CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
LIKE A GHOST
I'm freezing.
Am I dead?
No … not dead. Too cold to be dead.
But I can't open my eyes. Why can't I open my eyes?
I'm lying on something … soft. Is it a bed?
Where am I?
Disoriented, I tried to make sense of what was happening, where I was. My brain felt fuzzy, my memories from before I had fallen asleep blurred and jumbled, like a puzzle that had been knocked apart, the pieces scattered in a dark, dark room.
My limbs jolted, the cold reaching my bones and making them ache, and something rattled from overhead.
I reached out with my mind, knowing that sound from somewhere, but unable to place it.
Again, I moved my arms, with more purpose this time, and couldn't take them from their position above my head. Again, that rattling, clanging noise met my ears.
Handcuffs.
I'm handcuffed to something.
Gasping, I pulled harder, the sound echoing off whatever the cuffs were attached to. The metal dug into my wrists, rubbing against my flesh, cutting in and rubbing it away. Warmth slid over my skin, dripping down my arms.
Blood.
I coached my breath to even out despite the fear breathing life into my veins. I needed to assess my surroundings. I needed to figure out where I was, who I was with—if anyone—and with mounting strength, I managed to push through the fog to open my eyelids, only to be met by more darkness.
What the fuck is this?
Oh God, oh God …
My eyes squeezed shut as I blew out puffs of air through my mouth.
Calm down. Calm down. You’re no good if you’re panicking.
Slowly, I opened my eyes again to rove the space above me to find what I could only presume was a ceiling. Looking for anything, anything that might indicate where I was, only to find nothing but a shadowy expanse of emptiness until …
A small, dirty rectangular window, the type you’d see in a basement, sat far above where I lay. My view of the outside world was mostly obstructed by the wall beside me, but there, high in the blackened sky, was the moon.
It was nighttime.
How long have I been asleep?
However long I’d been out, I didn't know, but what I knew for certain was that more than half a day had passed since I'd sent a text to Meg, saying I was leaving.
It had been hours—maybe even days, for all I knew—and I was here, lying beneath a moon that could barely see me through that hazy window.
Could it see her too?
Oh fuck, Meg.
A whimpered noise escaped my throat as the tears sprang to my eyes.
It's my fault. It's all my fault.
I should be home right now. Dammit, I never should've left.
Every single warning, every single inkling of intuition … all ignored. And for what? To chase the ghost of a man I never should've set out to find. The dead remains had been buried for a reason, and this was what I got for trying to unearth a past better left untouched.
I was going to die. Whoever the fuck had done this was going to kill me, and it was my fault.
Silently, I cried for minutes or an hour, faulting myself for this unthinkable predicament I'd gotten myself into. Until I sucked the tears back and realized, No. This wasn't how it was going to end, and if, if, if it was, I wasn't going down easily.
I was Soldier Mason's son, dammit, and he had taught me how to fight.
With my strength somewhat regained—I was still weakened by whatever had been used to knock me out—I tugged at my restraints, rattling the chains against metal.
A headboard? A pipe?
A headboard was unlikely to budge, depending on what it was made of, but a pipe …
Pipes could be broken.
So, I clanged against that metal, tugging and rattling and tugging some more, ignoring the pain searing through my arms and hands as the flesh around my wrists was torn apart with the force. And then, finding my voice, albeit rough and hoarse from being unused, I began to yell.
“Help!” I shouted. “Hey! Is anyone out there?! Help! Help me!”
Clang, clang, clang!
I rattled, called out, and screamed until something bounded from somewhere within wherever I was being held. I quieted for a moment, holding my breath and listening to what I soon realized was the sound of footsteps coming closer and closer to where I lay.
Desperate and foolishly hopeful, I began to yell once again.
“Hello?! Is someone out there?! Help! Please!”
The footsteps stopped right outside, and I listened intently.
It didn't take a genius to realize that whoever was here in this place with me was likely the person who had abducted me in the first place. Whoever was there on the other side of my enclosure meant me harm, for whatever reason, and I needed to be smart if I wanted to make it out of this alive.
Compliance, I thought. Distraction. Conversation.
It was what Dad had done to stall Seth for as long as he could all those years ago. He talked to him. He distracted him. And even though Dad had ultimately been shot in the end, he had held him off until the cops were close.
Maybe I can talk this person out of doing something stupid, I considered.
It was a long shot. I knew that. Whoever it was had risked everything by abducting me in the first place. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t try.
Trying was better than doing nothing at all.
“Hey!” I called out again, switching gears and deciding to take a different approach. “H-hey, listen. I know you're there, all right? You got me chained up. I can’t do anything here. I just wanna talk. Please. Why are you doing this to me? Can you just tell me why you're doing this?”
A door creaked open from the far left, and still, I saw nothing. Whatever that door led to on the outside of this room—a cellar maybe—it was as dark as the space I was being held within. But thanks to the limited light cast by the moon, I could make out the shadowy figure as he entered.
I willed my heart to settle, but it didn't seem to listen as the door was closed behind the figure.
The heavy beat resounded in my ears, and I was certain he could hear it.
How could he not? That frantic drumming, the evidence of my fear, filled the room as he grabbed something from a corner and pulled it over to where I laid.
A chair, I noted, as the figure sat down.
“I wasn't sure what to think when I realized someone was comin' around, askin' about my dad,” he began, and with that statement, the breath froze in my lungs. “Especially when I heard it was the cops. No … I didn't know what to make of that. Not at all.”
My jaw flapped a few times before I managed to stammer, “Y-you're … you're B—”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Tomas's son, Benjamin, reprimanded in an eerily calm tone. “This is my turn to talk. You'll get your chance—I can promise you that. But first, you're gonna listen to me—you understand?”
I swallowed and clamped my lips shut, my head jittering with an aggressive nod, although I doubted he could see.
“Nuh-uh. You tell me. Tell me you understand.”
“I-I-I understand.”
“Good boy,” he praised, causing a shiver to work its way through my bones. “Good, good. Now, what was I saying? Ah, right … the cops.”
His voice. Where have I heard it before?
I've met this man. And not when we were kids twenty years ago. I've met him recently. But where?
“Why, oh why, would the police be lookin' for dear old Dad? My dead-for-twenty-years dad?”
The chair he sat in creaked as his shadowy form leaned closer. I could feel his hot breath on my face, could smell the rancid stench of his breath, but I couldn't yet see his eyes.
“Now, I'm not a smart man. I can admit my shortcomings.
Took me a while to figure it out. At first, I thought maybe this cop was trying to catch Daddy's killer, but …
no. No, that didn't make sense. Why now? Why now, all these years later, did the fucking cops finally give a single fuck about my fucked-up, criminal, junkie father? But then—”
A popping sound filled the room, and I gasped with a start.
His fingers. He snapped his fingers.
“It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the cops weren't really lookin' for my daddy. No, no, no … maybe they were lookin' for me.”
A bright cone of light was turned on. My eyelids slammed shut instantly, and I turned away from its blinding assault. I tried to move away, tried to hide my face against him. But a hand reached out and grasped my chin, then forced my head back to face him.
“Open your goddamn eyes,” he demanded.
Comply, comply, comply.
God, I didn't want to. I didn't want to look into the eyes of the man I'd been searching for, the one who'd outsmarted me and made me his prey. The one who'd undoubtedly end my life whenever he was done doing whatever the hell he wanted with me in this cold little cave of a room.
But despite every warning telling me not to, I did comply, and I did open my eyes.
A flashlight was positioned at his chin, shining upward to illuminate his face in ghastly planes of shadows and light, like a kid sitting around a campfire, telling ghost stories.
It took a moment for me to focus, to take in his features, his appraising smile and the wickedness in his eyes, but when I did …
“The coffee shop,” I muttered in horrific awe.
His smile grew. “Like seeing a ghost.”
He'd said it before, I remembered. I knew I'd seen him somewhere. I knew I'd recognized him. But it wasn't him I had seen in his glare. No … this man might be younger, this man might have all of his teeth, but …
“You look just like your dad,” I commented without a second thought.
He barely nodded, his hands still on the flashlight and my chin. “That's funny, isn't it? Because, oh boy … you sure do look like yours.”
Then he released me, and the flashlight was switched off.
“Wait!” I gasped out, panicked, scared he was about to leave again. Caught somewhere between wanting him to go and wanting him to stay, in fear of not knowing when he'd again return … if he ever did.
I almost laughed. Almost. At the fact that I could want to be in the company of my captor because the alternative was far too horrific to comprehend.
But before I had the chance to utter another sound, my cheek was struck with something solid and hard, and my head whipped against the blow.
It was the flashlight, I realized a moment later, as the throbbing pain bloomed across my cheekbone.
Warmth trickled down my cheek, and I knew he’d broken the skin.
“I was gonna kill you that night—you know that?” His face was beside mine now, his breath exploding against my injured cheek in heated bursts.
“I was gonna choke the fuckin' life out of your scrawny little body for pokin' your nose in places it didn't belong.
But then your daddy came along and saved your fuckin' life, and you know what happened then?”
He saved my life. He saved my life.
For every shitty fucking thing Seth had done, that was the one thing I could thank him for.
He had saved my life.
Then Soldier had.
Who's going to save me now?
Benjamin Nolan wrenched my face in his hand, giving my head a shake. “I said, do you know what happened then?!”
“N-no,” I stammered. “I-I have n-no idea.”
“Your piece-of-shit father murdered my dad.
He shot him point-blank, right in front of me.
Right between the fuckin' eyes,” he said, enunciating every word as he ground a finger against my forehead.
“Blew his fuckin' head right off and left me there, soaked in his blood and bone and fuckin' brains.”
It wasn't until I gasped with a sob that I noticed I was crying, my face sodden and my body quaking with every forced breath.
“I'm … I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m s-so, so sorry. That's … that's all I—”
“I walked,” he ground out from his clenched jaw, pressing his nose to my throbbing cheek.
“I walked for hours, screaming and begging for someone to help me. Nobody listened. Nobody came. I was thirteen fuckin' years old. I was alone. Orphaned. Then, finally, a fuckin’ cop picked me up a day or somethin’ later.
Put me into the system. They dumped me into home after home after home, and do you know what they did to me there? ”
I shook my head in response.
“Oh boy, the shit they put me through,” he drawled into my ear, nuzzling his nose against my cheek.
“They beat me. They starved me. Raped me.
Over and over and over again. And nobody—nobody—saved my fuckin' life, except …” He exhaled into my ear, the sound almost wistful.
“Except for me. I saved my own fuckin' life by fantasizing about doing every single fuckin' thing they did to me … to you.”
I froze, held the breath in my lungs as my eyes stared toward the darkness above, while he chuckled into my ear. The sound deep, gravelly, and wicked.
“I didn't know how I was gonna get ya, didn't know how I'd find you, but I thought about it. I thought about it a lot—a lot—and, boy, here you are. Guess my wish came true.”
“Oh God,” I uttered, squeezing my eyes shut against his shadowy face and hot, damp breath as a raw, soul-deep dread crushed against my chest. “God, please.”
“No, no, no,” he murmured, soothing in a condescending tone, smoothing a palm over my cheek. “You can beg all you want, but we don't listen to that around here. Nobody listened to me, and I sure as fuck won’t listen to you. But … how about this? I'll make a deal with you.”
“Wha-what?” I stammered, remembering I was supposed to comply.
But at what cost?
“You're gonna take it, Noah,” he growled, using my name for the first time. “You're gonna take every-fuckin'-thing they gave to me. And then, when I've given it all, I'll put you out of your misery. How does that sound?”
He stroked my cheek affectionately, and all I could do was shiver as the tears continued to slip over my cheeks and into the mattress beneath my head.
“And if you take everything like a good boy and if you can do it all like a champ, I'll give you the one thing none of them ever gave me.”
I swallowed a gag as he pressed a kiss to my cheek and managed to ask, “Wha-what’s that?”
I could feel him smile against me as he replied, “I'll give you mercy. How does that sound?”
I opened my mouth to speak, unable to open my eyes, and whispered in a trembling voice, “I-I just wanted to go h-home.”
“Ah, Noah,” he replied, nearly sympathetic. “I get it. I really do. But we don't always get what we want, do we? Hell, I didn't.”
Then he laughed. A bubbly, jovial laugh that only drove the helplessness deeper into the pit of my chest.
“Well, until now,” he said, continuing to laugh.
And he continued laughing still as he whipped my face and head with the flashlight, again and again, until sleep took away the last bit of my consciousness to give me the only thing promised to me now.
Mercy.