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Marney slows beside a bay door and cuts the engine. He leans over the steering wheel, staring at the building with narrowed eyes. “I don’t like the feel of this, boy.”
Neither do I. Tom Campbell invited me here. After holding Tor for days. I take my gun from the console, all too aware that no matter what, at this very moment, Tom has the upper hand. Nerves rattle my insides like a skeleton in a cage, and I fight against all rational thought as I try to calm them. Tom gloats in making people suffer. That is something I learned when he murdered my mother and sister. He didn’t simply kill them. He destroyed them. He tortured them and abused them and filmed every moment of it, taunting my father for years with the footage until the stress and heartache became too much and took my father, too. And now, he’s taken my Tor...
Marney’s car door creaks open. I follow him out, the humid night air wrapping around me in suffocating heat. We cross the space without incidence, Marney only pausing when we reach the rusted metal door. At the threshold is a magnolia. My pulse ticks up, and I draw my gun. A crawling anxiety winds my muscles when we step inside the abandoned building. No lights. No noise. We trek past empty conveyor belts and rotting cardboard boxes, and still, there’s not the first footfall, the first click of a gun’s hammer.
Tom’s not here. Neither are his men. Because it’s not my life he’s after, it’s my soul…
We come to a dark corridor. Marney jerks his head to the left. "I'll go this way. You go down the other side.”
With each empty room I pass, my frayed nerves threaten to snap. I round a corner, stepping through cobwebs, and then I catch a sliver of light dancing on the wall. My feet root to the spot as fear sets in. My pulse bangs in my ears like an angry war drum as I nudge the door open with the toe of my boot, and then the pounding rhythm skips several beats. Tor lies motionless and naked on the dirty concrete floor. A hot wave of panic and anger floods my system as I rush into the room and hit my knees beside her. Tears threaten my eyes until I realize she’s still breathing, and that’s when relief forces those tears out. Bruises cover her face and arms, blood smears her thighs, but she’s still alive. I quickly gather her in my arms and rush through the maze of corridors, shouting for Marney. I make it outside the warehouse and halfway to the car before I see Marney’s silhouette at the back of the truck.
“We’ve gotta get to a hospital,” I shout, rushing over broken pavement.
The cloud cover shifts, and moonlight spills over the dark lot. Marney places a limp body in the back of the truck, then turns away. “Jude…” His voice cracks, then a sob breaks through the silence of the night. “He’s gone.”
His words don’t register until I stop beside the truck. The person laid out in the back cab with lifeless eyes aimed at the roof can’t be my little brother. “Marney…” I start, and my hold on Tor tightens. That’s not Caleb. Marney braces his arms on the bed of the truck, his shoulders shaking on another heavy sob. “I’m gonna kill the bastard myself.”
Moments in a person’s life transcend reality, and this is one of them. Caleb has his whole life ahead of him. He’s at a girl's house right now, doing what twenty-year-olds do. He’s not in the back of that truck. There’s no way Tom got to him. The longer I stare at him, the dust of that lie settles, and the grim truth creeps in. My chest and throat tighten with an avalanche of emotions which render me numb and unable to process anything. The only thing that brings me back to the moment is Tor’s warm body underneath my hands. I have to take care of her when all I want to do is fall the fuck apart. “We’ll take him to the hosp—” I choke on my words when Marney closes the back door.
Whatever is left of my soul cracks apart and breaks. Loss falls over me like a cold tsunami, sucking me underneath its churning, dark currents and dragging me into their depths. The old man wipes at his face then nods toward Tor. “We worry with her right now ‘cause there ain’t nowhere to take Caleb but home.”
And I can’t deal with that thought, so I block out everything as I climb into the front cab of the truck with Tor in my arms.
24
Victoria
Hospitals have certain sounds, certain smells. The beep of machines, the lingering, sterile scent of bleach. Things that not so long ago were familiar, an everyday part of my life, now feel foreign.
