Chapter 18 Alone
ALONE
TYLER
The van stopped after what felt like hours.
I'd tried to track the journey—counting turns, estimating speeds, building a mental map the way my FBI instructors had taught me.
But the hood was suffocating, the zip ties cut off circulation to my hands, and somewhere around the twentieth turn I lost count.
We could have been anywhere. Mexico. California.
Somewhere in the vast Nevada desert where bodies disappeared and no one ever found them.
Hands grabbed me, hauled me out of the van. My legs buckled—too long in one position, muscles cramped and screaming—but the hands held me up, dragged me forward. Gravel crunched under my feet, then concrete, then nothing as we went through a door into cooler air.
Down stairs. I counted them automatically: fourteen steps, a turn, another eight.
Underground. The air changed—heavier, damper, carrying the faint mineral smell of earth and old stone.
The temperature dropped with each step, cold seeping through my clothes, raising goosebumps on my skin.
Wherever Cross had brought me, it was deep.
A door opened—I heard the groan of heavy hinges, felt the shift in air pressure.
Then we were moving through what felt like a corridor, my footsteps muffled on what might have been carpet.
Another door. Another corridor. The place was a maze, designed to disorient, to make escape impossible even if I somehow got free.
Finally, we stopped. The hood came off. I blinked against the sudden light, eyes watering, and found myself in the last place I'd expected: a room that looked like it belonged in a high-end hotel.
Cream-colored walls, tastefully lit by recessed fixtures ithat cast no shadows.
A queen-sized bed with a dark wooden frame and expensive linens—silk, I realized when my eyes adjusted, in a deep burgundy that looked almost black in the artificial light.
An armchair upholstered in leather the color of dried blood.
Art on the walls—abstract pieces in muted colors, the kind you'd see in a corporate lobby, chosen for their inoffensiveness rather than their meaning.
A door that might lead to a bathroom. Carpet thick enough to muffle footsteps, thick enough to muffle screams.
No windows. No clock. No way to tell if it was day or night, morning or evening. The air was perfectly still, temperature-controlled, carrying no scent except a faint trace of cleaning chemicals and something else—something floral, cloying, the ghost of expensive candles.
The silence was absolute. No traffic noise, no voices, no indication that the world outside this room even existed. Just the soft hum of climate control and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
Cross's voice came from behind me: "I had this prepared especially for you. Do you like it?"
I didn't answer. Didn't turn around. Just kept cataloging the room with the desperate focus of a drowning man counting his breaths.
One door—the one I'd come through—heavy and reinforced, with no handle on this side. Climate controlled, the air neither warm nor cold, perfectly regulated. The ceiling was too high to reach, the walls solid, the carpet too plush to hide anything useful underneath.
This wasn't a prison cell. It was a gilded cage. Cross had been planning this for a long time.
"You'll be comfortable here," Cross continued, stepping into my peripheral vision.
He'd removed his sweater, rolled up his sleeves, looking relaxed in a way that made my skin crawl.
"I've thought of everything. Fresh clothes in the closet.
Books, if you want them. The bathroom has a shower and all the toiletries you might need. "
He reached out, traced a finger down my arm. I held myself perfectly still. "You can even have meals brought to you. Anything you want." His voice dropped, turning intimate. "I remember how much you liked my cooking. I've missed preparing things for you."
The words were tender. The touch was gentle. And every nerve in my body screamed that I was in the presence of a predator.
"The zip ties," I said. My voice came out hoarse, rough from hours of silence and smoke inhalation. "Take them off."
Cross smiled—warm, indulgent, like a parent humoring a child's request. "Of course. Where are my manners?"
He produced a knife from somewhere, cut the plastic with a practiced flick. Blood rushed back into my hands, pins and needles that made me grit my teeth. I rubbed my wrists, buying time, trying to think.
"There." Cross tucked the knife away. "Better?"
I still didn't look at him. Couldn't. If I looked at him, I might break.
"You ran from me, Tyler." His voice shifted—still soft, but with an edge underneath. "Three years ago, you ran. Do you know how that made me feel?"
I know exactly how it made me feel. Like I was finally free.
"I searched for you. For months. I had people watching airports, train stations, bus terminals. And then you just... vanished." He circled around me, moving into my line of sight whether I wanted him there or not. "I thought you might be dead. I mourned you."
His eyes found mine, and there it was—the thing that made Marcus Cross so dangerous. He believed it. He genuinely believed that he'd loved me, that I'd betrayed him, that this was a reunion rather than a kidnapping.
"But you weren't dead," he continued. "You were hiding. With them. With him."
The emphasis on the last word was unmistakable. Tank.
"You let another man touch you." Cross's voice was calm, but something flickered in his eyes—something dark and possessive. "You let him put his hands on what belongs to me."
I forced myself to breathe. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
"Nothing to say?" Cross tilted his head, studying me. "You used to talk to me. You used to tell me everything."
I used to have no choice.
"We have time," Cross said finally, stepping back. "I'm a patient man. And eventually, you'll remember how good we were together. How much you needed me."
He walked to the door, knocked twice. It opened from the outside—a guard, armed, face blank—and Cross paused on the threshold.
"Rest. Eat. Think about what you've done." His smile was almost gentle. "I'll be back soon."
The door closed. Locks engaged—multiple, from the sound of it. Heavy bolts sliding home, sealing me in.
I was alone.
Cross visited twice more that first day—I was certain it was still the first day, because the adrenaline from the warehouse hadn't fully faded, because my ribs still throbbed with fresh pain, because I could still taste smoke in the back of my throat.
Short visits, almost casual, like he was checking on a guest rather than a prisoner.
He brought me books I didn't read—his favorites, the ones he'd insisted I study during our years together, as if literature could make captivity more palatable.
He asked if I was comfortable, if the temperature was to my liking, if I needed anything.
And he touched me.
Nothing violent, nothing overtly threatening—just contact. A hand on my shoulder. Fingers brushing my cheek. His palm settling on the small of my back as he examined the room's amenities with false pride.
Each touch was a claim. A reminder. You are mine. Your body belongs to me. I can touch you whenever I want, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I gave him nothing. No words, no reactions, no indication that his presence affected me at all. When he touched me, I held perfectly still, neither leaning in nor pulling away. When he spoke, I stared at a point over his shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes.
It was the only weapon I had, and I wielded it with everything I had left.
His mask slipped once—just once—when I pulled away from his hand on my cheek. A flash of something ugly in his eyes, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it.
But I hadn't imagined it. I knew that monster. I'd lived with it for three years.
The predator was still there, underneath the charm and the expensive clothes and the carefully modulated voice. Waiting. Patient.
And sooner or later, he would stop waiting.
On the second day, the main door's bolts slid back and Cross entered carrying a tablet.
"I thought you might want to see how your friends are doing."
My heart stopped. Cross sat down in the armchair, crossed his legs, tapped the screen. Then he turned it toward me.
Security footage. Drone footage. Multiple angles of the warehouse assault, playing simultaneously in a grid pattern. I watched, unable to look away, as Phoenix members fought and fell and bled.
There was Blade, taking rounds to the chest, crumpling against the side of a van. There was Hawk on the ridge, his rifle kicking, blood visible on his arm even from a distance. There were Santos and Marco, pinned behind shelving, Marco's leg soaked red.
And there was Tank. Fighting through the wreckage, trying to reach me.
His face twisted with desperation, with rage, with something that looked like agony.
Taking down man after man, but more kept coming, and I watched myself being dragged away from him, watched him scream my name as the hood went over my head.
The footage was silent—no audio, just images—but I could hear his voice anyway. Could hear him screaming for me, the sound burned into my memory from those final moments in the warehouse.
Cross paused the footage on Tank's face. Zoomed in until the image filled the screen, until I could see every line of anguish, every trace of desperate love.
"He really does love you, doesn't he?" Cross's voice was soft, almost wondering. "Look at him. He would have died trying to get to you."
I couldn't speak. My throat had closed up, my eyes burning with tears I refused to let fall.
"How touching." Cross set the tablet aside, placed it face-down on the armrest, denying me even the comfort of seeing Tank's face. "I have to admit, I'm almost jealous. You never looked at me like that."
Because you never deserved it.