Fractured Minds (Rebels of Sandland Book 3) Read online

  Fractured Minds

  Nikki J Summers

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any trademarks, product names or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners and are used for reference only.

  Copyright 2021 by Nikki J Summers

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, scanned or distribute in any printed or electronic form without the express, written consent of the author.

  A CIP record of this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover Image: Michelle Lancaster

  Cover Designer: Lori Jackson Design

  Editing: Lindsey Powell at Liji Editing

  Interior designed and formatted by: Irish Ink Publishing

  Contents

  Other books by Nikki J Summers

  Playlist

  Trigger Warnings

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Coming Soon

  Author Acknowledgements

  Rebels of Sandland Series

  Renegade Hearts

  Tortured Souls

  Stand-Alone

  Luca

  This Cruel Love

  Hurt to Love

  Joe and Ella Duet

  Obsessively Yours

  Forever Mine

  All available on Amazon Kindle Unlimited.

  Only suitable for 18+ due to adult content.

  Available to download on Spotify

  https://spoti.fi/3qM73NP

  The Sound of Silence – Simon and Garfunkel

  Don’t Wake Me – Aranda

  Boy Like Me – New Medicine

  Death By A Thousand Cuts – Taylor Swift

  Jesus of Suburbia – Green Day

  Say You Won’t Let Go – James Arthur

  Lose Somebody – Kygo, OneRepublic

  Perfectly Imperfect – Declan J Donovan

  Rampage – Gravedgr

  Photograph – Ed Sheeran

  Songbird – Eva Cassidy

  Puzzle Pieces – Framing Hanley

  Sound of Madness – Shinedown

  Dangerous Night – Thirty Seconds To Mars

  Monsters (feat. Blackbear) – All Time Low

  Waiting for the Night – Depeche Mode

  Killing in the Name – Rage Against the Machine

  Die a Little – Yungblud

  Make You Feel My Love – Adele

  Party Up - DMX

  Fractured Minds is for readers 18 years and upwards due to the graphically violent and sexually explicit scenes that happen in this book. It also deals with issues of sexual abuse towards a child that some may find difficult to read and may cause distress. There is also bad language throughout. You have been warned!

  That being said, I hope you enjoy Finn’s crazy, and at times, heart-breaking story!

  Love Nikki x

  The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

  ~ Charles Baudelaire

  Fifteen years ago

  Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…

  At school, I count the tiles on the classroom ceiling to stop myself from lashing out when I get angry. It calms me down. I don’t know why. I think one of the counsellors my mum took me to said focusing on something else when I feel it building up inside of me would help to tackle my anxiety. He suggested using nature. He said it can help to centre us, whatever that means. I’m six years old, but he had no idea how to talk to me. He droned on about the brain and how it works, showed me a video on something called mindfulness, and then made me sit in his window and watch the pigeons in a bird bath in his office gardens for the rest of the session. It was the most pointless afternoon of my life.

  Sixty-four.

  That’s how many tiles there are in my classroom, but I still count them most days, regardless.

  However, in our bedroom at home, we don’t have tiles. I wouldn’t see them in the dark anyway when I really needed to count. So instead, when I need to, I focus on the wallpaper next to my bed. It’s torn and peeling off in places. Not because of anything I did. Well, not really. The damp makes it come off and then we can’t help ourselves, we have to peel the rest and give it a helping hand. “We” being my sister, Alice, and me. We share a bedroom. Most days, I wish we didn’t, but then most days I pray we lived far away from here, from anywhere that adults could hurt us.

  If I had one wish, it would be to have a magic key to our bedroom, one that could only be used by us, so no one else could get in. The kids at school are mean sometimes, but adults are far worse. They pretended to be good in front of others, but they can’t be trusted. They hide their evil behind sweet smiles and gentle touches; touches that hurt when no one else is watching.

  He told me he’d cut my tongue out if I ever told anyone about him coming into our room. He said Mum and Dad would be mad at me for telling, that Alice would be taken away and that I’d end up in prison and everyone would blame me. So, I keep quiet. I don’t tell anyone about what happens when the lights go out and the rest of the world falls asleep.

  Neither does Alice.

  When I hear the click of the bedroom door handle, my stomach rolls over. I stay facing the wall, trying to ignore the rocks in my tummy, and I remind myself to keep counting. If I count hard enough, sometimes I fall asleep too, and then I don’t hear Alice’s quiet cries or his grunting. I hate that sound. Last night, I counted one hundred and eighty-nine daisies before he left. I hope it’s not more than that tonight.

  My sister always whimpers as the bed squeaks from his weight on it, and I squeeze my eyes shut as tightly as I can, pretending to be asleep. If I can’t count, I draw pictures in my head of what I’d like to do to him when I’m older.

  I’m the lucky one.

  He never comes to my bed.

  It’s only Alice he wants.

  One day, when I’m a grown up, I’m going to get my sister as far away from here as I can. We’ll live in a treehouse or on the beach somewhere, and I’ll make sure she has her own room with a massive bolt on the door. No one else will be allowed in unless she lets them. I’ll make sure she’s always safe.

  But for now, we lock ourselves up tightly in our own heads. We keep the pain to ourselves.

  We don’t talk to anyone.

  What’s the point?

  No one can help us.

  No one really cares.

  Present Day

  I wake up to the sounds of machines beeping all around me, making my banging head pulsate harder and agitating me to the brink of insanity. It took a few seconds for my foggy brain to kick into gear, and when it did, I realised I was in the hospital. It wasn’t just the sounds though, the clinical smell gave it away too. The scent of bleach, illness,
and death made my stomach turn. It was the whole package; like a cocktail of catastrophe, the omen of my downfall.

  Why did I have to wake up here?

  Why did I have to wake up at all?

  Lying still, my body felt like a dead weight, as if I’d been strapped to the bed like one of those mental patients in a horror movie. I couldn’t move. I could barely wriggle my arms, and my legs were fucking useless. As my brain-fog started to clear, I prayed to God no one else would see me here. I looked like a fucking loser. Really felt like one too.

  I tried to lift my arm up, but even the slightest movement made me wince in pain. Breathing wasn’t easy either and I grimaced, trying to remember exactly what’d happened after I got that call. The drugs they’d given me in here really weren’t helping my memory. I was numb but drowsy, and I needed to be alert.

  The last thing I remembered was going bat-shit crazy with the kind of fury that’d make my best friend, Brandon, proud, but probably shit his pants at the same time. I didn’t regret it and I’d do it again if only I could get my limbs to comply with my brain and bloody move.

  There were exactly four people, other than me, who knew the truth about what’d happened all those years ago. The truth that’d landed me in this hospital bed. My sister Alice, Brandon, our local copper Tom Riley, and him. I’d never meant for Tom to find out like he did, but he was good to me. I guess the reason he turned a blind-eye to a lot of the shit we all pulled around Sandland was because of what he’d found out one night, while coming across me and Brandon arguing in an alleyway. I’d done everything in my power to keep my family secrets hidden, but sometimes shit just happened, no matter how careful you were. I was lucky Tom agreed to keep my secrets for me. It could’ve easily gone the other way, and I knew Alice wasn’t strong enough to face a court case.

  When I got the call from Tom, giving me the heads-up that he was out of jail, I knew there was only one thing I could do. I had to hunt him down.

  Me.

  No one else.

  I couldn’t involve anyone else in my plans. Brandon and his girlfriend, Harper, were having the babies. I couldn’t drag him into this. Ryan and Emily had been through enough with her dad and the trial. And Zak? He was a mate, but I didn’t feel close enough to him to share something like this. I knew he’d have my back, they all would, but this was my war. My battle. I needed to fight it alone.

  I didn’t feel like a winner right now though. But what war had ever been fought and won in one night? I had a lifetime of regret, of feeling helpless and vengeful. The enemy I was fighting would take a lot longer to conquer. He needed to take more hits before his crushing defeat. But I’d do it. I owed it to Alice.

  It didn’t take long for the Sandland grapevine to go into overdrive. When a notorious armed robber gets out of jail and takes himself off to the local boozer to brag about his time inside, it spreads around the town like wildfire. I knew exactly where to find him, and I didn’t think twice about going down there. He’d had enough freedom in my book, being out the few hours that he had. Now, it was time for him to face his past. A past that would never forget what he’d done.

  No one was truly happy that he’d been let out early on good behaviour. The honest, hard-working people of Sandland wouldn’t give him the time of day. But then again, he always did surround himself with fake friends and no-marks who thought his fuck-the-world attitude was cool; something to replicate. If they knew the real man, like we did, they’d have never let him see the light of day again. Even criminals had a code of ethics, and he just shat all over it. He had no morals. The man was devoid of any humanity.

  I wanted to be the one to serve him a one-way ticket to hell. I wasn’t that impotent, useless little kid anymore. The fire of anger that balled into thirsty flames inside of me spurred me on, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to stop it.

  I watched him from the window outside the pub, laughing as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Downing pint after pint like he was a soldier returning from war, finally getting to enjoy the home comforts that’d cruelly been taken away from him. People walked past his table and patted him on the back, like he’d done something they were proud of. It made me want to raise the baseball bat I’d brought with me up into the air, smash it against the fucking windows of the bar, and shout from the bloody rooftops how deaf, dumb, and blind some of the people of this town were to his evil. He didn’t deserve recognition for anything. He was a dead man walking.

  An hour later, he got up, choosing to walk outside and down a side alley to take a piss. He couldn’t even use the men’s room like the rest of us. But then, he wasn’t like the rest of us, was he? He had no soul.

  He unzipped his trousers, and as he started to relieve himself against the wall, I crept up behind him and swung the bat, ready to take him out with an almighty blow. Only, my silent nature wasn’t quiet enough. I guess being in prison for so long teaches you to hone certain skills; one of them being staying alert to any ambush. I thought I’d been stealthy in my approach, but he flew around as soon as I swung my bat, and when it bounced off the wall next to his head, he barrelled into me and knocked me to the floor.

  We rolled around together and he struck a few lucky punches. I got some decent hits in myself, and it felt good to know that my fist connecting with his body made him grunt in pain. But it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t strong enough, and before too long, he was overpowering me.

  Eventually, he sat up, straddling my waist and brushing the greasy hair out of his eyes. When he finally saw who was lying underneath him, he cackled with a sinister laugh that made my skin crawl and my blood boil.

  “I was wondering when you’d show your face, boy.” He leaned over me, and the stench of stale alcohol and bad breath from his questionable hygiene made me screw my nose up in disgust. Hate wasn’t a strong enough word to describe how I felt about this man. “Think you can go against me, do ya? Think you’ve got what it takes to take me on? Bigger men than you have tried and failed. You need to remember your place, lad.” He spat onto the floor right next to my head then growled. “And it’s in the fucking gutter, along with your whore of a sister.”

  When they tell you anger can spread over you like a red mist, they’re not wrong. Hearing him talk about Alice that way made every ounce of fury I’d kept locked up all these years break free with a force I couldn’t contain, and I grunted, throwing him off me, and sending him sprawling backwards onto the floor.

  He was a smart fighter though, and he twisted himself to avoid my foot connecting with his head as I tried to kick him. Moving with speed and agility, he grabbed the baseball bat that I’d dropped and jumped to his feet. Then he swung with more precision than I’d used and smacked me right around the head. The thud from the whack to my skull made me falter and a sickness washed over me. I grabbed the wall to try and gain some balance, but he was merciless, and he hit me again, pounding the bat off the back of my head. I don’t remember anything after that.

  The darkness consumed me.

  It always did whenever Uncle Tony was around.

  I heard shuffling in the room and I opened my eyes to see an older nurse fiddling about with a drip at the side of my bed.

  “Wakey, wakey, handsome. You’ve had quite a knock to your head, haven’t you? They did a right number on you, love.”

  She reached over to touch my arm and I pulled away as sharply as my broken body would let me. I didn’t want anyone near me.

  “Calm down. I’m only checking your line. You’re a timid one, aren’t ya? Mind you, I’m not surprised after the state they found you in.” Her eyes were kind, but she reminded me of the teachers at school; full of pretence and appearing empathetic, when in reality, they were anything but. That was my experience, anyway.

  She fussed around me then went to check the chart at the bottom of the bed.

  “You’ve got a few cracked ribs and a lot of bruising. You need to stay in for observation too, that was a nasty blow you took to the back of your
head. Don’t worry though, I can still see how handsome you are under all that swelling.”

  She didn’t look up as she flipped through the pages on her chart. Obviously, she thought her shallow flattery was enough to make me feel better. All I could think was, how long would I be stuck in here? I needed to get out. Knowing he was out there, that he could do anything while I was trapped in here, unnerved me more than any of my injuries.

  “I’m Nurse Young by the way, but you can call me Constance.” She beamed back at me. “So, what was it? Mugging? Fight over a girl?”

  I tried to speak, but my mouth was as dry as a camel’s arse and I coughed, making Constance jump into action and grab a cup of water with a straw.

  “No need to tell me now. Plenty of time for that. I called your parents hours ago, but they still haven’t come.”

  Nothing unusual there.

  “As soon as they arrive, I’ll show them in. The police are outside though, eager buggers, but I’ll send them packing. They can wait for their statement. No one upsets my patients.”

  She winked and then sauntered towards the door. When she opened it, I could hear Ryan giving a piece of his mind to someone in the corridor outside. I bet Alice messaged him and told him I was here. She barely left the house, and after hearing about our uncle’s release, she was even more petrified.