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Book Title: Handled: A dark gay romance
Author: Romilly King
Publisher: Self-Published
Release Date: October 29, 2020
Genre: Dark M/M Romance
Themes: justice, retribution, and unsuitable love
Heat Rating: 4 flames
Length: 175 pages
Trigger warning: violence, mentions of suicide, and torture.
It's also a happy for now not a happy ever after
as there are two further books in the series.
Buy Links - Available on Kindle Unlimited
Serial killers think if it all goes south and they finally get caught that their swan song is a day in court, making the families relive the agony while they get off on that delicious pain, all over again.
Not happening. Not anymore. We’re not making celebrities out of monsters. We’re not giving them a stage to strut on.
Now they get an audience of two.
One to Handle the problem, one to Witness it.
I’m a Witness. I trained for six years to do my duty, to manage my contracted killer, and to watch justice be done.
I knew it would be hard, the first time, to watch the eye for an eye moment.
I expected to feel a lot of things – fear, disgust, guilt.
I didn’t expect to feel turned on.
And I didn’t expect my contracted killer to look quite so pretty with blood on his hands.
HANDLED is a dark gay romance with themes of justice, retribution, and unsuitable love. It is not for the faint of heart and contains graphic scenes intended for an adult audience.
Excerpt
Chapter One
Gray
I wake no less irritated than when I went to sleep. Frustration and arousal are rolling at a low level simmer in my brain and my body. I should have sought a release but I couldn’t make my mind up if I needed to hurt, or be hurt.
Normally I know exactly what I want.
Watching the kill turned me on, it always does, there was pain involved, and although I was fifteen feet away I could feel it, smell it, almost taste it as the wire of the garotte carved through the dirty skin of the neck.
It was the laziness of the killer that confused my arousal though. He was sloppy, his victim was random, there was no finesse anywhere, no evolution in technique, no learning or adapting.
The pain on the victims face had caused a jerk in my limbic system, my cock going half hard, my blood sluggishly stirring, but the lacklustre carry through from the killer snuffed my rising hormones.
I know I will be a lot harder when I kill him.
The pleasure will last a lot longer.
The best I can say about last night’s kill was that it was quick. Which was a blessing for the victim.
It was the second time I had seen this killer perform, and the previous operation had been no more inspiring than this one.
I roll out of bed, I have time for a shower before watching the congressional committee do their annual rehashing of old issues before failing to find a way out of their ethical conundrum.
It is essential viewing, it gives me insight into which way the wind is blowing on Capitol Hill with regard to my employment and more than that, my existence.
Chances are the wind will still be gusting in my direction. The public remains fascinated and frequently aroused by people like me, but reluctant to face the unpalatable truth that the human genome throws us up for a reason, and that reason is survival.
Apart from that it's always amusing to watch the Director deliver this year's version of his you can’t handle the truth monologue.
Under the warm water of the shower I feel again the urge to give into the sexual side of my issues but it’s not worth it. It won’t assuage the itch, and I still can’t decide, hurt me or hurt someone else.
Sometimes, when the disconnect is bad, I look down at my body and I am surprised, because it isn’t what I expect to see. I see smooth lean muscle and length when what I expect to see is skinny and short and dirty, with old blood on the backs of my legs, grime ground into too pale skin, and my ribs like a toast rack.
The curling arousal makes it worse. I need to kill or this vision of me becomes the more prevalent one, and that isn’t helpful, it takes the confidence away.
I don’t have bad memories per se, I just had my evolution forced, and so the real me, the me now, it sometimes regresses, and if I look in the mirror I see both of us, one standing inside the other. The grown Handler and the tortured child.
Once I get my new Witness and handle this killer it will be so much clearer, and then I can take my release with clarity and passion.
Rubbing my hair dry I walk naked into the bedroom and flick on the tv. The committee is coming to order, the Director adjusting his microphone smoothly on the desk in front of him - I honestly don’t know how he has the patience for this, but then we have different mentalities. His various assistants
are congregated behind him looking like a row of funeral directors, which is essentially what they are - all dark shiny graduates of the Witness program.
It would be nice if one of them was assigned to me, preferably one that I won’t want to kill within the first half hour, and then we can get the show back on the road and I can finally let the curling, aching need in me find its path to completion.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW PROMPTS
Author name: Romilly King
Fair warning
here, the answers to some of these questions are not fun, and I could make up
something playful or something quirky (am a writer, lie for a living) but I
have this rotten habit of being truthful and so the answers may be less
entertaining than you would hope!
Sorry if this
ends up more angsty than one would expect.
Honestly, I’m
not barking mad or breast beating in public, it’s just if you live long enough
questions like these can trigger deep responses.
The film you can watch time and time
again…
This is
ridiculous, but the answer is immediate, it’s Bull Durham, which is a 1988
comedy (it is so much more than that!) about baseball starring Kevin Costner
and Susan Sarandon. It has more great
nailing life lines than any other movie I know. I just love the way it is
written. I know nothing about baseball –
I’m Welsh, we play rugby – but this film speaks to small town teams and good
men who known what they believe in, and poetry, and metaphysics in real
life. I just love it. I think it’s funny and touching and when
Costner turns to the camera and delivers a speech about what he believes in,
and ends with the line “and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses
that last three days.” At that point I
would deal with the devil for one shot at Costner!
The unlikely interest that engages
your curiosity…
I have a
grasshopper brain; it hops through subjects like a bug through the summer
grass. So much to learn, so little time
to learn it. Endless curiosity is a
major character trait. Probably the most
unlikely thing I am interested in is the evolution of judicial systems – I’ve
lived on three continents, I have had to understand and work within the legal
systems in many countries. It is fascinating to examine the differences and the
similarities and to try and understand how they happened. I can be very boring about the Hague
convention and how it tries to harmonize legal issues internationally.
On a prettier
topic I am fascinated by islands. I’ve
lived on a few, I’ve visited many more, and how islands are different from
continental masses, ecologically, socially, practically, that fascinates me.
The poem that touches your soul…
Here we’re
going to get sad. A long time ago, when
I lived another life, I attended a course on PTSD that was delivered by a
psychologist who had treated the survivors of the Herald of Free Enterprise
disaster. At the end of the course she read out a couple of verses from a poem,
by Hilaire Belloc. He had written it ten
years after the death of his beloved wife, and she felt it was a telling
portrayal of PTSD and grief and how we try and hide it and live through
it.
At the time
the poem moved me and I remembered it.
It's ten
years ago to-day you turned me out o' doors
To cut my
feet on flinty lands and stumble down the shores,
And I thought
about the all-in-all, oh more than I can tell!
But I caught
a horse to ride upon and I rode him very well,
He had flame
behind the eyes of him and wings upon his side.
And I ride,
and I ride!
For you that
took the all-in-all the things you left were three.
A loud voice
for singing and keen eyes to see,
And a
spouting well of joy within that never yet was dried!
And I ride.
It is over a
decade now since my own husband died and the poem still resonates because it is
me, still riding, still trying, still thinking I am lucky, still thinking the
world is amazing, still not as whole as I once was.
The event that altered the course of
your life…
When I was
rather young my Grandmother passed away and she left me a small legacy, nothing
massive, but it turned out to be life changing for me. My parents wanted me to buy a car, or save it
for a rainy day. I spent it on a
computer. They were horrified! The internet had only just arrived in our
distant corner of the world and nobody knew what it was going to do. But I saw all the libraries of the world
opening to me, and I wanted in. That choice
altered my life within twenty-four hours, and it alters still today.
Sometimes you
don’t do the wise thing, sometimes you do the thing you believe in.
The song that means the most to you…
Nobody has a
single song, hell most people can’t cut it down to the top ten!
I have to say
it’s Big Love by Lindsey Buckingham, for no reason other than it was my
husband’s favorite. He was all about the
music, I am all about the lyrics. And
this track, it’s all about the guitar – When I listen to it I smile because I
can still see him, playing air guitar along with it.
Got to have a
link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1pzOxVtofc
This isn’t
the usual version I listen to, I found it when I was writing this, and I played
it here, in the office that was my husband’s office. This was recorded after my husband died – who
knew Lindsey would last longer than him! I know he would have loved it, played
live like this. Buckingham is just so fucking effortless, his voice has aged, but
his hands haven’t.
I can almost
feel my man behind me, leaning against the chair while it plays. If I turn and
look he might be there, eyes closed, lost in the riff, face puckered with
concentration, part of the music. I’m
not going to turn around, it would be crap to be wrong.
The pet hate that makes your hackles
rise…
Noisy eaters,
no, just no, no excuse, no reprieve, just die, now.
The philosophy that underpins your
life…
Be kind, don’t
be a dick, if you make your bed you lay on it.
These apply only to me; I don’t expect them from other people.
The character you enjoyed writing the
most…
It’s got to
be Gray, from my latest book. He’s a
psychopath and his mind is just so alien and his motives and reactions are so
detached from the mainstream and yet, despite this, he isn’t bad, he’s just different,
and I find that fascinating.
I loved him
so much I turned his story into a trilogy and so I get to wander around his
mind for a few more months.
And the promo…
The
blurb for Handled makes it pretty clear that this is a dark and unusual romance. It explores the relationship that develops
between a psychopath, Gray, who legally executes serial killers for the
government, and his younger Witness, Nathan, who is there to see justice being
done.
I
have to say I was nervous before I released this book. It’s not written to
market (a cardinal sin in the self-publishers handbook), it’s dark and it’s
complicated from a psychological point of view, and from the reviews so far it
is genre busting and I knew it was going to be.
If
it had sunk like a stone I wouldn’t have been surprised, but it hasn’t, it’s
doing well and I am hugely grateful that readers have been willing to take it
on and the reviews so far have been hugely motivating for me. People get it! And you can’t ask for anything more than that
as a writer.
I
also think this is the best book I have written, and I think it shows that love
and romance don’t have to be shoehorned into a genre mold and readers enjoy
something different and they want to be intrigued along with all the good feels
and high heat.
I’m
now really glad that I allowed myself three books to explore the relationship
between these characters; it’s going to quite the story.
Thank you.
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