18. Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen
W hen I finally get home, the cold, blue-tinged dawn light is breaking over the horizon and I’m fucking exhausted. Tristan drops me off in the Feral Possum parking lot before heading home to catch some sleep himself, promising to call me in a few hours.
The cops were useless. I was useless. No one’s seen Eamon. Tobias is in the wind, and right now I’m trying to figure out how to sleep in my shitty apartment without the sound of his breathing beside me.
The first thing I notice is the door hanging ajar. It’s too early for anyone else to be here, even staff. I know we left in a rush last night, but not that much of a rush.
My brain immediately spits out the idea that it must be Tobias. It’s totally illogical. The chance of him escaping this quickly is slim. He doesn’t even have a key to that door, so it’s not like he could let himself in. But none of that stops me from barreling across the parking lot, cold gravel flying behind me in a spray, until I burst through the open doorway in the desperate hope that he’ll be standing inside.
Instead, I see… I’m not even sure what I see. It’s too much. It takes too long to filter through all the sensory information I’m receiving right now and put together a complete picture of what the fuck happened to my bar.
The floor is sticky when I shift my weight, and I look down to realize it’s covered in something. Probably booze.
When my eyes flick back up and look around the room a second time, more of it sinks in. The place is trashed. Just wrecked.
Every single piece. I picked each inch of this stupid decor myself. The dorky little coasters, the sandwich board with drink specials written in chalk that everyone says looks too hipster, all of it. And it’s all turned into rubble.
I’m not sure how long I wander around, taking hesitant step after hesitant step through the space that used to be my favorite place in the world. There’s a shattered barstool that I remember Tobias sitting on while he got shit-canned the day before he showed up at my apartment.
I don’t know what to do. I’m always the person who stays calm when shit gets real, but right now, I have no idea what to do. I need to call my insurance company. I need to call the cops, although my body revolts at the thought of seeing them again after I just got finished with them. I need to call Kasia and Sav.
I need to…
I need to…
I need to…
I need Tobias back.
I wish my dad were here.
As pathetic as it is, the intrusive thought makes something inside me snap, and I start crying. Not dignified crying, either. Crying like a little kid who dropped his ice cream. Crying like I can push all the stress and sweat and fear and misery out of my body through my eyeballs, so I don’t have to deal with it anymore.
It sweeps me up like a wave, buckling me at the knees until I’m sitting on the disgusting floor, leaning against the bar with my arms bent on my knees and my face buried in them.
I get myself under control after a minute, thank god. I can’t remember the last time I cried like that. Not that I think adults shouldn’t express their emotions, but that was too much. I don’t like feeling like my body is carrying me away with it and I don’t have a choice.
I swallow hard, my throat feeling thick and choked even though the whole situation was over so quickly.
Get it together, Gunnar.
If by ‘get it together’, I meant control myself enough to swallow so I can start drinking on the floor, then that’s what I do.
There’s a bottle of Tanqueray, with a thick layer of dust covering all that green glass from how little it gets used. It’s on its side on the ground, rolling around but with the lid still closed and the contents intact.
I reach over—grateful for my long torso and arms because fuck getting back up—and snag it. It’s warm and god knows how old it is. Definitely not stock that I’ve replaced since I first opened this place. But right now, I don’t care. I’ll drink the sickly sweet, herbaceous liquid as long as it makes my chest burn and the rest of the world dim at the edges for a while.
Every time I look at the destroyed bar, it’s overlaid by the image of my father’s body in his destroyed store, and every time it makes my heart clench. It feels like my brain and the alcohol are in a race to see who can take control of my consciousness first. I’m desperate for those awful memories to roll back, because stirring up old trauma isn’t going to help me face this new one. That’s why I’m drinking at a pace I haven’t in years.
Eventually, I feel better. Well, not better, but more numb. The invasive memories of my childhood are rolling back and I feel like I can breathe. I still miss Tobias every second. The worry about where he is and what’s happening to him isn’t going anywhere. I know that. But there’s nothing I can do for him right now.
It’s not the first time I thought it, but the realization that the bar being destroyed is most likely connected to Eamon hating me suddenly hits me with total clarity. I’ve drunk enough to feel like the world is something I can exist in, but not so much I feel like a zombie. And as soon as I put the pieces together, the rest of me begins to wake back up and my focus sharpens.
Eamon did this. It’s the only explanation. Why else would I be targeted? Normal criminals might have robbed me, sure. But no one else would have gone to the trouble of causing this level of destruction. I feel like an idiot for not putting the whole thing together the second I stepped in the door, but I guess I was distracted.
Then I feel like even more of an idiot, because I completely forgot about the camera. The new camera that I recently installed because of Tobias. The one that is still sitting above the bar, blinking green, when I crane my neck to look up and over the wooden barrier.
I pull out my phone. The battery is at 12%, but hopefully it’s enough to see what happened before I have to get up to find a charger. The app is already downloaded and logged into, even though I’ve never needed to use the damn thing, so it takes me a few minutes to tap around and see how it works.
I should have paid for the alert system. But I thought it was unnecessary, because I have separate perimeter alarms to let me know if someone breaks in after hours. Of course, that only works if I remember to turn them on when I leave, which I obviously didn’t. Because Tobias was with me, I didn’t care what happened to anything else.
Once I pull up the grainy footage, it buffers for a while. They also trashed my Wi-Fi, so I’m working on the tenuous 5G coverage that kind of exists out here. Every moment that the buffering drags on, I get more anxious.
Load, motherfucker. Show me his fucking face.
I know he did this. Or his friends. Someone was trying to send a message. The only upside is that maybe this footage could be used to put him away, or at least get him more shit from the cops. Or even a clue about where he took Tobias. Or a sign that Tobias is still alive.
Equal parts of horror and relief hit me when the video finally buffers, because Tobias is alive. Or at least, he was a few hours ago. Here he is, grainy and black and white, but still so beautiful I want to reach through the screen and pull him back to me so I can clutch him tightly and keep him safe.
He’s the one who trashed the bar. Well, he did it looking like a dead-eyed automaton under the supervision of a man with a covered face, but who I would still recognize anywhere. So, it’s safe to say it wasn’t his idea.
I can’t look away. I set the playback speed as fast as it’ll go, but it’s still heartbreaking to watch. Tobias looks utterly numb. He works through it all methodically, destroying everything piece by piece, occasionally turning to Eamon for instruction, or maybe a question.
My poor boy. I can only imagine how much this must have hurt him. Knowing how deep the rabbit hole in his head goes, I bet he spent the entire time wondering if I would be furious with him as well.
I’m not angry with him, obviously. But my anger is very real, and very present. It’s also accompanied by a kind of hopeless despair that I haven’t felt in a long time. Maybe I’ve spent too much of my life trying to dig people out of these situations, only to be shut down. Maybe it’s because I’m being forced to confront how unrealistic it is that I could ever really help Tobias get free, no matter how much I care about him.
I loved my brother more than anything and trying to help him got me nowhere. Worse than nowhere. He still got trapped in his own self-destructive web, tearing apart our family in the process and putting a black mark on our lives that we’ll never get rid of. Maybe Tobias is the same.
He probably thinks I’m caught up in his wave of chaos and ruin, but I think he’s caught up in mine. Because everyone I let myself truly care about turns out this way, and the harder I fight to save them, the worse it gets.
I’m distantly trying to buck against these ideas—because I didn’t spend all that money on therapy for nothing—before they completely shift my thinking, when the footage changes. They’re done smashing everything I own. I’m expecting them to leave, but instead, Eamon pulls Tobias over to him. Once I realize what’s happening, it’s so, so, so much worse than anything that’s come before.
Nothing I’ve experienced in my life has prepared me for the kind of impotent rage that I feel as the footage continues. Watching Eamon hurt and violate anyone, but especially someone I would tear apart the world for…
Eamon holds eye contact with the camera the entire time. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and his message is received. The sight of his hands on the skin that I’ve worshiped makes my stomach churn, but I hold it back.
Tears are useless here. So is cursing or anger or anything else.
I want him fucking dead. I want to find him and destroy his life worse than he’s ever destroyed anyone else’s. I want him to think of all the pain and suffering he inflicted on Tobias as a gentle dream compared to what he’s about to suffer.
Of course, the rational part of me is never truly silent. It reminds me that I am not Liam Neeson, and this is not a revenge movie. The reality of me finding Eamon, subduing him, stringing him up so I can torture him to death, and then escaping any legal consequences for it is less than zero.
I’m not that guy. And more importantly, if I ever can get Tobias away from him, Tobias needs me a lot more than he needs the shredded remains of Eamon’s corpse in exchange for me spending the rest of my life in prison.
At least, I think he needs me. I hope he does. I’ll be here for him as long as he wants me, at the very least.
It’s not as impressive as severed fingers in a jar, but it’s what I’ve got, I guess.
I just need to bring him home .
Still bristling with disgust, I make a snap decision and delete the footage. Then I get up, ignore the slight sway to my movements from all that gin, and destroy the camera. I’ll tell the cops whoever broke in did it. I’m not letting Tobias take the fall for shit, obviously.
If I have to listen to one more cop condescend to me about Tobias being an adult and how unlikely it is that another man could be forcing him to do anything he didn’t want to, I really will turn into some kind of violent, avenging angel. It’s fucking repugnant.
With shaking, hate-fueled fingers, I dial 911. I mentally prepare myself to deal with the insurance claim as well, and all the garbage that will entail. I tell myself over and over that this is for Tobias.
Driving around the city won’t save him. Fantasizing about eviscerating Eamon won’t save him, even if I do keep going back and forth on whether that needs to happen.
Right now, I can’t save him .
It tears me apart to admit it, but I can’t. All I can do is make sure I’m here and kind of, mostly standing for when he manages to save himself. Again.