Chapter 32 Miles
Miles
I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Minutes and hours run together—the warehouse is a clock that only counts in pain.
My wrists are split raw where the rope digs in, knuckles white under the strain, the coarse fibers biting into skin.
My shoulders scream every time I breathe.
I can taste blood in my mouth, a copper tang that refuses to wash away.
The light over us swings, throwing the steel rafters into a slow, indifferent pulse.
Rico keeps hitting me. It’s a rhythm now—hammer, cry, brief silence, the rasp of his boot as he shifts position.
Each strike lands along the same line. The first blow stole the air, the second rearranged my insides, and the third made me think I’d black out.
I learned to count the strikes so I’d know where the next pain would start.
It’s not clever. It’s just a way to make the world predictable.
Between blows I hear shouts, the scrape of a bottle across wood, the low, sharp laugh that belongs to Victor. I keep my head up because if I let it drop I’ll see Chloe. God, Chloe.
Rico’s hand, stained dark, slides under the hem of my shirt as if to check what he’s done.
He’s always been detached. There’s a look he gets when he’s bored and needs to make something mean something.
He wipes his knuckles on his jeans and leans back to take another swing.
I brace. Pain blooms and I breathe through it, lungs learning to hate air.
It’s been an hour since the crash. An hour since I found Jamie and nearly lost him. I did what I could on the shoulder of that road, stifling my panic. I knelt on the gravel, hands slick, and begged him to hang on. I called for an ambulance. I called Benny. I called my uncle.
He told me to come to the warehouse.
That is where I had learned that Rico trailed my car last night. Then he had waited and waited and waited. Seeing Chloe in Jamie’s car was the reward he had been waiting on all along.
Rico hits again. This time it steals the air and I think I might leave myself on the concrete.
I clamp my teeth, and the taste of ash and grease fills my mouth.
I want to beg, but my voice is a rubber band that keeps snapping back.
Instead I pray that when the pain fades, something else will be there—some sliver of luck, a seam to pry, anything.
“Enough,” Victor says, and his voice is a slow, iced blade. It walks across me like it knows the exact places to cut. Even with pain, I hear it like thunder. Rico steps back obediently, the hammer lowering like a guilty confession.
Chloe’s voice is small. Something in me makes my head move because I need to know whether she’s all right. Her sobs are thin, soaked-through sounds. I blink and the warehouse tilts.
I try to turn my head and find the rope won’t let me.
My shoulders burn. My breath whines low in my throat.
This is penance and failure and I have none of the right words for any of it.
I should have never let her get near us.
I should have never trusted the plan. I should have left her alone.
The list of should-haves is a razor I use to carve away the last of my self-respect.
Victor approaches. Even without seeing him, I know the scent. Whisky and cigar smoke and that particular cologne money buys to hide rot. He moves like a man who expects everything to bend. He stands above me, a silhouette of control against the ragged light.
“You did this,” I say. It comes out as a croak. My jaw is raw from clenching. “Jamie, he’s bleeding. He might—”
“He might be dead,” Victor says, and the words fall like a verdict. He doesn’t hurry them. “He might be breathing. What he is, is useless to me if you’d rather tip the balance toward sentimentality. You were supposed to be the brain, Miles. Not the bleeding heart.”
My chest flares. The rope around my wrists cuts through skin in a way that makes it hard to think. “He didn’t—”
“Don’t defend him.” Victor slaps the side of my face with the flat of his hand, not hard enough to break me but hard enough to remind me he can. Heat blooms under skin. I taste copper again. “You failed.”
I go somewhere inside myself that’s smaller than the warehouse and older than the scar on my knee.
“Please,” I say. The word is nothing. But I have nothing else.
I imagine Jamie’s face, slack and pale, then Chloe’s hair like a damp halo under a streetlight, and the image drives the rest of the world into focus.
Victor crouches, close enough that I can see a thousand small things on him. I can see the vein in his temple that likes to sleep, the manicured cut on his thumbnail, the soft burn in his eyes that must be the thing that never allows him to rest. He looks at me like he’s inspecting a broken watch.
“You want a deal?” he asks. He laughs, soft and awful. “You come crawling, like the little dog I didn’t know had teeth. That’s the thing with you, Miles. You always think we can bargain with blood. But blood is my currency.”
“Take me. Take me instead,” I blurt, voice raw. “Take me—just let her go.”
Chloe’s sob turns into a hiccupped sound. I don’t know if it’s from hope or terror. I would beg for her to go free in a ring of fire if it meant she didn’t have to know a single ounce of what I’ve done. I would barter anything. My universe has been a ledger of debts and this one I want erased.
Victor’s mouth lifts like he’s smelling something sweet. “Anything?”
“Yes. Anything.” My voice is reduced to stitched cloth. I’ll promise him the moon if he’ll let her walk away. I’ll promise him the names of men I don’t have, the access keys I don’t know, the money that only exists in deals we haven’t yet made. Anything.
Rico circles, bored, and Victor watches him with the curious, relaxed attention of a monarch watching a pet.
“Romeo and Juliet,” Victor says, almost tenderly.
“Two lovers buried in the same grave when fate seems poetic instead of pathetic. You think you’re cleaning up the mess, Miles, but you’re just burying yourself under the weight of your own mistakes. ”
I don’t understand at first—the breath leaves me in a soft, incredulous whine. “What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”
Victor leans closer, and the cigar smoke paints his face an ugly orange in the dim light.
“You think your story ends with you, with a noble sacrifice that gets you absolution? No. When I get my money, you and your pretty little friend will be placed in the same hole. Convenient. Efficient. And then the world can pretend neither of you ever existed.”
Anger bubbles up hot and stupid. “You can’t—”
He punches me in the ribs then, right where Rico just worked me over—the force is a new kind of pain that makes my vision swim.
I yell, which is useless because the warehouse eats sound.
He punches me again, a measured, intimate cruelty, like a man who’s been practicing how to hurt exactly where it will leave the longest sting.
“You should have been put up for adoption,” Victor says between blows, as if offering a lecture.
“I always knew, Miles. From the moment you were spit out—premature, weak. Not fit to be an heir. I fed you scraps thinking you’d be grateful enough to be hungry for the rest of your life.
But you were always a disappointment.” His voice turns to ice.
“Traitors are the worst kind of illness.”
My breath comes ragged. “You were mine all along, and you didn’t even know it.”
The floor drops a few inches. My brain scrambles. “You—” My mouth makes a sound like a mistake. “You’re my—”
“Forgive me my lack of subtlety,” Victor says, smiling without mirth. “Yes. I’m your father. But don’t confuse biology for affection. Blood doesn’t mean loyalty. It means ownership. Ownership means I get what I want.”
All the world becomes very small and very loud. Memory is slippery, but the truth snaps into place like a trapdoor—everything aligns until I can see the pattern. I am the product of his power in a way I never understood. I was always collateral. I was always property.
“Why?” The question is useless and huge. My heart is a hammer. “Why would you—if you were my father—”
Victor cuts me off with a laugh that could have been tenderness.
“Why keep the heir close only to place him in the dark? So he learns hunger. So he learns to be useful. So he grows teeth and knows the taste of what I want. I gave you the chance to be good at being necessary. You failed. Figured you’d take pity instead. ”
I want to vomit. Shame soaks through me hotter than the blood.
I think of every time I’d followed his orders, of every compromise I’d swallowed.
I think of Jamie bleeding on a roadside because I thought loyalty was worth his life.
I think of Chloe, and how na?ve I’d been to think she was some clean thing in a world built on dirt.
“Victor,” I manage. “I’ll get you the money. I’ll do whatever. Just—her. Let her go. Please.”
Victor’s hand is steady when it pushes my head down, a small, deliberate gesture that says he owns the moment.
“Go fetch it, Rico,” he says, as if the order is the only reasonable thing he’s done all night.
“Take the blue duffel from the back of the van. It has all the papers I will need to get money from her trust, seeing as her father, as collateral put the fate of her life in my hands. It’s less than the money I would have gotten from the Ashford trusts, but it is better than nothing.
Don’t you think? I just need her to sign the form and that’s it. ”
Rico’s jaw tightens. There is no pride in the way he moves. He goes because he must. He goes because he is a man who knows his place in Victor’s small, efficient cosmos. He goes because loyalty is a commodity Victor trades in, and Rico owes a debt he cannot pay any other way.
“Wait,” I croak. My voice is a thread pulled taut. “If you get your money—”
Victor’s cigar glows. “Then the two of you will be taken somewhere quiet. There will be no parade, no funeral or poetry. Just two bodies in the dirt—close enough to teach the next fool that love is a weakness.” He taps the cigar ash into his palm and smiles like a man pleased with a blueprint.
I laugh then, a sound that wants to be broken. “Romeo and Juliet,” I whisper, and bile crawls up my throat.
Rico steps back toward the open bay. The van’s engine hums in sympathy. Every movement feels like a countdown. He glances at me once, the barest flicker of something—regret, maybe—before he climbs in. The back door slams, a gauntlet.
Chloe sobs again, quieter now, muffled by whatever fabric covers her mouth.
I strain my neck as best I can to see her through the haze of pain and humiliation.
Her face is small and wet and bright with terror.
My chest wants to split open. I want to do anything.
I want to punch Victor’s teeth out with my one good hand.
I want to untie myself and run until my lungs give out.
I want to cradle Chloe and promise her the world I never had.
Rico starts the van and pulls away, headlights cutting a white line across the yard before disappearing into the night. The echo of its tail lights is a punctuation that leaves the warehouse sudden and vast. Victor watches the glow die and then turns to me, expression unreadable.
“You remember this,” he says, each syllable precise. “You remember that you chose this life. You remember where your loyalty lies. And you remember that the only mercy I give will be the kind that suits me.”
He spits the words into my face like a benediction.
There’s a long, cruel silence. Somewhere, far away, a siren wails and fades. I taste metal and smoke and the old, stale fear of a child who knows the world is against him. Part of me wants to curl up and let the darkness take me, to end the ledger with a clean line.
Instead I breathe. The pain anchors me to the moment.
The sound of Chloe’s sob keeps me from caving into anything softer.
There is nothing left to bargain for but time, and I intend to use every second of it.
I will find a seam. I will remember the way the ropes creak.
I will count the steps. I will track the van until it stops.
My legs are weak but they exist. My hands are raw but they still work.
Victor lights his cigar again and the smoke swallows his features. He walks away like the man already imagining the grave he’ll order dug. The warehouse shrinks to the size of a mouthful of ash.
I am tied to the floor, failing and furious and suddenly, impossibly, aware that the ties that bind me aren’t just rope but history, lineage, the ugly inheritance of a man who calls himself my father. I am the son he never wanted and the son who will, one day, be the reckoning of that want.
For now, I press my forehead to the cold concrete and let the tears come. They are useless. They are necessary. They keep me human in a place built to strip that away.