4. Novak
FOUR
Novak
My safe place, or at least one of them, was a run-down industrial block off a half-dead stretch of road, with roll-up doors rusted in place and windows filmed with grime.
The building had been a sweatshop. Then storage.
Then nothing. Now it was one more secure location in a city full of shadows, and the second time I’d used it this week.
If I was thinking clearly, then the risk of such a close repeat was obvious, but I’d killed the man from the club for being a threat to Caleb, and my newest resident, staring at me with wide, wet eyes, was as much a job for Caleb.
Everything right now was for my Caleb.
He’d been mine to protect the first time I saw him. I wanted him close. I wanted him contained. I wanted a room with one door, no windows, no vectors I hadn’t cleared, where no one could reach him, and nothing could hurt him.
Not optional. Not negotiable.
I reduced risk. I removed threats.
“GHHA!” my prisoner shouted around the cloth in his mouth before finally managing to spit it out.
“Help! Help!” he yelled, the sound tearing out of him, high and useless.
I stepped in, the knife already at his throat, the edge resting enough to break skin if he moved. “Enough,” I said.
He stopped. Instantly. The sound cut off as if I’d severed it. What came after was smaller—breath hitching, a broken whimper he couldn’t control even if he tried.
He’d been sweating since the moment he’d come back to consciousness. Some men sweated because they were scared. Some because they were guilty. According to Caleb and the Cave team, he was both.
“No,” he whispered, voice cracking on the word. “Why are you doing this?—”
“You know why,” I said.
My voice didn’t rise. I didn’t need it to. Volume was for men who wanted to be heard. I wanted him to understand he wasn’t in charge of anything that happened in this room.
I flicked the knife once, testing the balance, then drove it into the meat of his naked pale thigh—high enough to miss the femoral, angled inward so it hurt without ending him.
This man was Reverend Neil Langston, forty-five, high church on paper, predator in practice.
He screamed. Spit flew from his mouth. Curses followed it, wild and useless.
He bucked against the restraints, and I stepped back out of range automatically.
Head turned so his spit hit my sleeve, not my face.
Weight balanced on the balls of my feet in case he tipped the bolted chair, which hadn’t happened yet, but maybe today would be different.
He might be strong enough to rock it free, crack his head open, and I’d get to see inside him, but that wasn’t for today.
Note: bolts holding. Wrists already reddening, some blood there—circulation okay. Good.
“Do you remember why you’re here now?”
“You’ve got the wrong person! I’m a man of God!”
“Ethan Cole, thirteen. Marcus Velez, fourteen. Tyler Bishop, fifteen. Aaron Kline, thirteen. Jamie Rourke, fourteen.”
Victims.
And now, survivors, but only thanks to the Cave’s work.
Thanks to Caleb.
My prisoner shook his head fast enough that his cheeks wobbled. He went through all the stages of denial—everything I’d heard from others, from I don’t know them, to it wasn’t my fault. Then the final one…
“I’m not like the rest,” he said, and the lie came out reflexively. “I didn’t hurt any kids. I swear.”
“Caleb said you did, and Caleb doesn’t lie.”
He shouts, and I cut him again—shallower this time, the type of slice that burns more than ends; I’ve tested how to set pain where it does the most work.
I stood still and let the silence sit. I’d learned early that most people couldn’t stand silence. They filled it with whatever they were trying to hide.
He licked his lips, slumping in the chair. “You can’t do this. You can’t—this is illegal.” His eyes darted to the door as if it might open and save him. It wouldn’t. This wasn’t a movie. There were no sirens. No hero.
I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my most recent burner phone, the one Caleb had handed to me with his customary sneer of disapproval. His tone on that word—”kill”—had been clipped at the end, and I replayed it enough times to map the cadence.
No one else spoke to me the way he did, direct and unfiltered, without calculation or fear, as if I was something he could dismiss instead of something that could end him, and I let him because he was safe from me.
I opened the folder he’d sent in preparation for tonight. Photos. Names. Ages. Lines of text from chats Neil Langston had imagined were private. I angled the screen toward him, and his face drained, his lying eyes staring up at me with horror.
“That’s not mine?—”
“Shut up.”
I scrolled so he could see everything, and there was desperation in his gaze.
“Your name is on the accounts. Your face is on the footage. The last kid you met hasn’t been seen since.
” I pressed a button to record. “Tell me about Tyler Bishop, reverend. Blond hair, blue eyes, foster kid sponsored by your church, which fuck, that’s kinda arrogant to have it close to home, right? ”
His breath hitched. He started to cry. Not real crying. Not grief. Just panic leaking from a body that finally understood the consequences.
“I didn’t take him. I just talked to him, gave him God’s words and comfort. I just?—”
“Stop,” I said.
He did. Immediately. Good.
I set the phone down on the table, face-up, still recording, so he could see the timer I’d started. Not for him. For me.
I’d given myself twenty minutes to get what Alejandro and Caleb had asked for. Names and locations, anything that could get a team to the right place before a door closed and a child disappeared forever.
“You’re going to tell me about any other child you had contact with,” I said. “Not vague. Not ‘I heard.’ I need addresses. Rooms. Landmarks. Names. Vehicles. Everything.”
He shook his head again, but it was weaker now, “I’m a man of God! I?—”
I stabbed him again because fuck that noise, and listened as his scream filled the room, echoed a little, and then fell to nothing but sobs.
His cricothyroid muscle would soon be shredded, and his screams would be nothing as loud as they were now.
I’d classified both kinds of screams, and they told me different things.
“I don’t know addresses,” he choked. “I just… I just get messages. Drop points. I don’t… I don’t go?—”
“You think you don’t know,” I said quietly. “But then you’re going to remember.”
His gaze flicked to the drain. I stepped back and walked a slow circle around him. Let him feel the room. The concrete. The lack of windows. The soft drip of water somewhere behind the wall. Every sound was amplified when you couldn’t move.
The Army had trained me to read men under pressure in a whole load of new ways.
Military prison had taught me what pressure felt like when there was no relief.
Private work after that had taught me how easy it was to turn a person into a problem and then remove the difficulty.
“Who do you work with?” I asked.
He swallowed hard. “No one. It’s not like that.”
“It is like that.” I stopped behind him, my mouth near his ear. “There’s always someone above. Someone who collects. Someone who organizes. You don’t just wander into a network like this by accident, or are you saying you’re in charge?”
“No! Fuck no! I’m just… I’m nothing.”
“You’re right.”
His shoulders shook. “Please. I’ll—I’ll give you money. Whatever you want. I’ll disappear.”
“Money doesn’t fix what you are,” I said.
He made a wet, choking noise.
“Names,” I repeated. “Start talking.”
He stared at the table, at my phone, at the timer counting down.
Nineteen minutes.
“I… I don’t know real names,” he said. “Screen names in our group. Handles.”
“Say them loud and clear so I can record them.”
He flinched. “—Rex… uh, RexWantsBare,” he blurted. “And…I don’t know!”
“Keep going.”
“‘BlueRoom69.’ ‘SaintMichael.’” He spoke faster, breathless now, the list spilling out. “They’re in group chats. They post pictures—I didn’t post pictures—I wouldn’t do that?—”
“Addresses.”
“I don’t?—”
“You do.”
His eyes squeezed shut, and his head tipped forward.
“I met him. Once. SaintMichael, he runs it—he runs all of it. He picks who. He picks where. We just—” His breath caught. “We just go. Please. Please, you have to—I didn’t want any of this, he found me, he turned me! I’ve sinned but God will forgive me. Oh God ?—”
“Real name.”
“I don’t— please —” He sobbed, his head dropping. “I don’t know it. None of us know. He doesn’t—he doesn’t slip. He’s careful. That’s who you want. Not me, please, please, I have a family, I have?—”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall. White. Hair… his hair is in a ponytail. Fifties. He calls everyone son. Like a priest. Like grace. That’s how he—that’s how he gets you, you don’t even know it’s happening, please, you must understand…”
God had no part in what they were doing any more than he’d been part of my convent training.
“You delivered children to him,” I said and tapped his knee.
“ No —God, no —I had no choice, he’d have killed my wife, my kids, he killed Tony, he just—Tony was gone, one week and gone, what was I supposed to—” He was choking on it now, snot and blood and tears mixing on his chin.
“I’ll tell you everything, anything, just—I just did what he told me, I swear, I just did what he told me?—”
He’d just confessed that his ceiling had a ceiling, that he’d been handing children on a schedule, and that the man at the top was going to know, very quickly, that Neil Langston had sat in this room and talked.
He’d also confessed, without hearing himself do it, that he was guilty of everything I was already going to kill him for.
He just didn’t think those two things went together.
Good.
“How did you meet with this man?”
“He gave me a burner. It’s in my safe, and I’ve only used it four times?—”
“What’s the code to the safe?”
“You’re not going to my house! My family?—”