Ember (Constant Flame Duet Book 1)

by Christi Whitson

  “Just tell me who’s doing this to you, sweetheart. I can help you,” she pleaded.

  “You won’t believe me,” Owen whispered, avoiding her watery gaze.

  “I will, Owen. I swear it. And I will do everything in my power to make it stop.” She waited patiently for him to speak, but after a few moments, she gave him another nudge. “Who’s hurting you?” When the answer came, it was in a whisper so low she almost missed it.

  “Mother.”

  Mary’s lungs seized in shock, and it was actually painful to draw breath. She had thought that, if his parents were involved at all, it would be Edward. He’d never had much of a relationship with Owen, and Vera had always implied that he had a bit of a temper.

  Vera.

  She didn’t want to believe it, but she’d given her word. Anger swelled in her chest as hot and fiery as an inferno, and she rose to her feet so that she could pace. Mary didn’t trust her own voice for a few minutes, so she fumed in silence, mentally castigating herself for her own short-sightedness. How many years had her best friend been abusing the boy that she had encouraged her to adopt? How many times had she beaten him? What had she beaten him with?

  What can we do now to help him? Sean will know… It’ll have to be reported, of course, but that’s never an absolute guarantee of a child’s safety. As a doctor, she knew that all too well...

  Owen watched her stalk back and forth more than a dozen times across the kitchen floor, feeling terrified as he waited for her verdict. And then, quite suddenly, she stopped and turned to face him.

  “I believe you,” Mary announced clearly and definitively, crossing the room again to stand next to his chair. She gently tilted his chin upward so that her gaze held his. “She will never hurt you again, Owen. And there’s no way in hell I’m letting you go back to that house.”

  Chapter 6

  A few hours later, Owen was back at the kitchen table with a glass of milk and a plate of brownies. Shortly after the big revelation, Mary had called Vera to tell her that Owen and Eric wanted to have a sleepover of sorts. She’d been able to wave off every one of Vera’s arguments against the idea, even promising that she would drive Owen to school herself in the morning. Since he would be coming back the next afternoon to help them around the house again, Mary had reasoned, feeding him and letting him have a fun night with Eric was the least she could do.

  Owen had been astonished that Mary had been able to out-talk his mother, but he was even more amazed that she had actually believed he was telling the truth about Vera. When Sean had arrived home a short while later, they’d all eaten dinner together. Julia, who was now nine, had been thrilled to have an unexpected dinner guest, and Eric had made an effort to lighten the somewhat heavy atmosphere with a few mildly inappropriate jokes. After dinner, Mary had instructed Eric to keep Julia occupied until her bedtime and warned that both of them were to stay away from the kitchen unless summoned.

  Owen talked to the Langfords for hours that night. Sean, who was now a senior partner at his law firm, recorded the conversation and took notes just as he would in a deposition, and Mary asked him endless questions about the injuries he’d received over the years. He told them everything. Every horrific, disgusting detail from his first beating at age five to the perversions he’d been subjected to for the past two years. He described the room below in painstaking detail, leaving nothing out, until every sordid thing his mother had ever done to him was laid out and exposed on the Langfords’ kitchen table. There were no words to describe the shock and devastation the Langfords felt as they listened to his story, and the more they heard, the angrier they became.

  Owen’s relief at being able to unburden himself was obvious, but he was terrified at the mention of getting the police and child services involved. The idea that Vera might be convicted and punished for the way she’d treated him seemed too good to be true. Just because Sean and Mary had believed him didn’t mean that a judge would.

  “What about my father?” Owen asked anxiously. “Won’t I still have to live with him even if Mother goes to jail? What if she gets out before I’m eighteen?” Sean held up a hand in a calm down gesture.

  “If Vera’s convicted, it won’t be difficult to get her parental rights terminated, and she would go to prison for longer than three years. The minimum sentence would be ten years, and I think the prosecutor will be able to do better than that. As for your father…” Sean sighed, thinking through the legalities of the situation. “I want to see him charged with neglect, but to be honest, I’m not sure it will stick. The fact that he’s away on business so often will work in his favor. He could claim to have had no idea what was going on, and it might even be true. Ed is so absorbed with his own comings and goings that he rarely notices anything that happens with his family and friends.”

  “But he’s still legally my father,” Owen pointed out.

  “Yes, but I’m hoping that the prosecutor can talk him into a deal of sorts. Perhaps he can be persuaded to sign away his rights and agree to steer clear of you in exchange for immunity from prosecution. No doubt he would find that preferable to having to stand trial alongside Vera. He'd still have to deal with the negative press, but this way he'd be able to leave and start over with no strings attached.”

  “But then… then I’d go back into the system. I can’t do that. I could end up somewhere even worse next time.” He hated the tears that burned his eyelids, and he inwardly scolded himself for being so weak.

  “You would be a ward of the state for a little while, yes, but you wouldn’t end up just anywhere,” Sean corrected him. “We’re still registered foster parents, and we’ll petition the court for an emergency custody order. I can’t make any definite promises, of course, but I really don’t think that any judge would have reason to deny the request. It’s less work for Social Services, which saves the state some money. We can assume guardianship until you’re eighteen. We won’t let you be handed off to strangers.”

  “Unless, of course, you’d be willing to let us adopt you,” Mary interjected, her eyes full of hope and sorrow.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mary,” her husband said gently before turning back to Owen. “Not that I don’t like the idea, but we need to take this one step at a time. First, we need to file the charges and the emergency petition for guardianship. We need to make sure that Vera doesn’t get wind of what’s going on until after her arrest. The police will want to search and document that room you told us about, and we don’t want her to have time to cover her tracks.”

  “Can things really move that quickly?” Mary asked skeptically. In her experience, almost nothing the government did happened quickly, and time was truly of the essence in this situation.

  “I have some friends in the prosecutor’s office and in the police department. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure they get all of the evidence. Photographs, artifacts, DNA…”

  “DNA?” Owen echoed in shock. “You mean like blood and… and…”

  “Yes,” the older man nodded empathetically, understanding what Owen was trying to say.

  “So, everyone will know that I… that she…”

  “No,” Sean said firmly. “Only those directly involved with the case will know those details. Since you’re a minor, the case will be sealed, and your name will be kept off the public record and out of the media. I can’t promise that Vera’s name won’t end up in the news, but the media is legally prohibited from mentioning your name or even the fact that the victim in the case was the perpetrator’s child.”

  Owen still saw a few holes in that logic, but he decided to let it go for the time being. Yes, it would be humiliating for his mother’s name to be dragged through the media with that kind of stain on it, and he knew that many of his classmates knew his parents’ names. The fallout would be brutal, but it would be worth it, Owen thought, if it meant that he never had to endure his mother’s abuses again.

  That night as he lay awake in the Langfords’ guest bedroom, Owen fix
ated on Mary’s suggestion that she and her husband would be willing to adopt him. Had she truly meant it? Was it even a possibility? To be a Langford was the thing he’d wanted most as a young child, and she had offered it as easily as she’d offered him seconds on dessert. The idea made him giddy, but in the same breath, reality fell over him like a shadow.

  He would accept their help in getting out of his parents’ home, but he could impose upon them no further. If all went as planned, they would already be doing far more for him than he deserved. He’d always known that he wasn’t worthy of a family like theirs, and he wasn’t going to allow them to adopt him out some misguided sense of responsibility.

  Besides, Owen reasoned, my last adoption didn’t turn out too great.

  Sean and Mary sat up for a long while after they sent Owen to bed that night. They talked through the ‘what ifs’ of the situations and consoled one another through their shock and guilt. Mary somehow felt mentally drained and murderously enraged at the same time. The years played themselves in reverse through her mind, and she searched for the signs she’d missed. There were so many.

  “How did I not see it?” she wondered aloud. “I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake. How could I have missed this?”

  “We all did, Mary,” Sean sighed. “Every single person in his life has failed him, myself included. His family, his teachers, his doctors… No one saw it.”

  “That bitch knew exactly what she was doing from the moment she signed those adoption papers. Before that, even. I always thought that the reason she’d agreed to the adoption so quickly after seeing him was that she’d fallen in love with him like I had. The way I knew in my heart, when we first met Eric, that he was meant to be my son, and again with Julia. I felt that with Owen too, but I… I didn’t listen.”

  “No,” he agreed softly, staring in shame at the polished wood of their kitchen table. “You listened to me. You wanted to adopt him, and I talked you out of it.”

  “That’s not true, Sean. I know you wanted him too, but your points were valid ones. We were both exhausted, overworked, and overwhelmed. I really did believe at the time that trying to spread ourselves too thin would have been unfair to both boys. I thought that Owen would be better off with a family who could devote all their attention to him. The problem is that I was selfish about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I felt a bond with him, and I didn’t want him to be yet another child I’d helped and sent on his way, never knowing what might have happened to him. I wanted to watch him grow up, and if I couldn’t be his mother, I wanted that honor to belong to someone we were close to. Vera had miscarried the year before, and I thought she would… I thought she would take care of him. I thought that she wanted a child because of the way she was with Eric when we first brought him home.”

  They digested that for a moment, remembering those early days after Eric’s adoption. A chill fell over them both as they realized that Vera hadn’t been displaying maternal instincts at all.

  “My God,” Sean whispered. He felt ill all over again, and he rose from his seat to pour two glasses of scotch.

  “If it weren’t for me, he’d have never ended up with that sick, twisted bitch,” Mary sobbed, burying her face in her palms.

  “We don’t know what would have happened, Mary. Even if we’d adopted him as we wanted to, there’s no possible way to know how things might have been different. She was our friend for years; chances are, she would’ve gotten her claws into him one way or another. There’s no sense in beating ourselves up about it,” he declared. “There are things we can do to help him now, and that’s what we need to focus on.”

  “He can’t go back there. I won’t let him go back to that house, to that… that room. I still can’t wrap my head around it. I can’t understand why anyone would go to such lengths to brutalize their own child. To actually enjoy hurting their child so much that they build a secret room to do it in? What kind of person does that?” She was crying again, and Sean wrapped his arms around her tightly.

  Mary shuddered in his arms as she mentally replayed Owen’s descriptions of the sexual abuse. He’d been subjected to anal penetration on more than one occasion, and Vera had forced him to give and receive oral sex on a regular basis since he was thirteen. Although, technically speaking, she may not have taken his virginity, she had sure as hell stolen his innocence. The images in Mary’s mind made her want to vomit, and she pushed the glass of amber liquid away.

  “What we need to focus on first is getting him out of that house for good and keeping him safe, but I want that bitch behind bars. I don’t care what it takes. I’ll file everything first thing in the morning. Hopefully, it ends up in Bernie’s court. That would work in our favor,” Sean explained. Judge Bernard Coulter had been a friend of his for several years.

  “So, what happens once the complaints and petitions are filed? CPS moves too slowly.”

  “No, we’ll file with CPS as a matter of formality, but this will go straight to the Seattle PD, and our petition for guardianship will be filed alongside the charges. We’ll get Owen right from school tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll make sure he stays here.”

  “But if the petition isn’t granted immediately, then she would have a legal right to take him,” Mary argued.

  “Yes, but it will be granted. Even if we weren’t filing it, they would make emergency accommodations for Owen when the charges are filed. Our petition just saves them the legwork of finding someone to take him in or finding room for him in a group home.”

  “You’re sure?” she pressed. Sean hesitated, knowing all too well that time would certainly be of the essence.

  “I’m as certain as I can possibly be. With any luck, Vera will be in custody before Owen is even out of school tomorrow afternoon. We won’t fail him again, Mary.”

  The Following Day

  Owen’s eyes flickered to the clock on the wall of his classroom yet again. It was at least the eighteenth time he’d checked over the course of the morning. Sean had told him what steps would be taken against his mother that day, and he couldn’t stop wondering what was happening while he sat through mundane lectures and pop quizzes.

  He wanted so badly to believe that his life was about to change for the better, but he couldn’t permit himself that kind of optimism. His spirit had been trampled far too many times to allow him to see the bright side of anything, and he knew that this was most likely yet another glimmer of hope that wouldn’t pan out. Owen was forever waiting for the other shoe to drop… because it always did. After so many years of pain and abuse, there was simply no way that the act of wiping sweat from his brow would lead to his salvation. It was just too easy.

  Ten minutes before the lunch bell was due to ring, a short girl with glasses came through the classroom door and handed a note to the teacher. He read it quickly and looked directly at Owen.

  “Monroe, someone’s in the office to see you. You’re to bring your bag.”

  Owen gathered his books quickly and shot out of his seat, wondering if Mary or Sean had come to pick him up early. Was it possible that his mother was already in custody? Against his better judgment, he felt a swell of hope bubble inside of him as he hurried to collect the rest of his belongings from his locker and skipped downstairs to the office. Maybe they wanted to take him to the house to pack up his clothes so that he could move in with them. Maybe they needed him to talk to the police. Maybe...

  His heart and feet faltered as he opened the heavy door and saw the person who was waiting for him, and that precious bubble of hope disintegrated in an instant. Owen stared into his mother’s cold eyes for a half-second before lowering his gaze the way she’d taught him.

  Vera gave the receptionist a vapid smile and wished her a pleasant day, strolling out of the office without a second look at her son. She didn’t need to check that he was following her out of the building and across the parking lot to her Mercedes. She didn’t worry that he might drop his backpack and refuse to come with
her or that he might scream to the administrators that she was an abuser who had never given him a moment’s peace. She was confident in her control over him, as she had every reason to be, and there was no change in her expression when the passenger door opened and Owen slid into the front seat next to her.

  He remained silent, waiting for her to speak first. He knew that to open his mouth and ask a question without permission would earn him a backhand across his face and much worse when they got home. His mind was reeling in panic, and it was nearly impossible to steady his breathing and stay calm. Owen had always hated crying in front of her. Whether they were tears of fear, pain, or humiliation, Vera enjoyed them all the same. She found pleasure in shaming him for his weakness, and the more he was able to withstand without crying, the harsher her punishments became. She wanted to break him. As many times and in as many ways as possible.

  “Do you really think I don’t know full well that you put Mary up to that sleepover bullshit last night? Do you think I believe for one minute that you didn’t beg her to let you stay there and take you to school this morning? That you didn’t manipulate her into picking you up this afternoon so that you could pull the same underhanded scheme all over again tonight? Who do you think you’re fooling, boy?”

  She was shouting in the enclosed confines of the car, and it made his ears ring. Although every sentence she’d spoken was a question, he knew that she didn’t actually want an answer to any of them. There was no right answer with his mother. Ever.

  “Now, we’re going to go home, and you’re going to get the punishment you deserve,” Vera growled, appearing to calm herself a little when her voice grew softer. “And then, if you can remember how to behave and make me come at least twice… I’ll consider letting you go back to work at the Langfords’ tomorrow. I’ve already called Mary and told her that the school sent you home sick today, so she won’t be expecting you this afternoon.”