Chapter 1

My name is Trevor, and I’m an evil son of a bitch. Oh I am. No question there. You’ll understand in a bit. This is a story of betrayal, evil done to others, humiliation, revenge, bullshit prophecies – some of which I’ve come to what was really intended ... no ... wait. I’m not going to prejudice you on this. I need to tell the story as it happened, and let you judge. I doubt you’ll be kind to me once you’ve heard it, but on the other hand, you can count the number of fucks I give about that on the fingers of a sperm whale.

I was born in Barnsely, in England. Yeah. Baahnslei. I still have that accent when I’m stressed or angry, despite years of doing my best to be rid of it. The Barnsely accent is like the deep south of the USA – no one with that accent is someone you want at the controls of your aircraft or doing brain surgery on you. It’s not associated with brains at all. Which is a shame, since Yorkshire has produced a lot of smarty pants. They just don’t sound like it. Hell, the steam train was invented in the Newcastle.

Anyway, I got a degree in engineering, at Manchester University, and left as soon as was decently possible. My family, well, I had a Dad, who died when I was nineteen. My mother vanished when I was eight. I still don’t know exactly why, but I think it was due to the fact that my Dad was an overbearing bigot, full of opinions, bollocks and beer. While I was pissed off with my Mum doing a vanishing act, there were quite a few times when I was quite empathetic to her, and just wished she’d taken me with her. I didn’t have any siblings, so once Dad died, it was just me. I had heard I had cousins from mum’s side, but Dad never made any effort to get into contact with them, so I never got to know them. I still have no clue who they might be, since I had no details on mum, like her maiden name, for example.

That’s the Stevenson Clan then. Trevor Elliot Stevenson. That’s my potted family history.

I was lucky in that I got an engineering apprenticeship – designing and building bridges, of all things – with a company in Huddersfield, which was then bought up by a company in Maryland, called Bardels Inc. So I moved out there as soon as I was able to wrangle it. They got me an H1B visa to emigrate out to the US and I was off to the races!

The US was an education. Mostly in how bloody stupid my accent sounded, but also in how American women responded to it. I honestly thought I’d died and gone to heaven for a while there. I got seriously laid for that first year I was out there.

But I worked. Oh I worked. I took every on site job the company had – it was a consultancy group that wanted to get into the physical construction aspect of Engineering, hence them buying the place I was at. But because the company still did a lot of consultancy, there were lots of opportunities to go do different things. I built bridges in Japan, I helped strip mine copper in South Africa, I leveled mountains in China. I had, frankly, a hell of an education and a whale of a time and got to see some of the world at the same time. Not the “View from a nice four-star hotel” world, but the “We are lucky if the showers work and the toilet is a fragrant hole in the ground” view. The real view if you like.

And then Sarah came into my life. I remember it as though it were yesterday. I was back at head office, and there she was. The new receptionist. I just stopped and stared. I mean, for me, it was love at first sight. There might have been violins and soft focus and dancing cherubs, for all I know. Red hair, porcelain skin, a smile to die for, even when she frowned, it was the cutest thing. Little dimples in her cheeks. Even great teeth. She was five foot six, figure to die for, curves in all the right places. I was absolutely in love, even from a distance.

All I do know is that I got the ribbing of my life from my office mate for a couple of weeks because of how affected I was, before I got up the courage to actually ask her out.

I couldn’t believe it when she said, “Yes, I’d love to!” and fluttered those eye lashes. We went out for Sushi, which thinking back, probably wasn’t a great move because while I knew what I liked, I didn’t have a clue how to introduce someone else to eating what is effectively raw fish on sticky rice.

But I needn’t have worried, she took to it like a duck to water. She babbled and I was entranced. I learned that she was living with her Aunt, she was from Iowa, her family were farmers, that had a live in license on someone else’s land, she loved French movies, spoke fluent French, harbored a desire to tour France, was an accredited sommelier, and took Yoga when she could find the time.

I just sat and stared at her and let the words wash over me. I was totally lost.

To cut a long story short, we dated for a few weeks, I got to first, then second base, and then, one night of boozing after St. Patricks Day, we did it.

And when I say, we did it, I mean We. Did. It. All night. And most of the next day. It was just, well, they say out of this world and in our case, it was. I was seeing stars. She said she was too.

We were happy. Broke, but happy. The life of a nomadic engineer isn’t one full of cash, at least not until you get to be the gaffer on the job. Occasionally I’d get danger money, but between us, we made do. We moved in together and I put in for more local work, perhaps start up the management chain. I’d put in my dues, no one could argue that.

We were extremely sexually compatible. I’m not huge, but I’m not small either. I fit in her just right and she loved it. We experimented, but not too far. Neither of us where into BDSM or water sports or anything like that, but we had a few occasions where we’d role play, or, in one memorable new year, she’d dressed up for me. I’ll never forget it – her red hair, shiny and glossy, draped around her neck. A black velvet choaker, a simple black jacket, with one button, done up over the top of a Fredericks of Hollywood corset. It pushed up her boobs, and you got a bunch of cleavage in your view, with the hint of something satiny holding them up, before the jacket closed over it. I knew what was underneath, but there was only a hint for others. A tantalizing and extremely sexy hint, but only a hint. A short pleated black skirt came below the jacket, with black seamed nylons under that. I knew they were stockings, because she was wearing a corset, complete with garters. If she bent over enough, you’d just be able to see the tops of her stockings – another teaser because I never knew if she was going to or not. I think she quite forgot that could happen over the evening, because she did bend over a few times. It was all set off with 4 inch CFM pumps. Nothing subtle about those at all. Oh, and no panties.

I knew for a fact that heads turned wherever she went, and I made no bones about the pleasure I took in knowing she was mine. Those others could look all they want, but she went home with me. The teasing was for me and no one else.

We screwed that night. Oh my god we screwed. I did her twice while we were out and about. I’m assuming she had wipes in her bag, because otherwise she’d have had my cum dribbling down her leg all night. Hell, we spent most of dinner with my fingers in her pussy, making her squirm. Every now and then I’d lick my fingers, gazing into her eyes. It was a hell of a night.

Not every night was like that, but it did happen on occasion. And I gave as good as I got. I once set up a day spa for her. I knew what the spa was – it was one of those places that took it to the limit, suggestive wise, but didn’t go over the top. Their specialty was to drive your spouse up the wall with erotic massages and so on, and then, when they were at their height of arousal, send them back to your room, where you’d be waiting. It cost me almost a seven hundred bucks, which was a lot for us back then, but oh my god, was it worth it. She was jelly when she got back to the room and I swear she almost came just from me kissing her. That was another weekend worth marking on the calendar.

Sarah and I were like two peas in a pod. She’d finish my sentences for me. We thought similarly enough that the big decision were almost no brainers for us. We’d fight about the smaller stuff, like all couples did. She had a habit of spending money and then using sex to apologize – “better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” she’d say, usually naked, before reducing me to a quivering mass. I had a habit of buying stuff for our apartment without asking her, and as the mistress of that domain, she’d get huffy about it. I came home with a pretty great print of the Death Star rising behind Yavin 4 once, and hung it up in the living room. When she got home that day, well, lets just say that there was only one Star Wars fan in our house, and it wasn’t her.

We were made for each other. She never looked at another man, and I never looked at another woman – we didn’t even have to talk about it, we just lived in our little cocoon. It was us against the world. Like I said, we fought, and she could be a little vindictive – she didn’t speak to me for a week once over something trivial that I can’t even remember, and I could also hold a grudge if I felt it was necessary. I held justice – not revenge – very dearly in my heart, and if I was wronged, I would take steps to correct it. She knew it, and she knew when she stepped over the line, as did I. It might take a while, but we would always end up apologizing to each other if things had gone too far.

Another issue I had with her – I don’t even know that it’s an issue per-se, but it sure drove me up the wall on occasion - was her empathy. Sarah was a hugely empathetic person. She felt other people’s experiences at an emotional level. She could be in tears over a movie, where she knew it wasn’t real, but it connected to her at an emotional level, bypassing her reasoning centers. She’d adopt stray dogs, or put out food for stray cats. I wouldn’t have minded – it just showed what a great heart she had – but on occasion it put cramps in our plans, and for what? So she could stay up all night and nurse a bird with a broken wing back to health? I gave up a birthday dinner for that?

And that’s just the animals. When it came to humans, it was even worse. A child left alone? Saint Sarah to the rescue. A friend with relationship issues? Saint Sarah was there, with a bottle of wine, a soppy movie and tissues. One friend had a divorce and Sarah virtually moved in with the woman for a couple of weeks. It was lovely that she felt that strongly for other people, but there does come a point where it starts to impact your own life to the extent where it feels like other people are coming first. We had this discussion a couple of times, and while she understood what I was saying and promised to be more considerate of ‘our time’, it happened again. Mind you, in her defense, she made it up to me, big time. The new years thing was one such attempt to make up for some time she spent disregarding me in favor of someone who needed her, for example. But, as I pointed out to her, while the ‘making up’ was great, I’d rather she did that because she wanted to, and not because she felt she had to make up to me. It would be better if she didn’t have to make up to me in the first place.

Of course, she had her pet issues with me too. I misjudged ‘romantic moments’ apparently. I didn’t even really know what that meant, to be honest. But I nodded the whole time and said I’d work on it. I made fun of her TV shows – she loved reality shows, the more trashy the better. Sister Wives, Dance Moms, The Kardashians and so on. I ripped them un-mercilessly if they were on when I was present. I had no respect for other people’s choices in life – occasionally when she’d put on the Florence Nightingale hat and rush off to help some friend in trouble, I’d be very insensitive about their situation – as far as I could see it was just me being honest about their circumstances. You don’t get to have everyone be sympathetic to you if you caused your boyfriend to leave because you were a round heeled slut? I mean, come on, right? Balance? Justice perhaps?

So yeah, we had our issues. We’d talked about kids, and both wanted them, without doubt, but we wanted to wait until our lives were a little more settled. I was still earning my spurs, as they used to say, so the traveling was necessary. Once that wore off, the kids would come. And we’d have a hell of a lot of fun trying.

She had some distant family – her Aunt had kids that were her cousins, but she had no immediate siblings and her parents had died years ago. Apparently she had come along late in life for them, and they’d died of natural causes, within a year of each other, when she was twenty.

We were happy. There was no question of that. Sometimes when I traveled for work, she came with me. Work wasn’t happy about it; she was some manager’s personal assistant, by this point, but they understood our need to be together, and somehow, we made it work.

Right up till the events of that winter.

I’d been pushed up to the British Columbia territory in Canada, to decommission some old oil mining equipment. That stuff is expensive, and it had been sitting dormant for four years, once the field was worked out, and the company that owned it, Dirani Oil, wanted to relocate it. But Dirani Oil was falling on harder times, and didn’t have any grunts or hard hats of their own to pull it apart, at least not that they could spare, so we got the gig, and off I went. And Sarah came with me.

It wasn’t fun, trying to get it apart. The crew I had were ok, not great, but they’d never dealt with equipment quite like this before, so it was slow going, and the weather turned brutal. Sarah was with me, and the eventful night was one where we were traveling to the local town, Fort Nelson, along Route 97. We’d been up at the private Fort Nelson Aerodrome, to wait for a supply visit from the company airplane, and found it had been called off due to the incoming inclement weather. While Fort Nelson does actually have it’s own airport, it was commercial only and we were business, so we’d had to use the less local one out of town, to the west. We spent some time admiring a very nice private jet that was in one of the hangers, wondering who owned it, and what it was doing there, but then with the incoming bad weather, we’d turned around and raced the weather back to the city, in our SUV.

But we were too late leaving. We got caught in the middle of it. It was chucking down snow – you couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of you, if that. And while we were in an SUV, it wasn’t a snow prepared SUV. We didn’t have chains and we didn’t have extra gas. And worse still, there was no phone reception out this far. No cell towers, no ability for us to communicate with the outside world and let them know we were stuck.

In the end, after being stuck three times and having to dig ourselves out, while the snow just got worse and thicker, it had become apparent we weren’t going to make it back to the city.

We sat in the cab and debated what to do.

“I dunno babe. I think we should head back to the airfield. At least they have heaters there. We can’t have gone too far.”

Sarah shook her head vigorously, rubbing her hands in front of the air vents. “I don’t think so. I think there won’t be anyone there now. I think they’ll have found ways to get home. We need to press on. There’ll be plows coming out from the city, not the other way. We’ll meet them coming out. Worse case, we can see if we can find somewhere to stay. There’s got to be some one living out here. I’m sure we past some homesteads on the way out... ?”

I looked over at her and thought about it, making mental calculations. Looking at the gas tank meter, I figured that even if we did go back, we wouldn’t have enough gas to get back to the city anyway.

“Ok. Lets do it. Worse case, we can huddle together and get naked and swap warmth. Among other things.”

Sarah looked back at me, trying to keep a straight face. “You planned this, didn’t you? Just so you could get me naked in a car.”

“Yeah,” I said flatly. “I made it snow, just so we could risk hypothermia. Because I’ve never seen you naked, and wouldn’t, if we didn’t get caught in a blizzard...”

Sometimes Sarah’s sense of humor could be slightly inappropriate. I loved her for it, but I’d had to explain it away a few times with friends too. But it was a small price to pay to have those incredible eyes look at me and crinkle up at the edges, while she was trying desperately not to laugh.

She leaned over and kissed me and I smiled back and got the car in gear and drove towards the end of my marriage.

We got about two or three miles down the road, and it was getting hard to keep us on the road, mainly because I wasn’t entirely sure what was road and what wasn’t any more – it was all just white powder. And the sun was starting to go down. I couldn’t see any lights in the distance and I was starting to get more worried, when Sarah suddenly stiffened and pointed off to the right and exclaimed, “There! There’s a light, way back from the road. Look, you can see there’s a trail up there ... we should go knock on their door. See if they have a phone or something.”

I looked over at where she was pointing, trying to see. The reflection of our lights and the amount of snow on the windshield, - that the wipers were doing their best to clear, - made it hard to see, but damn if she wasn’t right?

I flashed her a smiled and said, “We are saved!” not understanding that the exact opposite was about to happen.

We made it to the drive way and just about plowed our way through the snow, managing to get up to where there was a house, standing forlornly at the end. There was a shed some steps behind it and a large gas canister the side – your classic remote farmhouse set up. I could see another car there, deep under wedges of snow, and a light outside the house. We could see two lights on inside the house, so there was probably an occupant. We looked at each other, then braved the snow, getting out of the car and rushing to the door, our breath making big clouds of steam in the cold air.

We knocked, rang the doorbell, yelled “Hellllloooo...”, everything possible to ensure the occupants would hear us. And they did, more’s the pity.

The door creaked open, and we could see beyond it a fire crackling in a hearth built into the wall. A large man, at least six feet two inches tall leaned out and squinted at us, looking back and forth.

“Yes?”

“Hi, um, could we ask a favor? We got caught out here ... the snow is bucketing down and there’s no chance we will make it back to the city tonight. Is there a chance we might come in and use your phone or something? We honestly have no place to go...”

Sarah got all that out, using her beguiling eyes, and leaning in, to encourage empathy. I was about to say something similar, but if it was coming from her, so much the better ... she was cuter than I was and way more persuasive.

The man looked back at us, with an expression I couldn’t fathom. It was half way from incredulity, part panic and then went to settled confidence.

It all passed his face in a second, but I saw it, and I did wonder what that was all about.

He stepped back and then said, “Of course, come in.”

We walked in and took stock of the surroundings. They were Nice. With a capital N. From the outside, the house didn’t look like much. But inside, it smelt of money and good taste.

The kitchen area was brand new, with shiny new facilities. Large 55 inch TV on the wall, with no discernable cables – as an engineer my eye immediately told me this guy had money, since it costs money to rip out a wall, install cables to hide them, then re-hardwall it. This house certainly wasn’t built with TV Cables in the wall, that’s for sure. Way too old for that.

There was recessed lighting and a nice comfortable sectional sofa, along with a crackling - real – fire going under where the TV was installed in the wall. That was another thing that gave away the fact that money had been spent. TV’s over the top of fires is generally a bad thing, since the heat going up tends to mess with the TV itself – the cabling heats up and the mount isn’t so stable because it’s constantly expanding and contracting. It takes money to rout the heat – via fireproof ducting - from a fire away from where the TV is mounted above it. Again, only stuff you’d know if you were an engineer, or had occasion to mount a TV over a fireplace.

It smelt of money, and my face must have given it away, since the man gestured around and said, “My late wife’s influence I’m afraid. I wouldn’t know a sconce from a cushion I’m afraid.”

I felt Sarah tense in sympathy, and heard her murmur, “I’m so sorry for you loss.”

The man looked directly at Sarah with an indecipherable look and then said, slowly, “Well, it comes to us all. I’m a firm believer that when one door closes, another opens.”

I had no idea what that meant at the time, but looking back, I should have taken Sarah by the hand and gone out to the car and just done our best to reach civilization. But I wasn’t to know what would come.

“I’m sorry, where are my manners,” the big man said, spreading his hands. “I’m Sam Fellows. You are... ?”

“I’m Trevor Stevenson. This is...”

“I’m Sarah. Please to meet you Sam,” interrupted Sarah, pushing out both her hands to grasp his. I could see the beginning signs of her empathy for his loss marching across her face. Sympathetic expression, physicality in terms of a handclasp, her interrupting me to make it clear these are her feelings. It was all there. And when she did it, a shiver went down my back. I had no idea why at the time – now I can see it was a harbinger of what was to come.

Sam insisted on making us something warm to eat and drink, and we realized then how tired and hungry we were.

I asked him about using his phone and he grunted, “Don’t have a land line. This is my retreat from the world. When I’m here, my office knows I’m out of touch. I find it’s a good way to find out who is competent in the office and who is not. I have a cell, but as I’m sure you’ve discovered, there’s no cell coverage this far out.”

When we ate, I noticed that when we sat at the table, he sat next to Sarah, across from me. It didn’t really concern me that much at the time, although Sarah’s body language was one hundred percent oriented to Sam, her concern for his mental well being evident.

The conversation roved as we ate the frozen hamburgers Sam had warmed for us – he explained how his wife had died three years earlier, and how he’d taken a year off his business traveling the world to rediscover himself. Sarah hung off his every word, going into details about his feelings, how he felt now and all the rest of the touchy feely crap I could never get behind. She was doing that thing that some women do, where they try and find commonality of experience or feeling, in order to get closer to the other person, so they’ll share more. To me it was a fairly transparent tactic but Sam just sat there and lapped it up.

I never did get exactly what he did – he mentioned a brokerage firm and some other interest in another company, but he quite skillfully avoided actually giving details. I shrugged it off at the time – we’d only be there one night, so what did it matter?

He asked me cursorily what I did for a living and I gave the two-minute version. About three quarters of an hour in, I began to realize that this conversation wasn’t actually between all three of us – it was between the two of them. To give Sarah her due, she kept trying to include me, but beyond a few flicks of his eyes to gauge my situation, he wasn’t interested. At least that’s what it looked like.

An hour in, a bottle of wine came out, and I was further excluded from the conversation. It was a weird thing – how do you play that? Sam had already indicated we’d be sleeping on a pull out sofa bed in the main room, so it wasn’t like I could just say “Hey, we want to sleep now” to put an end to it. It was his house, so if he wanted to stay up and talk, it wasn’t our place to say no to it. But I was being further excluded by the moment and my patience was starting to wear thin. Sarah could see it – she kept stealing glances at me and could see my discomfort, but she couldn’t stop Sam from keeping his attention on her. And, to be brutally honest, I could see her empathetic side was engaged, so while I was being ignored, I could see she considered it an ok thing for the moment. Something to be ‘made up to me later’, obviously. As I said, she was big on the whole “Ask forgiveness, not permission” thing.

Eventually, after two hours of non-stop Sam-Sarah interaction, and at the point where me being dis-regarded was quite blatant, and even given the situation, I had to say something.

“So Sam,” I said somewhat forcefully to inject myself into the conversation and overriding what Sarah was about to say, “I have to say thank you for taking us in, given the weather out there, but I’m a little uncomfortable with the attention being paid to my wife here. It doesn’t feel quite ... appropriate, don’t you think?”

I was trying to be firm but conciliatory.

Sam turned to me, and regarded me with an inscrutable expression. Then he said, slowly and deliberately, “So, you feel me paying this amount of attention to your wife is wrong, do you?”

It was said flat, not in a taunting way, just a statement.

“Well, since you put it that way, yes,” I replied. “I understand you have been alone a long time, but I would point out that’s my wife and our marriage...”

“Trev!!!” exclaimed Sarah, embarrassed and obviously annoyed. “Sam just needs a sympathetic ear. That’s all. Don’t embarrass us!”

A small wry grin appeared on Sam’s face and he turned to Sarah and said, “Well, if he doesn’t like that, he’d not going to like this...”

I was taken aback and so was Sarah. Sam turned back to me.

“Look, I let you in. You can stay here. I didn’t have to, and I wouldn’t be much of a business man if I didn’t get something out of the deal. If you want to stay tonight, she,” he said, gesturing at Sarah, “stays with me in my room.”

“WHAT???” I exclaimed. Sarah was just stunned.

“You think you can just take my wife because we need to a place to crash? Fuck this, come on Sarah, lets get out of here...” I ranted.

I got up, and Sam said, smirking a bit, “What are you going to do, little man? You can’t even dig your car out. And if you just sat in it, you’d be trespassing. I’d be within my rights to shoot you. I’m taller than you, I’m bigger than you and I have a second degree black belt in Ju-jitsu, so don’t even think about coming at me. It wouldn’t go well for you. Besides, this,” he nodded at Sarah, “is ordained. It’s meant to be.”

“WHAT THE FUCK?” I almost screamed.

Sarah got up and came round the other side of the table and took my hand, looking into my eyes.

She glanced at Sam and said, “Sam, can we have a moment?”