CHAPTER 11 TO BENOT TO BE
Abel barely noticed the jacket Devlin wrapped around him.
A chill ran through his body, sinking into his bones.
He vaguely remembered being placed in the car by Devlin, the engine starting, and the heater turning on.
Yet, the heat from the air failed to warm him.
The cold penetrated beyond the physical, leaving his soul a frozen wasteland.
His eyes stared blankly through the front windshield as police cruisers pulled up to the park, lights flashing, bathing the grounds in a strobe of red and blue.
An ambulance arrived with the cops, and moments later, the car door opened, and paramedics began checking his vitals.
They spoke to him, asked questions, but their voices were muffled and distorted as if they were speaking underwater.
Devlin’s voice seemed to drift in from a distant, answering their questions to the best of his ability. Abel’s stare slowly focused on the two bodies hanging from the tree limb. Bodies that had bled on him while he sat tied to the tree trunk, unable to move, or even scream.
She’s dead… my little sister is dead…
The condition of her body was an image of horror permanently etched in his mind.
He raped her… I couldn’t protect her…
Abel didn’t know where Angel was, but he could hear his wailing cries—the one sound that wasn’t muffled or distorted. Or maybe they were his own wails and screams, still resounding inside his head, ricocheting around his skull like a metal ball in a pinball machine.
Where he’d kept his head ducked, refusing to look up at the bodies while he was tied to the tree…
he now couldn’t look away. He tried, but his eyes remained fixed, cataloging every detail he could make out from where he sat, his mind storing it away as fodder for his nightmares when he finally succumbed to exhaustion; The pink T-shirt that Savannah had bought just days ago because Maddy said she looked cute in pink…
now soaked in blood and ripped to shreds; the bruises on her thighs and the blood from—
Abel twitched, and his stare broke, allowing him to look away. When he lowered his head, the tears returned—or perhaps they had never stopped—warm droplets rolling down his chilled, dirty face, bruised from throwing himself against the cage bars when the madman was… when he thought he was…
His memory of it now placed his little sister back in that cage, because the horrific nightmare of that moment had become reality.
The screaming wails suddenly stopped, as if cut off by a switch.
Angel went silent as something inside him broke.
He sat in the open passenger door of Dane’s car, feet on the ground, his body limp against the back of the seat.
Tears streamed down his face despite the silence that suddenly consumed him.
He didn’t feel here. He didn’t feel anywhere.
Had he screamed himself to death? Was that why it stopped?
Let me be dead… please let me be dead…
If he weren’t dead, then… the worst nightmare of his life—even worse than the horror he endured with Wade—had come to life. He couldn’t live in that nightmare, couldn’t survive it day after day. The tears streamed faster when he sensed Dane nearby.
I’m sorry, baby… but I can’t be here anymore… just let me go… let me die… please… please…
Hands touched him, folding around his chilled hands, squeezing, comforting.
Angel didn’t respond, couldn’t respond. He couldn’t move, couldn’t see, though he was aware of hazy figures moving around him, voices too muffled and distant to understand, as if the earthly plane around him was slowly receding into the ether…
or maybe he was the one fading away, disappearing.
He didn’t fight it. Angel wanted to go, to dissolve into nothing, be nothing, just… stop existing.
Dane functioned on autopilot, answering questions he barely knew the answers to, trying to decide within his fractured mind how much information to give the police.
Cole spoke with the same “auto” responses, and Dane left it to him to determine what to tell them.
Cole looked like he might collapse at any moment, the unfathomable horror that was suddenly barreling down on them, draining his life force.
It was draining Dane as well, but somehow he stayed upright, keeping his wits about him as best he could—maybe because if he went down, there would be no one to anchor Angel to this life. Perhaps he wasn’t enough to anchor him anymore… not now.
Like Dane, Devlin was running on pure instinct, helping the paramedics with Abel, who was as gone as Angel.
This didn’t feel like just a double loss tonight.
They hadn’t only lost Savannah and Maddy…
but Angel and Abel as well. And every scream, every cry, every tear—Cole was absorbing it all, taking the blame for every ounce of anguish and suffering, bearing a weight too great for any human being.
If we lose Gabe too…
There would be no Cole without Gabe. Maybe they had already lost Cole, too.
Five birds with one stone. More than five.
Their entire family would unravel, each loss like a domino knocking down the next, and the next, until they all lay in a scattered heap of individual pieces… broken for good, this time.
And the madman wins… just like that.
Dane squatted before Angel and cupped his cold hands between his palms. The boy stared through him, seeing nothing. Nothing would be a blessing. Because if he was seeing something …
“I won’t lose you, baby,” Dane whispered with a tremor, tears blurring his husband’s face.
He pressed the boy’s chilled hands to his lips and closed his eyes, the tears spilling over.
His warm breath shuddered against Angel’s limp fingers.
“I won’t let you go… I won’t… I can’t.” Sobs shook him as he pressed his lips harder to Angel’s hands.
“I can’t live without you… I wouldn’t know how anymore… I don’t want to know how.”
His arms slid around the young man, and he buried his face in his neck, crying. Angel sagged against him limply, tears streaming, but no sound emerging. Dane hugged him closer, so fucking scared that this time, the fracture was too great, too severe, too much … that even God couldn’t heal it.
The coroner arrived, a grim silhouette against the cold, harsh night, accompanied by a plainclothes officer whose presence felt like a heavy shroud settling over the already suffocating scene.
The officer approached Cole, his voice a low rumble cutting through the icy stillness.
“Are you Dane Chambers?” he asked, his gaze piercing. “The one who called 911?”
“No,” Cole choked out, the word a whisper caught in his throat.
His head spun, a dizzying void threatening to swallow him whole, and his stomach churned with a nauseating knot, each twist a fresh stab of phantom knives through his guts.
The world tilted precariously, every nerve ending screaming in silent protest.
“I’m Dane.” The other man, leaving Angel at the car, walked forward with heavy steps, the air around him thick with unspoken grief. “I made the call.”
“I’m Detective Wil Jordan.” He surveyed the two men, voice dropping to a near whisper, a dark current of shared history flowing beneath his words. “We have mutual friends.”
Dane nodded.
“Clint informed me of the circumstances,” Jordan continued, his eyes holding a grounded sense of grim understanding. “When I heard your name over dispatch and the details of the situation, I figured it was best I handle this until the FBI arrives.
“Thank you,” Dane rasped, the word raw and filled with deep, aching distress that vibrated in the cold air. “Clint trusts you, and that says a lot.”
Cole’s focus, fragile at best, shattered completely, his eyes pulled with an agonizing, magnetic force past the detective, past everything, to the grotesque ballet of the bodies.
They hung there, two broken dolls, swaying with a grim grace in the night breeze, their forms silhouetted against the pale, unforgiving sky.
He watched, frozen by a horror that transcended thought, as the coroner moved with a solemn, practiced efficiency, instructing the officers to loosen the ropes and lower the children onto the icy ground.
The two teens, so recently vibrant, now lay utterly still, defiled and exposed.
The coroner, donning surgical gloves with a faint snap that echoed in the oppressive silence, knelt beside them, starting an initial, clinical examination that felt like a further violation.
The detective, his gaze tracking Cole’s, murmured, “That’s Frank. A very good friend of mine. He’ll take special care with your friends.”
Cole could only manage a choked nod, his throat tight with a suffocating knot of shame and revulsion.
He couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. It felt as if the crushing weight of this entire nightmare—every agonizing detail, every shattered hope—was falling on Dane and Devlin, while he bore the searing, inescapable brand of blame.
A sickening, corrosive guilt gnawed at his insides, a relentless self-loathing that kept him from stepping up, from articulating himself, from taking responsibility for what was undeniably, horrifyingly, his fault.
He was a hollow shell, crumbling under the weight of it all.
“Tell me what happened here,” Jordan said, his voice softer now, imbued with a quiet empathy that felt like a cruel irony against the backdrop of such savagery.
Dane, despite his own visible torment, managed to articulate the unspeakable, recounting how Abel and the kids vanished, the chilling contact with the serial killer, and the monstrous demands.
Cole should have been the one, needed to be the one, providing those details — the killer was his father.
But his entire system was shutting down, a desperate, primal retreat from the unbearable reality.
His mind rebelled, a thick fog descending, muffling the world, leaving him adrift in a sea of numb horror.
“You’re Cole?” Detective Jordan’s voice cut through the haze, directed at him.
Cole gave another jerky nod, like a puppet on broken strings.
“Is there anything you can tell me about this man that might help the investigation?”
“I don’t…” Cole’s voice was a ragged whisper, a threadbare sound.
He couldn't tear his eyes away from the coroner, from the brutal, unholy display of the children’s bodies lying naked and eviscerated on the frozen ground.
A fresh, icy film of tears blurred his vision, but no sobs came, only a silent, desperate leaking of his soul.
“Just… if you find him…” he whispered, the words hollow, scraped from the deepest, darkest corners of his shattered being, “… don’t arrest him…
kill him… don’t hesitate.” The plea was a desperate, guttural command, an echo of the violence that had consumed his life.
Jordan’s nod was slow and laden with understanding as his gaze shifted to Dane.
“There might be two of them,” Dane said, his voice strained but clear. “A Deputy Roland. I don’t know if he’s still a real deputy, but he was back when Cole was a kid.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Yeah,” Dane affirmed, and with a chilling precision, he provided a detailed description of the man and the car he was driving when he was last seen with Gabe.
Frank, the coroner, approached the three men, his face showing deep weariness and a hint of grim sympathy in his voice that felt like a fresh wound. “I need someone to identify the bodies,” he said, his words a stark, unavoidable truth. “I know this is a difficult time for you, but…”
“I’ll do it,” Dane rasped, the words torn from his throat, raw and defiant. He reached out, his hand trembling slightly as he touched Cole’s arm, his voice softening to a desperate, aching plea. “I’ll do it.”
Cole stared at him, tears finally spilling over, hot streaks carving paths down his chilled face. He swallowed hard, a painful, dry rasp in his throat, but no words or sounds could escape the crushing weight in his chest.
“It’s okay,” Dane whispered, pulling him into a desperate, crushing embrace, a futile attempt to hold Cole together when he was already shattered.
“This isn’t your fault.” His voice, usually so steady, now trembled, a fragile thread stretched to the breaking point.
“You’re not to blame for any of this— he is. ”
Cole stood frozen, a statue of despair, as Dane walked away with the coroner, toward the unspeakable task.
The detective followed them, leaving Cole utterly alone in the brutal, echoing silence of the night.
The cold seeped into his bones, a mirror to the icy dread in his soul.
He stood there, a broken thing, praying with every fiber of his being for the earth to open up beneath him, to swallow him whole, to erase him from this unbearable, horrifying reality.