Professor Cline: Redeemed (Professor #2)
J. M. La Rocca
Prologue
Mason
Seventeen years old
I wasn’t always like this. Dark. Malicious. Empty.
He made me this way.
Years ago, I was happy and content. Living a life beside my mother, a light so bright that she transferred it to others. She was a beacon. All the goodness she had in her bled into me.
Then she was gone.
My beacon faded away.
I was left with him.
That darkness seeped into my soul and took over. It flipped a switch and showed me things I’d never known. It showed me how one’s pain could be my pleasure.
At first, I fought it. I knew right from wrong.
This was wrong.
But if it was wrong, why did I enjoy it?
I battled with my subconscious on a daily basis, but he kept pushing me further over the edge, so far that there was no more light to be seen.
I knew why I embraced it. She was magnetic. A new beacon to consume me, but the darkness was overpowering.
I told myself I hated it. I was evil. A murderer. Deep down…I enjoyed it.
I closed everything behind a door in my mind and kept it there until it needed to be opened again.
I despised myself, but the inner part of me enjoyed that, too.
I’d never win this battle.
I lost myself when I was seven.
There was no redeeming who I would become.
One
Mason
I sat with my head resting on the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling. The blood on my hip was already starting to clot, the pain from the cut no longer registering in my brain. Luke would be there soon, and I needed to get my head on straight.
So many things whirled through my mind, but Emma’s terrified expression as I yelled at her to leave was front and center. I tried to block it, like I’d done with so many other things, but it was too fresh.
Running a hand through my hair, I sighed as the night’s events played over in my head again. I was stupid. So fucking stupid.
I heard a soft tapping and lifted my head to look in the direction of the front door.
“Yeah!” I shouted then laid my head back down.
I heard the door open and light footsteps as Luke made his way to me.
“What the fuck happened?”
I turned my head and looked toward Luke to see him standing in the doorway. “You bring your kit?”
“Yeah,” he said, lifting it up for me to see as he looked at my hip.
“Good.” I turned to lie on my side, exposing my torn flesh for him, not worried in the least of what he’d think of my nudity.
He walked into the room and set his bag on the table. “Talk to me, Mase. What the hell is going on?”
I stared at the wall, looking over the painting Emma had examined a week before. The colors swirled together as I stared intently at the purple splotch in the corner. It truly was a window to my soul.
“Do you ever wonder what your life might have been like if you had made a different choice?”
I looked toward him and waited for him to answer. It wasn’t something I thought of often, but there were times I wondered how my life would’ve turned out if I’d chosen a different path. What would it have been like if my mother hadn’t died? What if I’d tried to get Sophia out? There were so many times I was left in the house on my own with her. We could have both run. I could have kept her safe. I could have found a way. I destructed my own life. I’ve made all the choices.
I heard him sigh and open his bag before he knelt on the floor beside the couch.
“I’ve been your best friend for a long time, Mase, and I’ve never questioned your choice not to tell me why you do this to yourself, but I’m not leaving tonight until you tell me what the fuck is going on inside your head.”
I chuckled before bending my arm back behind a pillow and resting my head to get comfortable.
“If I told you all the fucked-up shit going on in my head, you’d be just as fucked up as I am.”
“I highly doubt that.”
I looked away from the painting to see a small smirk on Luke’s face. He’d been with me through thick and thin all of my life. He was the only one I’d ever consider telling, but that wouldn’t be a wise decision on my part.
“There’s too much to even try to explain.”
“That’s the main word there, Mase: try.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly before looking down at my naked body and then over to my hip. “Fix me up first, will you? Then we’ll talk.”
He nodded somberly and got to work on my hip after bandaging the shredded skin on my hand.
After he stitched and dressed the cut, I sat up and grabbed one of the decorative throw blankets from the side of the couch to cover myself up.
“Can you go to my office and grab the bottle of scotch?”
He closed his bag and did as I asked, pouring a glass for each of us when he arrived back in the room.