26. Jack
Jack
The ride back in the backseat of the sedan is a blur of jagged jolts and blinding, white-hot agony.
I had lost the fight tonight, and Ray and Dad were pissed.
I can still feel the sharp, punishing impact slamming through me from when they shoved me against the car, dropping me to the cold, wet ground of the parking lot outside the warehouse where I fight.
They took full advantage of me while I was down, raining kick after kick into my ribs while screaming about how much money they had lost.
Now, sitting in the back seat, I try to force air into my lungs, managing only a shallow, burning pull that’s just enough to keep the encroaching blackness from completely taking over.
Tears wash tracks through the mud that sits heavy on my face, dripping down onto my tattered shirt, which barely covers my bruised chest. It’s cold and filthy, but I don’t feel the physical chill anymore.
My skin has gone numb to the daily routine of violence, and my mind drifts away from me more often now.
That is when Ray and Dad hurt me the most, when I’m too hollowed out to even fight back.
I ache for Sol. Missing him feels like a knife twisting straight into my heart. Every time I think of him, a little piece of me breaks away, like sand at the water’s edge, slowly being washed away until there is nothing left.
I can’t feel his touches anymore. The ghost of his fingers on my skin has faded into nothingness. I can’t smell his scent, and as desperately as I try, I can’t quite picture his face. It’s distorted, blurred at the edges.
He’s there in my memory, and yet, he’s gone.
I flinch as the tyres hit a pothole with a heavy shudder, my ribs grind together with a sickening crunch that echoes straight up into my throat, tasting like copper and old iron.
I knew the second I had lost tonight. The moment the heavyweight fighter had caught me with a brutal, unchecked left hook that dropped me like dead weight to the canvas, I knew I had failed them. I knew what was waiting for me when this was over.
My father and Uncle Ray don’t say a single word during the entire drive. They don’t have to. The heavy silence in the car hums with a cold, vicious fury, suffocating every ounce of air out of the cabin.
When the car finally stops, the doors fly open, and strong, calloused hands grab me by the shoulders and collar, dragging me out across the rough gravel and hauling me toward the side of the house.
My boots drag uselessly behind me, my legs completely unresponsive beneath the crushing weight of utter exhaustion and pain.
I know what a broken rib feels like; I can feel the jagged edge of bone pressing dangerously close to my lungs every time I take a shallow, wheezing breath.
The heavy wooden door opened with a sharp, protesting screech, and they don’t bother walking me down the stairs. They just pitch me forward. and follow me down.
I tumble down the steps in a tangled heap of bruised limbs, crashing hard onto the stone floor at the bottom. The impact drives the last remaining oxygen from my chest in a sharp gasp.
Dad drags me by the hair, turns and locks me in my kennel, flicking the light out when he walks up the stairs.
I lie there in the damp dark, curled into a tight, miserable ball, shaking violently as I struggle to pull air back into my lungs.
Footsteps echo above me, and then the heavy wooden door slams shut with a final, crushing thud. The deadbolt slides into place with a definitive clack, sealing me in absolute, pitch-black darkness and suffocating silence.
The harsh yellow fluorescent light doesn’t even come on tonight. They left me in the dark.
I manage to drag myself inch by agonising inch across the freezing concrete floor until my back hits the edge of the narrow cot.
I pull myself up onto the thin, coarse mattress, burying my face in my trembling hands as tears, hot, bitter, and filled with defeat, mix with the dried blood caked across my cheeks.
They are slowly killing me.
I can feel it ticking away inside my chest like a bomb. Every fight is harder, every recovery window shorter, and the internal damage piling up inside my body is becoming permanent.
They are punishing me for leaving.
For running.
My father and Ray are slowly, methodically bleeding me out behind locked doors, turning me into disposable meat for a betting ring until there is nothing left of the man Silas remembers.
That I remember.
And for the first time since I woke up in this tomb, the crushing weight of despair truly takes root, freezing the blood in my veins.
I’m losing hope.
Three months have bled into an endless, distorted eternity of darkness.
Silas is a hacker, a brilliant mind living in a bright world of code and sunlight, but Seattle is a massive, sprawling labyrinth of concrete and shadow.
He doesn’t know where this house is. He doesn’t know Peter Sale or these forgotten back alleys. Hidden warehouses.
He doesn’t know that there is no digital footprint.
The thought that I will die down here in the dirt, forgotten and broken, feeling like I let him down when he needed me most, shatters whatever fragments of my soul were still holding together.
I close my eyes, letting the heavy, cold darkness swallow me whole as I wait for the end.
* * *
Hours bleed together in the blackness, marked only by the agonising throb of my ribs and the shallow, rattling whistle of my breath.
Then, something shifts in the quiet upstairs.
Muffled shouts break through the heavy wood of the cellar door, and the thud of heavy boots rains down on me like heavy drops of mud.
My eyelids are too heavy to lift, my mind floating somewhere just beneath the surface of consciousness.
I barely register the sharp, concussive cracks echoing through the floorboards above.
Gunshots. They rumble through the concrete, but the sound feels miles away, filtering through a thick, cotton-filled haze.
My body is shutting down, dragging me under into a dark, welcoming void where the pain can’t reach me anymore.
I don’t move. I can’t. Even when the noise abruptly stops and a heavy, eerie silence settles over the house, I remain slack against the thin mattress, drifting on the edge of nothingness.
I’m too weak. Even if I wanted to call out, to scream for help, my body won’t let me, my throat is raw and dry, the air too thin, and my voice is trapped beneath the crushing weight of the beating I took tonight.
Is it him? Sol?
The prayer forms frantically in my mind, a fragile, desperate hope clawing its way up from the ashes of my despair. Could it be Silas? Could he have somehow found the needle in this massive, wretched haystack?
I hold my breath, listening with every fibre of my being as more shouting and rapid gunfire echoes through the floorboards above. The noise is intense, violent, and chaotic, shaking dust loose from the low wooden ceiling above my head.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, the gunfire stops.
Silence rushes back into the house. A heavy, eerie silence that feels entirely different from the quiet of my imprisonment.
I hear more heavy footsteps, but then they stop.
Low voices form a faint hum against my ears, but I don’t know now if I’m imagining it or if it’s just the void I’m heading into. My body jolts as I hear one more sharp gunshot echo through the structure, and then silence claims everything again.
It’s the silence after a storm, the quiet of a battlefield where the smoke is still clearing and the dead are left behind.
I lie there, my body fading in the dark. I want to hope, I want to believe that the nightmare is finally over, but the reality of how deeply buried this basement is, how hidden this tomb has been, tells me not to hold my breath.
My eyes drift shut again, hot tears slipping quietly into my matted hair as I whisper the only name that has ever mattered into the dark.
Sol…
A few moments later, a sound shatters the quiet above.
A gunshot. Footsteps. Heavy, fast, purposeful footsteps pounding down the concrete stairs. The footsteps rush across the room, and a brilliant, blinding beam of light cuts through the gloom.
These aren’t the heavy, sluggish boots of my father or Ray coming down to deliver another meal or another beating.
These are urgent. Frantic.
A beam of white light casts across the room. Funny, the light is so cold, I thought it would be warmer.
But then, cutting straight through the ringing in my ears, I hear a voice pull me back. A voice that I haven’t heard in three agonising months. A voice that lives in my bones, in my blood, in every piece of my soul.
“Jack!”
Sol. I want to move. I want to turn to him. I want to see him.
But I can’t. My body sits in a heavy fog now, and it hurts too much to drag myself out of it. I hear the clink of keys and I think I hear CJ and Deck.
The cage door creaks open.
A shadow falls over the cot, and strong, shaking hands gently, desperately touch my face, my body. I squint through the glaring light, my brain refusing to process what my eyes are seeing.
It has to be another cruel hallucination, a fevered dream of a dying boy slipping away in the dark.
“Dove…”
The voice breaks, thick with jagged tears, and the face hovering over me comes into sharp focus. The slope of his nose, the familiar dark eyes wide with a devastating, raw terror and overwhelming relief.
Silas.
I stare up at him, my chest heaving, tears spilling hot and fast over my lashes. I am so convinced this is just another phantom of my own broken mind playing tricks on me before I finally let go.
I slowly raise a trembling, bruised hand, my fingers brushing tentatively against his cheek to see if he dissolves into mist.
His skin is warm. Real. Rough with stubble and wet with his own tears. He leans desperately into my palm, pressing a fierce kiss against my knuckles.
“Sol,” I whisper, the words barely escaping my cracked lips as the darkness finally lets go, pulling me safely into his arms.