The Getaway

by Hope Anika

  Not just a pedophile. A motherfucking sadist.

  He stepped back, pulled out his phone, and took a picture. The flash caught the glare of something that sat high up to the left, built into the cabinet: a camera.

  “I’ve got eyes,” he said to Isabel, his throat raw, his stomach suddenly churning. He looked right—another camera, a different angle—and then turned around to sweep the cabin with his headlamp in search of more. He found none.

  “Copy.” Isabel said from behind the desk.

  Tony forced himself to close the cabinet, to move—he could throw up later—and strode toward her, hyperaware of the tablet continuing to count time. Tick-tick-tick. There was nothing else obvious to capture his attention, no pictures, none of that fucked up artwork, nothing but furniture. Nothing under the bed, under the couch cushions, nothing in the narrow, galley kitchen cabinets or the sink.

  Isabel was crouched behind the desk; Tony kneeled down behind her and said, “Two and a half minutes.”

  She didn’t respond. She was picking the lock of the bottom right-hand drawer, so Tony looked through the other drawers, all of which were unlocked and empty, but for a handful of pens and thick parchment stationary.

  “Need some help?” he asked, moving behind her, far closer than she would have liked had she been paying attention.

  “I’ve got it,” she muttered.

  “Never would have pegged you for a thief,” he continued, focusing on her heat and scent, trying to erase the images in his head. Moving closer, until they were almost touching.

  “I have many skills,” she replied coolly, and he almost smiled.

  “I bet you do,” he murmured.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  A soft snick sounded above the countdown of the tablet, and Isabel pulled the drawer open. Tony’s heart beat hard, and adrenaline fountained through him like a geyser, but the drawer was nearly empty, containing nothing but a small collection of paperclips and two red rubber bands.

  “Fuck,” he growled.

  “No one locks an empty drawer,” Isabel retorted, and stuck her hand in to check the bottom of the drawer above the one she’d opened. She hissed softly, and Tony tensed, and when she pulled her arm free, she held a small, square external hard drive.

  “Many, many skills,” Tony said.

  Isabel ignored him and hooked the hard drive to her tablet. A few deft touches later, and the screen filled with a security prompt: user name and password. She launched the decryption software and held the tablet tensely, her eyes glued to the screen.

  Tony’s heart was a thunderous gallop in his chest. The tablet continued to track the march of time: tick-tick-tick, even while running the software. His nerves tightened; memory of what lay in the cabinet across from them filled his throat with bile.

  He didn’t want to think about that. Not yet.

  “So, this contact of yours,” he whispered and leaned closer to Isabel, until the scent of cinnamon filled his head. “Is it a man or a woman?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You’ve never met?”

  “No.”

  Annoyed, Tony thought. Capable of asking personal questions, but not so keen to answer them.

  “Is there a man?” he added, suddenly struck by the thought, because it was not something he’d considered.

  Silence, but she stiffened, as if just realizing how close he was. So close his chest nearly touched her back, close enough he could press his mouth to her bare nape. He settled for nestling his mouth to her ear, where her hair tickled his nose and her cap pressed into his cheek.

  “You don’t wear a ring,” he said softly.

  “Do you really want to have this conversation now?” she snarled.

  Tick-tick-tick.

  “Now’s as good a time as any,” he replied. On the heels of that statement, the first chime sounded.

  “Two minutes,” she muttered.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well what?”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Tony said, satisfied in spite of his churning belly and his nerves, which were shrieking that they were almost out of time. “You sure that software’s going to work?”

  He watched the tablet’s screen. It had gone black; the only thing on it was a blinking cursor at the top left hand corner. It didn’t appear to be doing anything, and—

  “It will work,” Isabel said, her confidence absolute. A heartbeat later, the screen on the tablet flickered; a wash of blue appeared, followed by the opening of a screen that held countless .wmv files.

  “Fuck yes,” Tony said, scanning them. They were all similar in size, arranged by nothing more than date, and none of them were labeled in any significant way. There were easily a hundred files—

  “Here.” Isabel chose the one at the top and clicked on it. “This is dated two nights ago, the same night she took them.”

  Tick-tick-tick.

  Time seemed to bleed away as the player opened to reveal the cabin they stood within, brightly lit with the curtains closed. The angle of the view made it clear it had been recorded by one of the cameras in the cabinet.

  Alexander Cruz sat on a tall, narrow wooden chair in the center of the room. He was nude—which made Tony flinch—his form pale and slight, his hands curled into fists in his lap in effort to cover himself. The look on the boy’s face was one of desperation and fear and knowing. Frozen, as if carved from stone in a moment of infinite horror; a statue cast in terror.

  The kid understood what was coming, that there was no escape. Resignation, survival the only goal, so he would take it. Tony saw it plainly, like accident footage playing out in slow motion, and such hot, pure fury burned through him, he had to close his eyes and take a deep breath. Stop himself from throwing that wooden chair through the fucking window.

  If the kid can take it, so can you.

  He grit his teeth and forced himself to watch as Donavon Cruz approached the boy, who fought to be stoic in the face of his fate. But the kid was shaking and shuddering, and so sickeningly vulnerable, part of Tony was screaming. Cruz’s steps were slow, deliberate, his smile a curve of gentle mockery. He was fully clothed in a hand-tailored three-piece suit; the contrast against Alexander’s nudity only further illustrated the power Cruz wielded, a weapon as effective as any of those he collected. He circled the boy slowly, and Alexander watched him with wide, waiting eyes, going so motionless it made the fine hair across Tony’s frame bristle.

  “We both know why you’re here,” Cruz said softly, and Isabel turned up the volume on her tablet until the words were crisp against the tick-tick-tick. “You, and not him.”

  Alexander said nothing.

  “You confessed to a crime you didn’t commit,” his father continued. “Didn’t you?”

  The boy only stared at him, unblinking.

  “You lied to me.” Cruz’s gaze swept his son’s naked form; another smile flickered across his face, pleasure and anticipation, drunk on his power, and Tony wanted to reach through the screen and kill him. “But you did it out of loyalty, to protect him, and I can’t fault you for that. Protecting him is your responsibility. So I’ll allow you to take his punishment—this time. But only this time. Because no matter what you do, Alexander, nothing will stop me from claiming him. He is mine, as you are mine. Mine. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  Something flickered across the boy’s features, something Tony knew instantly: hate. A furious, burning rage that turned the bile in his throat to acid.

  “Your fealty pleases me, but we both know it is only a means to an end. Because for all your protests, you want this. You need this. Even if you won’t admit it.” Cruz slid off his suit coat and tossed it aside. He reached up and began to loosen his tie, still circling the boy, still smiling. “Perhaps it’s time to take the next step. Is that what this is about? Are you asking me to test your limits? There are many different methods I can use to discover your thresholds. Many different tools. I waited, because I thought you weren�
�t ready. Was I wrong, Alexander? Are you hungry for the full initiation into your bloodline? Have you grown eager to become blooded?”

  A sound rumbled in Tony’s chest; he couldn’t stop it. Cruz discarded his tie and moved on to the buttons of his shirt, which he began to undo, one by one. The boy watched like snared prey, and every one of Tony’s muscles went tense, as if he could leap through the tablet screen and save the kid. His breath tightened; his heartbeat echoed the countdown: boom-boom-boom!

  Horror was seeping into his veins like ink bleeding through paper.

  “Yes. I can see I’m right. You’re beginning to understand that this is your heritage. Your gift.” Cruz removed his shirt and tossed it on top of the suit coat. His hands flexed, his eyes rapt on his son’s small form. “Here is where your value and your power lies, Alexander. Do you feel it?”

  Cruz halted in front of the boy. He reached down to the erection clearly visible beneath the fine fabric of his trousers and began to stroke himself, and Tony felt his skin grow tight, his nerves sparking like live wires. His stomach clenched hard; it was everything he could do not to throw up. The boy was still, waiting, his hands clenching and unclenching in his lap, his eyes unmoving from his father’s face.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” Cruz’s hands went to his zipper. “I want to feel it, too. Submit.”

  The boy jerked, as if he’d been struck, and for one, breathless moment, didn’t move. In that instant, Tony saw everything: his terror, his hate, his rage, the blinding need to defend himself crashing into the knowledge that nothing he could do would be enough. Acceptance. And then he stood stiffly, turned, and knelt down before the chair. He reached out and gripped the seat, his knuckles white, a muscle ticking wildly in his jaw. He leaned forward, rested his chest on the seat of the chair, and stuck his buttocks into the air, and the purpose was so hideously clear, Tony had to physically contain himself.

  “Sick sadistic fuck,” he snarled, and his heart screamed at him to move, to save him, even as his brain recognized the futility of such an act.

  There was nothing to stop; it was already done.

  Cruz shed his pants. His entire body bore scars, whip marks, pockets, odd, curved marks. Long, ugly lines and raised, round burns. A man who liked receiving pain as much as he enjoyed delivering it.

  He stroked himself again. Licked his lips and smiled. Then he reached out and grabbed his son’s hips with both hands and pulled the boy toward him, and Tony broke. He looked away.

  He’d seen men blown apart, decapitated, shot. Limbs disintegrated, heads explode; he’d been awash in blood and brains and bone, but he couldn’t fucking handle watching what he knew was happening. He couldn’t. He fucking couldn’t. Jesus H. Christ.

  Beside him, Isabel continued to stare at the screen, her only sign of distress the hard, tight, white line of her mouth.

  Ding. The second chime sounded, and Isabel’s hands moved across the surface of her tablet.

  “Sixty seconds,” Tony said, his voice rough, squeezed past the gorge sitting in his chest.

  “Downloading.”

  “Clock’s ticking,” he muttered and swallowed once, twice, his heart beating double-time, his guts churning. He wanted to kill Donavon Cruz.

  He needs us, Tony. Like Elian needed us. We cannot fail him.

  The memory of Lucia’s plea sheared through him, and regret made the caustic mix in his chest surge into his throat. He realized it wasn’t just Lucia he’d betrayed with his denial and deliberate inaction—it was a goddamn ten-year-old kid who had no one—and fury burned in his belly, fury at Donavon Cruz, but mostly at himself for being such a stupid, selfish, scared SOB.

  “Let’s go,” Isabel said, disconnecting the hard drive, and shoving it back into the cubby beneath the drawer. Tony shoved the drawer they’d removed back into the desk, and then they were hauling ass out of the cabin, out the back door, and running full speed across the length of the Cruz property.

  Tick-tick-tick—

  They leapt over the perimeter just as the last chime sounded; Tony slammed into the side of the SUV and looked back to make sure no alarms were screeching. All was silent.

  “Well, we got what we came for,” Isabel said breathlessly, sagging against the car. “Now we just have to figure what to do with it.”

  Tony bent over and threw up.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sam was a big man.

  When Alexander stood next to him, he felt like a narrow blade of grass in the shade of a giant Sequoia. At first, that had scared him. Not that he would ever admit to such a useless and futile emotion—fear—but that did not change the fact that he felt it. Every moment of every day, forever. Or that it caused him to do stupid things. Selfish things.

  Something of which he was not proud.

  But for some reason, he’d stopped being afraid of Sam. And it wasn’t because Sam wasn’t dangerous—Alexander fully recognized how far Sam would go if Sam believed in something. All the way. And he would leave a brutal, bloody trail in his wake. Sam didn’t hide, as Alexander’s father did, behind words. Games. Sam was just Sam. And the anger Sam carried was something Alexander shared, something he understood. He hadn’t expected to ever have anything in common with someone.

  And yet, he did.

  The story of Sam’s father—and seeing those scars, too many to count, and suddenly understanding that some scars were visible, but others, others weren’t—had made Alexander contemplate their similarities, which was a new experience. He understood there were others out there like him, but they hadn’t seemed real—like he didn’t seem real—and he’d found no consolation in the statistics and stories he’d come across.

  I figured every kid knew the taste of his own blood.

  Sam made him think. And part of Alexander despised him for that; he didn’t want to think. He simply wanted to survive. But his brain was always busy, always murmuring, painting pictures and telling stories and helping him to escape, if only for a moment, and Sam intrigued his brain, because while part of him was painfully aware of what Sam could do to him, the other part was—oddly—wholly trusting, as if recognizing Sam as someone who might actually have the ability to help him.

  Which was wrong. Foolish, stupid—grow the fuck up—and hopeless. That he would even consider such a possibility enraged him, that boiling heat, so close to the surface. Something he utilized to keep people away, but something which—sometimes—overtook him. Never ebbing, never easing, just a steady, eternal combustible flame. Alexander accepted this; his rage was part of him, in every cell, every breath. There was no fighting it. But part of him…some tiny, stubborn, certain part of him actually believed in Sam. In hope. In miracles. In spite of everything. And despite the cold, hollow, infuriated place in which Alexander existed, so remote and removed from the world, he wanted to believe, too. When he looked at Sam, something raw swelled in his chest, a living, breathing thing that made his lungs tight and his heart beat too hard.

  He’d tried to crush it, and it was Lucia’s fault that he couldn’t, because that sensation...she was responsible for its birth. Her fury and her fierceness and her love had broken through the icy, furious wall he’d spent so much time building as though it were nothing. Nothing. He couldn’t forget the look on her face the first time she’d found him, and it wasn’t something he wanted to remember—because forgetting was the only solace he had—but she had been so enraged…Alexander knew she wanted to kill. He could see it. Not like Rosa, who had no words, no tears, only silence—acceptance—her face locked, her eyes unwilling to meet his. Not like Mrs. Mills, who saw only what she wished to see, or Mrs. Livingston, who knew everything that went on in the Cruz household and watched him with disgust. Scorn.

  Alexander had become accustomed to those around him simply floating past, as if he were a forgotten planet, spinning along his own cold, solitary trajectory, but Lucia…Lucia had crashed into him like a blazing meteor, and that had forced him to awaken. To feel. And he was not grateful, not one
bit. He didn’t want to feel. Hate was so much easier than hope. Because now he had to decide whether or not to step into the light, and that light exposed everything. It burned. So much so, he was afraid—sometimes—that he might turn to ash beneath it.

  To take that step…the idea terrified him, infuriated him, far more than his father ever had. He could handle his father—he could—but he couldn’t handle false hope. He could not reveal himself only to have that revelation dismissed. Ignored.

  Judged.

  Because Alexander knew Lucia had told…others. And that they’d all sent her away. Lucia didn’t understand how powerful his father was, how he could twist and turn things until they were unrecognizable…especially the truth.

  There is only one truth, mijo.

  But that wasn’t true. That was wishful thinking.

  Alexander had allowed her to steal them away for only one reason: Ben. Ben was the sole person Alexander loved; Ben was the only person for whom Alexander would give everything, do anything. Ben was smart and funny, his heart pure and good, and Alexander would not watch their father destroy him.

  He would not.

  The next time, it will be him in that chair. You can’t stop that, Alexander. He’s a Cruz. He will be initiated.

  Over Alexander’s dead body…and not because he would again take a paring knife and spilt open his veins. No, that had been wrong. Weak. And that he’d sought such an escape—while leaving Ben to fend for himself—shamed Alexander deeply. That was why he’d allowed Lucia to usher them through the dark house and into that decrepit death trap on wheels, why he’d kept Ben quiet and strapped them both in as she’d backed from the driveway and raced away.

  For Ben. Because in his heart of hearts, Alexander knew he would never be saved. He was already ruined. But Ben…Ben still had a chance. Even if that meant hiding. No matter what it meant, if he was free… Then it didn’t matter what happened to Alexander. It would all be worth it. Because if he could save Ben, that would mean he’d won. And that his father had lost.