Beyond Revenge (The Ransom Series)

by A. T. Douglas

  “Okay,” I say, pulling back and stepping away. I wipe away the last of my tears on my sleeve. “I’m okay now.” I take a seat on the bed to keep myself from pacing the room nervously. I need to relax. I need a distraction.

  Jack sits next to me on the bed, leaning forward to put the pregnancy test on the floor out of my sight before resting his elbows on his knees.

  “How long can you stay?” I ask, fearful that our time is already up.

  “As long as you need.”

  I breathe a heavy sigh of relief. “Just stay with me for a while?”

  He smiles and nods. “Of course.”

  My hands twist and turn anxiously within each other’s grasp in my lap. Jack’s presence helps alleviate some of my nerves, but Leo’s the one who would truly keep me calm if he were here. Maybe talking about him will give me the same effect. “How long have you known Leo?”

  “Since he was just a boy. Since the day Mark took him in like his own son.”

  “You saw him the day his family was killed?”

  Jack diverts his gaze from me, his hands in his lap becoming a convenient distraction. “Yes. He had a bullet in his arm. That was the first of many injuries I treated for Leo.”

  I remember the story Leo told me of that awful day when he was only eight years old. Armed men showed up at his home, killing his father, who was high-ranking on Mark’s crew, and killing his mother. He was shot in the arm, but Mark showed up and saved him, taking him under his protection from that day forward even though the truth was that Mark ordered the deaths of Leo’s parents. Leo grew up living a lie with Mark, the man who did more to hurt Leo than help him during the time up until my dad put Mark in prison.

  “Mark did it,” I say quietly. “He had Leo’s parents killed.”

  Remorse and sorrow show openly on every aspect of Jack’s face. “I never got the truth out of Mark, but I suspected as much.”

  “Did you know what was happening between Mark and Leo all those years?”

  “I was blind to it, or maybe in denial of it, for a few years before I realized what was happening. I knew Mark most of my life and could hardly believe that he would do such horrible things to a young boy. I confronted Leo about it when he was twelve, but he told me to let it be. He didn’t want me to intervene.”

  “Why would he do that? Those were the worst years of his life, and he just let them happen?” I’m dumbfounded by the thought of it. Jack could have helped. He could have at least talked to Mark, worked some sense into him, done anything to stop the slow destruction of the young boy Mark was supposed to be caring for.

  Jack seems uncomfortable, almost reluctant to continue the conversation, but he keeps talking. “Did Leo ever tell you about Stella?”

  I know that name, but not from a conversation with Leo. Stella was Mark’s daughter, the innocent girl waiting outside her home when Mark’s enemies rammed a truck into her, killing her instantly. Mark’s wife Elise saw it all happen and committed suicide only days later.

  Mark was in prison at the time. Of course he blamed the man who put him there for preventing him from protecting his family. That man was my dad, and once Mark got out of prison, he enacted his plan for revenge: my kidnapping and ransom to set the stage for me to choose Leo and Mark’s criminal organization over my own family and former life, followed by Mark stealing me away from Leo to create his own new family, to provide him an heir to his empire.

  “Mark told me about Stella, not Leo.”

  Jack stares at me, seeming surprised by my answer. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything, then.”

  I’ve never had the feeling that Jack was holding back or not being truthful with me until now. He’s the only person I can trust in my current situation, and I need him to be honest with me. “What is it, Jack? Please tell me.”

  He sighs and shifts uncomfortably on the bed. I fear that I’m losing him, that he’ll get up and walk right out that door, but he turns to me calmly instead. “When I confronted Leo about what I suspected Mark was doing to him and he told me stay out of it, I pressed him to understand the very question you asked. Why? Why not get out when I was giving him the opportunity?” He pauses, lowering his voice. “Leo wasn’t Mark’s first victim. Before Leo came along, Stella was Mark’s focus for abuse. She was only two years younger than Leo, and they quickly became close friends when Leo was brought into their home. It didn’t take long for Leo to realize what Mark was doing to Stella, so he did things to take the focus away from her. He put the bull’s-eye right on himself for Mark to fire at, and he did. For years he did just that, and Leo wouldn’t let me stop it because he knew that if he left, Mark would hurt Stella again. If we tried to get Stella out, too, Mark never would have stopped looking for her. Leo wanted her to have as normal of a life as possible. That’s why he took Mark’s abuse all those years.”

  There are no words to properly describe what I feel inside. They seem irrelevant, not up to the task of conveying the full weight of what Leo has carried on his shoulders for so long. He has spent the majority of his life standing up in the face of evil to shield someone else. He tried to protect me from Mark just as he protected Stella. He was willing to sacrifice himself for me just like he made sacrifices for her all those years.

  His scars. His pain. Everything he’s been through. It’s all been in the name of making someone else’s life better.

  “He never mentioned her,” I manage to say, still in shock from Jack’s revelation.

  “Some things are too painful to remember. He cared about her deeply. He was devastated when she died.”

  I wish Leo was here, not so that he could hold me, but so that I could hold him. I want to comfort him, grasp his face between my hands and kiss every aspect of his skin to tell him just how much he is loved and how much he should be appreciated for his selflessness and sacrifices.

  Jack wipes the fresh tears from my cheeks with the backs of his fingers. “He was a strong kid. He still is. If anyone was going to live through the shit that Mark dealt, it was Leo.”

  My attempt at a small laugh comes out as a half-sob. “He is amazing, isn’t he?”

  Jack smiles at me, and we continue to talk about Leo. For hours we sit there as Jack tells story after story of Leo’s adventures growing up that all ended in a home doctor’s visit: the time he was showing off for Stella on a skateboard and broke his arm after spilling off a railing, a stop for ice cream ending in a brawl and a broken nose, a motorcycle ride in the rain landing him with severe road rash and a mild concussion.

  We don’t talk about the injuries that Mark inflicted upon Leo that required Jack’s attention. We focus on all the crazy and exciting things Leo did that brought Jack in for a visit, and the stories only make me love Leo more.

  8

  Her Screams

  ∞

  In all the horrors I’ve seen,

  through pain and death.

  Blackness.

  Nothing compares to that sound,

  the haunting sound of her screams.

  Terror spun into vocalization.

  Piercing, echoing into the world.

  Siphoning life.

  And I am helpless.

  ∞

  The sound of clinking glasses reverberates between me and Robert. I’ve missed that sound.

  I’ve had my share of celebratory beverages before, usually after Mark and I closed a significant deal or when we successfully moved an impossible shipment. We shared drinks when Mark was released from prison and a few days after that when he congratulated me for holding up the business while he was locked away, though I didn’t know at the time that he planned to take Morgan from her family and her life only days later.

  These successes were miniscule compared to the victories Robert and I have achieved in the last month. One by one we’ve taken down the distributors and key players who are vital to Mark’s business, the people on the ground who sell for him, move his products, and collect from his debtors. We’re chipping away at Mark�
��s organization and financial stability from the ground up, one bit at a time.

  Robert grabs my glass and pours me another shot of bourbon before refilling his own. We’re sitting at the dining room table while Cindy busies herself in the kitchen, insisting on making us a home-cooked meal since we’ve been on the road so much lately.

  With a tip of his glass toward me, Robert smiles slightly and makes yet another toast. “To being one step closer.”

  I raise my glass to his with a grin. “One step closer.”

  The chiming sound of our glasses coming together again reminds me that I spent time drinking happily with another Whitford not that long ago. Morgan and I enjoyed a bottle of wine together on our day off over a month ago, the evening we found out that our precarious happiness in Mark’s crew was about to plunge into disaster.

  To anyone else a month would not appear to be a long time, but to me it’s eternity. Time seems to move painfully slow when you’re spending it without the most important person in your life. When you’re constantly worried and wondering where she is, what’s happening to her, what she’s thinking, how her life and her body and everything about her is changing while she’s gone from your grasp, time moves at a fucking snail’s pace. That’s where I am right now in my life, but not at this moment.

  At this moment I’m drinking, and I plan to continue to do so.

  Sitting back in the chair at the table, I let the alcohol rush through my body, buzzing my brain but numbing me slightly. The liquid smoothes over me in its blissful, calming way. For five whole minutes I sit back and observe Cindy talking to Robert like it’s any normal day, as if he just got home from work and they’re catching up, a perfectly happy married couple in the suburbs of Phoenix living their lives.

  You’d never know their only daughter was currently in the possession of a madman.

  The house phone rings. Cindy casually picks up the cordless device from its base and throws her long brown hair back to hold the phone between her shoulder and her ear.

  Her face blanches.

  The phone falls from her ear to the counter, clattering loudly onto its surface. Robert and I both stand up as our chairs fly backward. Robert is closer to the phone and grabs it first, putting it on speakerphone so that the sounds of the call fill the room around us.

  The waves of pain and suffering echo off the walls. I know these sounds too well. I’ve heard them too many times before. They’re the sounds that haunt me at night, the culmination of all my failures.

  Her screams. Morgan’s screams and cries pour out of the phone, and I feel them squeezing relentlessly and viciously at what’s left of my heart inside my chest. She’s begging now, barely able to speak, pleading with him to stop, and I almost can’t take it. I can’t physically withstand the crushing weight of helplessness her sounds create in me.

  My hands fall forward onto the table, my body shaking and my mind swirling from the adrenaline and the alcohol. My eyes can only focus on the table in front of me, the lines in the wood so straight and calm then jutting out into chaos where there is a cross-section of knots in the material, the imperfections that make us appreciate the beauty and good in what we have.

  With one final muffled scream, the audible suffering is over, then there is silence.

  I look up to see Robert’s whitened face, his body completely still. Cindy braces herself against the fridge with a shaking hand covering her mouth. I can’t move or think or even begin to process these last seconds we’ve experienced, the hell that has just been brought down upon us again. I feel anger and hatred and sorrow all wound up in my chest, secured there by my guilt in a tight knot around my heart.

  “You will stop your crusade against me,” the voice says through the phone. Mark’s voice. The voice of evil. “You give up even one more of my men, hint anything about my suppliers to the authorities, stop even a single ounce of product from reaching its destination, and I will start sending her back to you, piece by piece, and there’s plenty to go around.”

  There’s a sharp click followed by dial tone. It’s over.

  It takes only a moment for Robert to be at Cindy’s side. He’s forcing her to look at him, but I can tell she doesn’t see him. He’s calm and offering comforting words, and eventually he gets through to her. She collapses into his arms, sobbing against him, then looks at me over his shoulder.

  In that one devastated glance from her, I stop breathing. Everything comes to a screeching halt, and I have to leave or the guilt will destroy me.

  With a quick turn, I run to the front door, throwing it open and launching myself out into the driveway. The waning sunset behind the houses across the street creates the perfect setting for my misery, the sky’s final grasps at sunlight before the imminent darkness consumes it.

  Except I am already consumed.

  I walk in endless circles on the pavement, my hands on my head squeezing my skull to make the sounds of Morgan’s screams go away, but they remain, louder and louder until I realize they’re blending with Stella’s cries and I can’t handle it anymore. The people I’ve let down scream at me relentlessly, and I’m completely helpless to silence their reminders of my failures.

  My body stops, collapsing me to my knees against the rocky pavement. My hands fall forward, and the rough surface digs into my skin as I stay there, motionless. A strange calm settles over me before the rage builds up again and bursts out of me in a cascade of human emotion.

  My hand balls into a fist as I slam it down against the pavement, over and over again until I’m painting the ground red with my blood. When the pain in my hand finally makes it through to my brain, I stop what I’m doing, pushing myself to standing before backing away from the site of my mental and emotional breakdown.

  I turn to see Robert watching me from the open doorway, Cindy not far behind him. For a moment I worry about how much they’ve seen, and then I realize it doesn’t matter. I’ve just shattered into a million pieces all over their driveway, but they aren’t looking at me like I’m crazy. They know this feeling. This has been their reality for much longer than it has been mine.

  I rub my uninjured hand over my face and realize I’ve been crying. The sleeve of my shirt becomes convenient for casually wiping the tears from my face, though I’m not sure I’ll ever get the stain of them off my skin.

  Sunset is over now. Darkness has set in, and I feel like the sun will never rise again.

  “Come inside, Leo,” Robert calls from the door.

  I know I should move. I know I should go to him, but my body doesn’t follow through. My eyes can’t let go of that place in the sky across the street where the last of the sun’s rays were holding out in a final stand against the night. They were just there. It was only minutes before.

  “Leo,” Robert says, much closer now, and then a hand touches my shoulder. “Let’s go inside. We can regroup. We’ll figure this out.”

  “How do you do it?” I ask without thinking. “How have you and Cindy gone months like this and not lost your minds?”

  Robert looks away and clears his throat. It takes him a moment to answer. “We have to be strong for her. The moment we give in to weakness, we’ve lost her.”

  “You’re both great parents,” I say out of nowhere. The alcohol is talking for me. “She’s so lucky to have you both. I know everything you did for her before was just to protect her. I think she knows it, too, but she’s a stubborn teenager. She admitted it to me. She’s too stubborn.”

  Somehow Robert manages to smile at my drunken ramblings, and I’m jealous. I want to be smiling like him, and not from the alcohol.

  “Come on,” he says, and I follow him inside.

  Cindy gives me an ice pack for my throbbing hand, and the three of us sit together quietly in the living room, dinner left forgotten in the kitchen, our appetites lost. It seems pointless to do normal things like eat and sleep and breathe when you know that someone you love is suffering.

  “We got his attention,” Robert says after what seems
like endless silence. “I’ll see if my guys can trace the origin of the call. They have to be able to get something from it.” He glances to the side, picking up a framed family picture sitting on the end table as he looks at it intently. Without seeing it, I already know they look like such a cohesive and happy family in that picture. I’ve studied it for hours in the downtime I’ve spent in this house.

  He sets the picture back down on its stand, and I can’t help being drawn to Morgan’s smiling face there. A wave of chills runs through my body at the thought of how far she must be from smiling at this moment.

  I need distraction, and looking forward is the only direction I can face right now. “What’s our next move?”

  Robert leans back in his chair and kicks his feet out in front of him. His brow furrows slightly as he thinks. “We’ll have to come at this from a different angle.” He holds that position for just a moment longer before abruptly standing up and walking to the dining room. Within moments he returns with our glasses and the bottle of bourbon. “For right now, we drink.”

  He pours some in each glass, handing one to me and the other to his wife before taking the rest of the bottle up in the air in a silent toast. We all know who we’re toasting to. It doesn’t need to be said out loud.

  It’s all for Morgan. Every single thing we do and everything we try is all for her, even when it fails and all we’ve done is caused her more pain and plummeted ourselves further into darkness.

  I suck down the bourbon, the alcohol almost instantly causing that perfect warmth and fuzziness within me again. I extend the empty glass to Robert for a refill, but he’s still drinking straight out of the bottle.

  The moment the rim of the bottle leaves his lips, I see the flash of fear on his face, the tiniest moment when the strong and hopeful detective is gone and replaced by the grieving father who is desperate for his child. It’s comforting to see the truth behind the facade, to know that I’m not the only one crumbling internally with each passing day of her absence.