Chapter 1: Blood on the Heather
The wind didn’t howl. It screamed. It ripped across the moor from the Minch, carrying salt and needle-sharp rain that hit Callum MacLeod’s face like thrown gravel. He pushed into it, head down, his oilskin coat plastered to his broad frame. The flock should have been in the high pen by now, but the storm had come early, a dirty, bruise-colored thing swallowing the afternoon light.
He found the old man halfway to the boundary fence, a dark, crumpled shape against the gleaming wet peat.
Callum stopped. The wind roared in his ears. He took ten more steps, his boots sucking at the sodden ground.
His father lay twisted in a strand of barbed wire, one arm wrenched behind him at an impossible angle. His eyes were open, a pale, clouded blue staring at the low, racing sky. A dark bloom, almost black against the grey wool of his jacket, spread from his chest. Not blood from the wire. Something else. His mouth was a tight line, even in death, as if he’d been biting back a curse.
Callum stood over him. The rain streamed down his own beard, dripped from his nose. He felt nothing. Not relief. Not grief. Just a vast, hollow silence, like the wind had scooped him out. He looked from his father’s face to the broken fence post, to the scattering of fresh hoof prints churning the mud beyond the break. The ponies. The old bastard must have been trying to mend it in the storm, the ponies had spooked, caught him a kick in the chest. Sent him flying into his own damned wire.
Simple. Almost poetic.
He should close the eyes. He didn’t move. He stood there, water pooling in the folds of his oilskin, and let the rain pummel his father’s dead face. A lifetime of silence, of swallowed words and clenched fists, ending here, in the mud. The weight of it pressed on his shoulders, heavier than any sodden fleece he’d ever carried.
“Christ,” he finally muttered, the word torn away by the gale.
He bent, the muscles in his back protesting. The barbed wire was old, rusty. It had bitten deep into the wool and the flesh beneath. Callum took out his folding knife, the blade nicked from a thousand other tasks. He didn’t look at his father’s face as he sawed at the wire. The metallic scritch-scratch was lost in the storm. When the strand gave, the body slumped further into the muck.
He dragged him. Not gently. There was no tenderness in the grip under the arms, the heels carving twin troughs in the peat. He hauled him into the lee of the low stone wall of the sheepfold, a hundred yards away. The ancient, sagging structure offered meager shelter, its thatched roof groaning under the assault. He propped the body against the moss-grown stones, out of the worst of the rain. He still didn’t close the eyes.
He had to find the flock. That was the work. The work was all there was.
He spent two hours in the screaming grey, his throat raw from shouting half-remembered Gaelic commands the sheep ignored. He drove them in, shivering, bleating masses, into the relative calm of the stone fold. The tally was short. He’d look tomorrow. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
Back at the sheepfold, his father was still there, a stark reminder. Callum lit the old Tilley lamp hanging from a beam. Its hissing white light pushed back the shadows, flickering over the slumped corpse and the ranked, nervous sheep. The air was thick with the smell of wet wool, lanolin, peat smoke, and a new, coppery tang.
He needed a drink. He kept a bottle of cheap whisky tucked behind a loose stone, for the coldest nights. He pulled it out now, uncorked it with his teeth, and took a long, burning pull. The heat hit his gut and did nothing to fill the hollow.
He sat on an upturned crate, the lamp between him and his father. The storm battered the walls. He took another drink. The silence between them now was total. No more criticism. No more cold, seething disapproval. No more stories that ended with a backhand for asking the wrong question.
Another swallow. The whisky began to blur the edges. His gaze fell on his father’s hands. Big, knuckly, brutish things, crusted with dirt and old blood. Hands that could break a fence post or a child’s spirit with equal ease. Callum looked at his own hands, resting on his knees. The same size, same shape, scarred and calloused from the same work. The sight of them, the legacy of them, filled him with a sudden, sick heat that had nothing to do with the whisky.
The memory came unbidden, sharp as the barbed wire. He was fifteen. Finlay, just eleven, weeping silently after a beating for some minor mistake. Their father had grunted, “Make a man of him, or I’ll do it worse.” Callum, trembling with a fury he dared not show, had taken Finlay to the barn. He hadn’t hit him. He’d done something else, something confused and desperate, fumbling in the hay, a rough, silent collision of bodies that was more about shared anger and shame than anything like pleasure. A secret pact of violence turned inward. They never spoke of it. It just became another layer of the silence.
Now, staring at his father’s hands, a brutal, misplaced wave of arousal surged through Callum’s groin. It was nausea and need twisted together. It was power. It was disgust. The hollow inside him yawned wider, demanding to be filled with feeling, any feeling, even one this corrupted.
He stood up, the crate scraping over stone. He walked to the body. He looked down at the dead face, the open eyes.
“You’re fucking quiet now,” Callum said, his voice a low rasp.
He kicked his father’s boot. Nothing. He kicked it again, harder. A jolt went through him, a spark in the numbness. He knelt, his knee sinking into the cold mud beside the hip. He grabbed the front of his father’s jacket, the wool rough and wet, and shook him. The head lolled.
“Get up,” Callum snarled. “Get up and say it. Say I’m weak. Say I’m soft. Go on.”
The only answer was the rain on the thatch. The fury boiled over, hot and desperate. He fumbled with his own belt buckle, his fingers thick and clumsy. He shoved his father’s body onto its side, facing the wall, and yanked the trousers down over the dead, pallid thighs. It was an ugly, brutal act. He spat into his own hand, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He pushed himself against the cold, unyielding flesh, his mind a riot of shame and a crushing need to dominate the source of all his pain.
He fucked the corpse with short, savage thrusts, his teeth bared, tears of rage or grief mixing with the rain on his face. The sheep shuffled nervously. The lamp hissed. His climax was a convulsive, wrenching thing that left him empty and shaking, forehead pressed against the cold stone wall, the taste of blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten his lip.
He pushed himself away, quickly fastening his trousers. He couldn’t look at what he’d done. He righted the body, pulled the clothing back into place with mechanical efficiency. The eyes still stared. He finally reached down and closed them with trembling fingers. The lids were cold as slate.
He took the last swig from the whisky bottle and threw it against the far wall. It shattered, the final drops falling onto the straw.
The work. Just do the work.
He spent an hour checking the sheep by lamplight, his movements stiff, his mind a blank. He was mending a gap in the inner hurdle when he heard the shout from outside.
“Callum!”
Finlay. Of course.
His younger brother appeared in the doorway, soaked through, his face pale. “Jesus, Callum. The ponies came back to the yard alone. I’ve been looking everywhere. Is he—?” Finlay’s eyes found the shape by the wall. He stopped short, his sentence dying.
Callum straightened up, wiping his hands on his trousers. He met his brother’s wide, shocked eyes. The momentum of the night, the storm, the hollow silence, all of it focused into this single moment.
“Aye,” Callum said, his voice flat, dead. “He’s gone.”
Finlay didn’t move. He just stared at the body, then back at Callum. The questions were already there, forming in the air between them—about the wound, the wire, the storm. But underneath them was a deeper, more terrified question: What happens now?
Callum looked from his brother’s lost face to their father’s final, silent sneer. The wind screamed around the sheepfold, but inside, the quiet was worse. It was a quiet they would have to fill themselves.
“Help me get him home,” Callum said, and the words sounded like a sentence.
Finlay didn’t move for a long moment. His eyes, wide and washed-out grey in the lamplight, darted from the corpse to Callum’s stony face.“What happened?”
“Pony kicked him. Into the wire.” Callum’s voice was stripped bare.“Storm spooked them. Help me lift him.”
The walk back to the croft was a silent, brutal slog. They carried him slung between them, his arms over their shoulders, his boots dragging twin graves in the sodden earth. The wind shoved against them, a physical enemy. Finlay stumbled, his breath hitching in a way that wasn’t just from the weight. Callum adjusted his grip, his hand closing over his father’s cold, dead wrist, and a fresh wave of nausea, hot and acidic, rose in his throat.
Inside the sparse, cold kitchen, they laid him on the scrubbed pine table. His mother’s table.The one where they’d eaten under a cloud of threat for twenty years.
“We need to wash him,” Finlay whispered, staring at the mud cracking on their father’s trousers.
“No.” The word came out too sharp.Callum saw Finlay flinch. He forced his tone lower.“The soil’s too frozen.We need to get him in the ground.Tonight. Before the whole glen comes calling.”
“Tonight? In this?” Finlay gestured wildly towards the black window, the rain lashing against it. “We can’t have a proper—”
“There won’t be a proper.” Callum turned on the tap, filled a kettle, his movements precise.“We dig the hole.We put him in it. That’s it.”
He made tea. The silence was a third presence, thicker than the peat smoke clinging to the rafters. Finlay sat at the table, right where their father’s head lay, and wouldn’t look down.
“You’re covered in mud,” Finlay said quietly, not looking at him.Callum looked at his hands.They were trembling.He curled them into fists. “So are you.”
“Not like that.” Finlay’s eyes finally lifted, tracing the strange, dark stains on Callum’s knees, the frayed tear in his trousers. “What did you do out there, Cal?”
The question hung there, accusation and fear twisted together. Callum felt the truth, vile and unspeakable, clawing at the back of his tongue. He saw the flicker in Finlay’s eyes—not understanding, but a deeper, older knowledge, a memory of hay and hurt and shared shame.He turned away, busied himself with the cups.
“I dug the fucking ponies out of a bog. That’s what I did.” The lie was ash in his mouth.“Get the shovels. And the tarp from the barn.”
They dug.
The chosen spot was on the north side of the family plot, under a gnarled rowan that creaked in the gale. The earth was a bastard—half-frozen clay, thick with roots and sharp stones. Each impact of the spade jolted up Callum’s arms. He worked with a furious, silent rhythm, stripping off his coat as the sweat cooled instantly on his skin.Finlay worked slower, his breaths puffing white. “Should say something,” he grunted, levering a rock loose.
“Say it then.”
Finlay was quiet for a few more strokes. “He was a hard man.”
“Aye.”
“He taught us… he taught us to work.”
“He taught us to take a beating.” Callum slammed his shovel down, the blade biting deep.“And to give one. That’s all.”
The hole grew, a dark mouth in the weak beam of their torches. The rain turned the sides slick, collapsing in small slides of mud. It felt less like a grave and more like they were digging a pit for a dangerous animal.When it was deep enough, Callum climbed out, his muscles screaming. They fetched the body, wrapped in the blue plastic tarp, a shapeless bundle.
Lowering him in was the worst part.The awkward weight, the finality of the soft thud at the bottom. Callum stood at the edge, looking down at the plastic-shrouded shape. The hollow feeling was gone, replaced by a solid, leaden coldness in his gut. He thought of the secret poetry book under his floorboard, the Gaelic words for love and sky and light that never felt right on his tongue.He had no words for this.Finlay picked up his shovel. He hesitated.“A prayer?”
Callum picked up his own shovel. “Fuck your prayer.”
They buried him.
The first shovelfuls of dirt hitting the plastic were a soft, rotten sound.Then it became thicker, a drumming of earth on earth. They worked fast, not speaking, the labor a welcome numbness.Fill the hole.Erase the man. The mound they created was raw and ugly, a fresh scar on the land.
When it was done, they leaned on their shovels, gasping.The storm was finally dying, the rain softening to a drizzle. The world was quiet, save for the drip of water from the rowan branches.
Finlay wiped his face with a muddy sleeve.He looked young, and lost. “What do we tell people?”
“The truth.Pony kick.Storm. Buried him quick.” Callum’s voice was rough.“They’ll think it was grief. Or they’ll know it wasn’t.Doesn’t matter.”
They gathered the tools. Callum’s gaze was drawn back to the mound.A life, reduced to that. A tyranny, ended by a hoof and a length of wire. And his own final, secret act of defilement, a stain that would never wash off, now buried under six feet of cold Scottish soil.
He turned towards the dim light of the house.“Come on. There’s whisky inside.”
Finlay didn’t move right away.He stared at the grave, his expression unreadable. Then he nodded, once, and followed his brother through the lingering dark.
Then he nodded, once, and followed his brother through the lingering dark.
The kitchen was colder than the grave. The empty table where their father had lain was a conspicuous void. Callum went straight to the cupboard above the sink, pulled down a full bottle of Islay malt—the good stuff their father saved for intimidating visitors—and two cloudy tumblers. He slammed them on the table, poured three fingers into each, the amber liquid catching the weak light from the single bulb.
He pushed one glass toward Finlay, who was hovering by the door, shivering. Finlay approached slowly, peeled off his soaked jacket, and sank into a chair. He didn’t touch the drink. He stared at his brother’s hands, now clean of mud but looking raw, almost bruised.
Callum knocked his whisky back in one burning gulp. He refilled it immediately, the glug of the bottle loud in the quiet. He felt Finlay’s eyes on him, on the strange, frantic energy animating his shoulders.
“You’re bleeding,” Finlay said softly.
Callum looked down. A thin trickle of blood was working its way from his split lip, down his chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand, smearing red across his knuckles. “Wire,” he grunted.
“Right.” Finlay didn’t sound convinced. He finally picked up his glass and took a small sip. He coughed. “Fuck, that’s strong.”
“It’s supposed to be.” Callum drank again, slower this time, feeling the heat pool in his belly, doing nothing to thaw the ice in his chest. The silence stretched, thick with everything unsaid. The storm outside was a distant murmur now, just the drip-drip from the gutter. The lamp hissed. The memory of what he’d done in the sheepfold pressed against the back of his eyes, a film he couldn’t switch off. The cold, resistant flesh. His own animal grunts. The utter, devastating silence after.
He looked at Finlay—really looked at him. His little brother. Still slim where Callum was broad, his face all sharp angles and anxious eyes, pale from the indoor work at the garage in the village. A lifetime of flinching. A lifetime of Callum failing to stand in the way.
“You okay?” The question felt stupid, hollow, falling from his lips.
Finlay barked a laugh, a short, jagged sound. “Are you?” His eyes were bright, too bright. “You’re… vibrating, Cal. You look like you’re going to smash through the wall.”
Maybe he was. The energy was curdling inside him, the whisky turning it molten. He needed an outlet. A violence. A feeling that wasn’t this crushing emptiness or this sickening shame. His gaze traveled over Finlay’s throat, the jump of his Adam’s apple, the damp collar of his shirt.
“I can’t sit here,” Callum muttered, standing up so fast his chair legs screeched on the stone floor.
“Where else is there to go?” Finlay’s voice had a edge of panic.
Callum didn’t answer. He paced the length of the small room, a caged beast. The ghost of their father was in every shadow, in the very grain of the table. The ghost of his own depravity was closer, sitting right here in his skin. He stopped behind Finlay’s chair. He could see the delicate vertebrae of his brother’s neck, the fine, fair hairs there. A protectiveness, vicious and twisted, surged in him. He had to mark this. To claim something. To prove he was not that cold thing in the ground, even as he knew part of him was.
His hand moved without his full consent. He placed it on Finlay’s shoulder. Finlay went very still.
“Cal?”
Callum’s fingers tightened. He felt the muscle, the bone beneath. He leaned down, his voice a hot, whisky-laden whisper against Finlay’s ear. “You know what he’d say right now? He’d say we’re weak. Sniveling. That we should be out checking the flock, not sitting here feeling sorry for ourselves.”
Finlay tensed. “He’s dead. He’s not saying anything.”
“Isn’t he?” Callum’s other hand came up, gripping Finlay’s other shoulder, holding him in the chair. He was stronger, much stronger. It had always been the way. “He’s in my fucking head, Fin. In yours too. You’re shaking.”
Finlay was. A fine tremor ran through him. It wasn’t from cold. Callum knew that tremor. It was the old fear, the old, sick excitement. The secret language of their damaged history. Callum’s breath hitched. The need was a physical ache, a clawing desperation to connect, to corrupt, to feel anything but alone with what he’d done.
He turned the chair, wrenching it around so Finlay faced him. Finlay’s expression was wide-eyed, fearful, but beneath the fear was a dreadful understanding. This was their pattern. Pain transformed into something else. Callum didn’t ask. He just grabbed a fistful of Finlay’s shirt and hauled him up, hauling him up onto the table.
“Callum, stop—what are you—”
Callum pinned him there with his body, his forearm across Finlay’s chest. He could smell the peat smoke on him, the rain, the sharp tang of his own fear. Callum’s face was inches away.
“You want to feel something?” Callum growled, the words slurred with drink and desire. “Or do you want to just sit in the quiet and listen to him in your head all night?”
Finlay stared up at him. His chest rose and fell rapidly. A tear escaped, tracking through the dirt on his cheek. He didn’t say no. He never said no. That was the worst part. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
It was all the permission Callum needed, or chose to take.
He crushed his mouth against Finlay’s. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision, a transfer of rage. He bit at Finlay’s lip, tasted blood—his or Finlay’s, he didn’t know. His hands were everywhere, rough, yanking at clothing. He tore at his belt buckle, then his own. The cold air hit his skin. He spun Finlay around, face first against the table. He didn’t prepare, didn’t care. He spat into his palm, a crude, animal gesture, and rubbed it over himself.