Page 1 of Deliah
Chapter 1 –
Built for Carnage
The heat clung to me like sweat and sin. I leaned over the crumbling balcony railing of our half-broken apartment in Spain, dragging on a fag and wondering, not for the first time, how the fuck I got here.
I was twenty and completely over it. Not in a poetic, tortured-artist kind of way. Just… done. Done with the guys. The jobs. The same old Friday nights in the same old pubs, surrounded by people I’d known since I was ten, pretending we were all content living out the same recycled weekends on a loop.
I’d grown up in a decent home, and we were comfortable. Middle-upper class, I suppose. We didn’t have everything, but I never grew up struggling. And my parents? They were great. Solid. My dad was a gem—loving, funny, and would do absolutely anything for me. He adored my mum, and life at home was simple. Whole. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was me. I was loud. Confident. Sharp-tongued and a little too good at getting what I wanted. I’d been that way since I was six, thanks to all those summer drama schools my mum enrolled me in, hoping they’d “channel my energy.” What they actually did was turn me into a performer. I learned how to read people. How to talk circles around them with a smile and a wink.
The lads in my town weren’t exactly hard to tame. Just a bit of confidence, a bit of flirting, maybe some light manipulation if needed. I was good at reading people. Still am. I wasn’t seriouswith myself. I loved a laugh, and I didn’t take life too seriously. It was easy to get what I wanted when I mixed humour with pleasure. I wasn’t out to cause drama, but it seemed to follow me anyway. Small town, big mouth energy—kiss the wrong lad on a night out and suddenly someone’s cousin’s best mate wants to swing for you. I wasn’t heartless. I just didn’t care for petty politics. Stable home, decent parents, no tragic backstory. Just a wild streak I never grew out of. I was born for chaos, I suppose.
My first boyfriend was when I was sixteen. He was eighteen—kind, loyal, a proper “good lad.” Picked me up from college in his boy racer car, always had snacks in the glovebox, and used to take me to car shows on weekends. We had our first kiss in a McDonald’s car park where all the lads would park up on a Friday night, revving engines and pretending they were inFast & Furious. Romantic, right? His dad ran a garage, and most Saturdays, we’d be under the bonnet of some rust bucket, getting oil on our fingers and laughing until we cried. My mum liked him. She said he was sweet but that I was too young for something serious. She wasn’t wrong. We were together for a couple of years. We didn’t fight, didn’t cheat. Just slowly drifted apart. I turned eighteen and started craving more—nights out, parties, freedom. My schoolmates were already out drinking, smoking weed, and going to house parties. We got fake IDs at seventeen and started hitting the clubs. Meanwhile, he was happy staying in, watching telly, eating takeaways. He wasn’t into that life, and I wasn’t about to play house every night. So, we argued a bit, then parted ways. Amicably. No drama.
After that? A shitstorm. The good kind. The reckless kind. I tried art college—photography, to be exact. I’ve always been creative, got it from my dad. But the coursework bored the life out of me. Too slow. Too structured. Too… meh. ClassicCapricorn problems—once I lose interest, I’m already out the door.
Then came the jobs. I worked for my dad in construction for a bit, answering phones in steel-toe boots. The site visits were the best. I wound up all the tradies, wrapped them round my little finger, and left. I’d flirt through text about a delivery, then send heart emojis for no reason—just for a bit of spice. I once even kissed a scaffolder on-site. He was mid-twenties; I was nineteen. Didn’t care. Honestly, I was fucking manic. I tried a warehouse receptionist job. Quit after two months. Then I did a stint as a carer, looking after a couple of mental health patients. That one was wild—in the best way. I’d take them out for lunch, and we’d talk about the world in the weirdest, most beautiful ways. Their minds were built differently. Honest. Raw. They made me feel more normal than anyone else had in a long time, but even that wore thin. Everything did. The boys. The jobs. The nights out that all blurred together. It all felt like standing in a room that was slowly filling with water. No disaster, no crisis. Just the quiet dread that I was going to drown in nothingness. I was constantly searching for chaos—something, anything, to make me feel alive. A wild girl in a town too small for her.
Then one night, I was sitting in my bedroom, staring at the ceiling, scrolling through flights to anywhere. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t even scared. I was just itching. I needed out. And then—madly enough—it was my dad who gave me the final push.
“You should go to work in Spain for a bit,” he said one night, casual as anything, like he was recommending I try a new shampoo. “Your uncle’s got that apartment out there, so if you ever get stuck, I know he wouldn’t be far. Bit of sun might clear your head. It’s only a couple of hours away. You can come back if it’s shit.”
That was all it took. One tiny seed of permission. Before he’d even finished speaking, I was already dialling Aneeka—my wildest, most reckless mate.
“Babe,” I said, “wanna fuck off to Spain with me?”
“For what?” she said. “A holiday?”
“No. To work. For the summer.”
She was working at McDonald’s at the time. The girls and I would drive through just to be a nightmare, order a cheeseburger, and come out with five full meals. She was another wild soul with zero filter and no plan, just like me. She quit her shitty job the next day. We booked our flights. One-way. No return. No plan. Just a suitcase full of crop tops, high heels, and bad decisions waiting to happen. All my mates said it would be a summer thing. A little break. A quick escape. But I knew the truth. I wasn’t coming back. Not really. I didn’t know what I was running towards, and I didn’t know what I was running from, but I knew I needed more. More than pub lads with ego issues. More than job hopping and ghosted dreams. More than a town where nothing ever fucking happened. And I had no idea that the thing waiting for me out there would wreck me, in the most beautiful, brutal, addictive way imaginable.
Spain, here we fucking come. Sun, sin, and absolutely no plan.
I remember it like it was yesterday. We rocked up in Spain with one week of a cheap hotel booked, £300 between us, andnot a single brain cell’s worth of a plan. No job. No flat. No clue. Aneeka and I stepped out of the airport, blinking in the sun, dragging our battered suitcases across the pavement, high on freedom and whatever sugary hangover cocktail we’d necked at 4 a.m. before our flight. The heat wrapped around me like a hug. The air was dry and hot and full of promise. For the first time in forever, I felt alive. No one here knew who I was. No boys I’d ghosted, no parents watching over me with passive-aggressive remarks. Just sun, sea, and a whole new identity waiting to be written. So, what was the plan? There wasn’t one.
Naturally, night one, we got completely glammed up. Tiny skirts, push-up bras, lashes so big we had to squint to walk, and the highest heels we owned. Then we took a few too many shots for “Dutch courage” (which turned into full-blown tipsiness) and tottered off down the main strip, half pissed, looking for a job. The first bar we came to was called Baywatch—which made us laugh because the only thing we’d be saving was our overdrafts. It had red neon signs, cheesy music blasting, and enough Brits in vests to make us feel right at home. I gave Aneeka a look and said, “Fuck it,” before storming up to the bar in my £20 heels like I owned the place.
“Hiya,” I said with the smile I reserved for bouncers and bartenders. “You hiring?”
Behind the bar stood a short, tanned guy with an earring and a gold chain that likely wasn’t real. He looked us up and down slowly—like he was trying to figure out whether we were brave, stupid, or both—and burst out laughing.
“You’re pissed already.”
“Little bit.” I grinned. “But we’re good at it. Experienced.”
Aneeka leaned on the bar like a drunk Bond girl. “We’re looking for work. Fast. You got anything going?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You’re here with no job, no apartment, no plan?”
I shrugged. “Just vibes.”
He laughed again, shook his head like he’d seen this a hundred times before, and said, “I’m José. I run the bar. You want in? Selling shots, commission only. The more shots you sell, the more you earn. You start tomorrow night.”
We stared at him, speechless.
“You serious?” Aneeka squealed.
“You’re British, pretty, and clearly not afraid to flirt. You’ll do fine,” he said. “Just don’t puke on the customers, yeah?”
