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That’s when I see her. Through the stocky legs of the big bruiser, back at the main entrance, just fifty, one hundred yards away. Daisy pops out of the store, skirts flying around her, looking as perfect as ever. Perfect, and perfectly confused, as she squints against the bright sun. Peering around the lot. She holds up a hand to shade her eyes, and I turn my head away so she won’t see me.
I shut my eyes, trying to imprint that image of her on the backs of my eyelids. Trying to hold onto her like she looks now. Because I know deep down it’s the last time I’ll ever see her.
“Into the van,” the guy on my right growls. “Or we hunt down your little girlfriend next.”
“Leave her out of this,” I say, and I climb into the vehicle without another protest. I turn to face them. One bruiser climbs in after me. The other slams the door and circles around front to the driver’s seat. “Please,” I say to the guy who’s back here with me. “She had nothing to do with any of this. She doesn’t know a thing.”
“Good.” He grins, his teeth crooked and yellowed in his wide smile. “Let’s keep it that way.”
Then, without warning, his fist connects with the side of my skull, and I lose track of anything else he says, because all I can hear is the ringing in my ears, and all I can see is the flash of bright colors that pop across my vision.
3
Bronson
I lose track of time. I lose track of how many bruises and breaks I’ve acquired. I lose track of everything, anything, except the sound of footsteps on the steps of the cellar where they’re holding me. That, and the sound of flesh slapping against flesh whenever they beat me—which is pretty much every time they come down here, as far as I’ve been able to determine.
“Give. Us. The. Money.”
It’s become a chant. A rhythm, over the hours. With every word comes another punch to another soft spot on my body. I’m a ball of cuts and bruises, broken ribs and black eyes. And all I can ever do in response is spit blood and the truth—“I don’t have it.”
Eventually, the punches stop coming. Then the footsteps stop too. Panic settles in, instead. All I can see, every time I close my eyes, is that one last glimpse I caught of her. The confused furrow of her brow, the way she shaded her eyes to gaze across the parking lot.
And his voice, a growl in my ear. We’ll hunt down your little girlfriend next.
I am such a fucking moron. I should never have gotten involved with her. Never have let my guard down, never have let her in. Now I’ve put her in danger too, and for what? For my pride? For some fucking money?
Money that I don’t have, not personally.
But money you know how to get, says that little voice in the back of my head. The fucker that’s been dead silent all this time. Until now. Until I’ve finally hit rock bottom, gotten desperate enough to reach at straws.
He’ll never speak to me anyway, I tell myself. He won’t accept the call.
But that’s not true, and I know it. It’s been five years. He’ll answer the phone for me. More than that, he’ll pay for me. I know he will.
The truth sits like a weight in my gut. It reminds me all over again of the chains I escaped, the pressure I ran from. Only to run straight into this fucking mess.
I deserve this, part of me believes, as I reposition my body on the hard concrete floor. Bruises throb on every inch of my skin. My ribcage stabs my side like a goddamn knife—there’s definitely something broken in there, probably more than one rib. My collarbone feels funny too, jutted at the wrong angle, probably fractured. I can barely feel my hands, they’ve got them cuffed so tight. Who knew handcuffs left ligature marks? Every time I shift so much as a centimeter, I feel the metal edges cutting my skin.
One eye has swollen shut, but with my other, blearily, I peer around the basement where they’re keeping me. There’s a window in the distance. It’s dark now, which means it’s been at least seven or eight hours since they grabbed me from the parking lot. Daisy will be freaking out by now. She’ll have gone to my apartment, searched for me. Maybe she’d have started off angry but by now she’ll just be terrified.
The knowledge of that, too, weighs heavy on my shoulders. I might deserve this, but she doesn’t. Not any of it.
It’s the thought of her that makes up my mind. That makes me decide to finally do what I swore all along I’d never stoop to, no matter how bad things got.
The next time I hear footsteps on the stairs, an hour after I make the decision, I raise my voice as loud as I can—which isn’t loud, since one of these fuckers throat-punched me. My breath wheezes in my throat as I say it, as reluctant as I am.
“I can get your money,” I say.
The footsteps pause. Then continue down, until feet appear at the edge of my vision. Thing One walks over and grabs a fistful of my hair, yanks my head upright. He sneers down at me, lips curled like a supervillain in a movie. “I thought you said you don’t have it.”
“I don’t,” I reply, teeth gritted. “But let me call my father, and he’ll pay you.”
Rewind six years, and my life would look unrecognizable. Nobody in their right mind would connect the beaten, bruised man in that basement to the boy I was in high school. The wealthy, popular kid with a full ride scholarship to Harvard, where his old man went, legacy, just like five generations of his grandfathers before him. The clean-cut, all-American smiling kid, heir apparent to the Burke fortune, who does everything right, toes the line every step of the way.
The kid who had never made a single goddamn decision for himself in his life. The kid who had every second of every day planned, scheduled, calculated.
Don’t take guitar lessons, it’s too low-brow; but don’t take piano either because there are seven other kids from your class who will be going for Ivy League legacy status who already take piano. Join the school orchestra playing cello, so you stand out, but only just far enough.
Soccer lessons are too cliché; take lacrosse for your sport, so you’re well-rounded but you don’t actually have to excel too much.
Captain of the debate team is a requirement, obviously. Work on yearbook, not the school newspaper, because nobody’s hiring journalists these days but you need to seem literary.
Hell, even my goddamn name was carefully calculated from day one. My parents went back and forth between a family name—Henry, like my father? But Henry was already Henry Burke III, and they felt a IV tacked onto the end of my name would be just one step too far toward pompous.
Yeah. Because that would be the thing that pushed us over the edge into ridiculous caricatures of rich people.
They settled on Bronson because Stacey (that’s what she prefers to be called, never Mom or Mother) did an extensive survey of dozens of her “nearest and dearest” female friends—only the wealthy ones, obviously—and that’s the name they settled on as “unique yet inoffensive.”
She was the kind of parent who wore headphones strapped to her pregnant belly, with a constant cycle of classical music playing—mostly Beethoven and Mozart because she didn’t approve of Wagner’s “proclivities.” She and my father never agreed on much, but controlling me was the one place where they both presented a united front.
After all, I was the heir apparent. The modern-day prince. One day, I would step into my father’s shoes, take the reins of the company and lead us all to future prosperity.
My friends were chosen, groomed for me. Anyone I associated with outside of my parents’ carefully approved list of choices suddenly met with untimely transfers to other schools, or mysteriously stopped speaking to me right before they started strutting through the halls with brand new designer kicks. My parents weren’t above paying off the people they considered unsuitable for my friendship.
As a result, I had nobody in my life I trusted. Nobody I connected with, not really. Nobody I could turn to for advice or help or hell, even just to blow off some goddamn steam for once.
At my eighteenth birthday party, surrounded by a bunch of rich blowhards I’d hated fo
r years, half of whom were also headed to Harvard or Princeton or Yale in the fall, I silently retreated up to my bedroom. Nobody else at the party even noticed. I spent the rest of the night, while chatter and the distant strains of classical music floated through the palatial goddamn mansion we lived in, packing up a single suitcase, the least obviously rich-looking one I could find. I dug it out of my father’s closet, brown leather and stenciled with my grandfather’s initials, cracking at the corners.
How could I have known it was vintage Gucci?
I stuffed a few jeans, a couple shirts, and a wad of bills I’d been squirreling away at every opportunity into the case. The bills were hundreds, ones my parents would toss at me whenever I mentioned I needed lunch money or a bit of cash to shop for a new tux for prom (to which I took the daughter of my father’s best friend, per his request. She ditched me for the girl she really wanted to be there with five minutes into the first dance).
Any excuse I could come up with over the year before that birthday, I took. It all paid off now—I surveyed my bag, counted the stack, and realized I had well over $500,000 saved.
I left that very night, with the party still in full swing behind me. It was the perfect time to slip out. The one time I could move around unnoticed, because my parents were too busy fawning over their wealthy friends, trying to decide which one’s daughter I should date at Harvard, probably.
I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I’ve never regretted it, not for a second.
Not until now. And even now, I feel the years between have been worth it. Five years of freedom for a few hours of pain?
My only regret is dragging Daisy into my mess.
I squint through my lone functioning eye at my captor. Watch as he dials the number I can still rattle off from memory. A number I haven’t used in five years. Father’s private line, one reserved for family and immediate friends.
It only rings twice. Halfway through the second ring, the phone connects, and through the tinny whine of this blundering oaf’s speaker, I hear my father’s voice for the first time in half a decade.
