, unlike crack or heroine. The stain on your soul left by a death you commit yourself is incomparable to any other human disease. It corrupts your entire being. The aftermath paints the world gray. Crushing a man's windpipe beneath your fingers or striking him down with a bullet you let loose marks the moment you decide to stop being human. Darkness consumes you, and even though a pretty social worker in a clinical lab coat tries to tell you to feel remorse...

You simply don't. C'est la vie. That's life.

"Mr. Vialle. Did you hear me?" An orderly waits by the door with a clipboard propped in the crook of his arm. "Detective Van Hallen for you." He steps back to allow another man to enter the room.

It's one of the interview rooms the prison uses for meetings with lawyers or impromptu so-you've-been-released well wishes from the cops. Whoever he is, this "Detective" is tall. Graying black hair covers his head and matches the neatly trimmed beard around his mouth. Rather than look in my direction, he warily eyes the plastic chair placed on the other side of the metal table I'm already seated at. When he finally sits, he has to spread out his legs just to keep his knees from brushing the table's underside.

"Good morning, Mr. Vialle," he says, finally looking up. "I hope I'm not troubling you too much." He makes a show of placing a battered, leather briefcase on the table. Then he takes his sweet time opening it and withdraws a rather sizeable file. Dante Vialle, is printed on a sticker taped to the front of it. He makes sure I read the label before he opens the file and shuffles the pages inside it. "You have an...interesting record to say the least, Mr. Vialle."

I don't answer. This jumpsuit itches. The fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling are set to the highest setting on purpose—as is the fact that the heat is blasting, though Mr. Van Hallen has enough sense to pretend he doesn't notice. Stupid pigs. You'd think they'd get tired of playing the same old tricks.

"Well, I personally wasn't pulling for your release," Van Hallen goes on. He frowns at something he reads on one of the pages in my file and begins to recite out loud. "Robbery. Arson. Attempted murder. Assault with a firearm. Assault with a deadly weapon. Felony assault. Possession with intent to sell. Kidnapping—"