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“Five years?” Renzo asked again.

He didn’t care about the training. He didn’t know what the fuck Lucian was talking about. None of it mattered because the man had just given him a hand out to help him up when all he had ever done was kick Renzo down to the ground. He saw the truth looking back at him—Lucian was trying to do better.

He was trying to be better.

“Five years,” Lucian echoed. “They make the rules until that time is up.”

“How do you get me out of here, then?”

“When you’re extradited to Iowa, an event will happen. Let me worry about the details. You just keep yourself alive until then. This place is rough, I know. As for your brother and sister, because I know they’re probably on your mind, too … she now has a lawyer working pro bono on her case to get full custody of Diego. Well, pro bono to her, I guess. I’m the one who pays the bill for it.”

Jesus Christ.

Renzo swallowed the thickness forming in his throat. “Should I thank you?”

Lucian shook his head subtly. “Don’t thank me for what I am about to do to you.; for what they will do to you.”

Maybe that should have been Renzo’s warning.

He was still hearing the echoes of freedom.

What was five years?

Famous last words.

NINETEEN

Two months later …

Lucia scrolled down the screen of her phone, the Google results not giving her anything that she wanted. It didn’t seem to matter how many keywords she put into the search bar, nothing came up except blasts of the same kinds of articles over and over again. Articles that didn’t tell her a goddamn thing, really.

Bronx Man Charged with Kidnapping.

Zulla To Face The Judge On Kidnapping Charges.

Man Found Guilty of Kidnapping.

Process to Begin Extradition to Iowa For Robbery Charges On Bronx Man.

The real problem was when Lucia tried to find out where in Iowa Renzo had been taken—she was trying to plan a trip to visit him—she couldn’t find anything. She was convinced the damn prison registry was broken, or they had spelled his name wrong when he was brought in for the Iowa charges because even on that site, she couldn’t find anything. That didn’t mean she stopped looking because she never stopped looking for him. It felt kind of like she checked the internet less and less with each day that passed for a new update, but that didn’t mean she stopped looking.

God.

She had to know where he was now.

California had done its job for her, though. That was the only good thing that she counted in her favor these last couple of months. Oh, she still felt entirely lost and confused. Like she was drifting into the air with no rope to keep her safe and tied down to something on the ground. Like her heart was empty and her soul was missing entirely.

She still felt those things, yes.

They greeted her every morning like the tightness in her chest, and the coldness of the spot in the bed next to her. A constant friend that she didn’t particularly like, or want around, but here they were. Day in and day out. It put her to bed with tear stains on her pillow, and an ache in her gut.

California helped, if only a little bit. It kept her busy and getting ready to start school made sure she didn’t really have much else to think about except what she needed to do for it. She still felt robotic, in a way. Like she was just going through the motions, but not living.

What was the point?

Her life was somewhere else entirely.

She wasn’t as angry, now, but she believed that was only because she wasn’t faced with her father every single day. She knew the anger was still there, if only distant in her mind, because when she was faced with the possibility of talking to her father … it came rushing back like a wave determined to take her under and drown her with its poison.