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TWO
‘CtrlAltDelete’ BONES
Gio
My fingers fly across the keyboard, my eyes straining painfully as I type in codes on my laptop. It’s been two nights since my best friend underwent a Percutaneous surgery. I hated lying to him, but I know him better than anyone. If I had told him Lexi and Maxine were taken by my father, he’d let nothing - not even his recovery - get in his way.
I know because I’ve been in misery just thinking about what state Lexi could be in right now. She’s been nabbed by a motherfucker who took her God-knows-where to do God-knows-what. I don’t even know what condition she was in when Alan took her from the scene. Could she have had any broken bones like Luce? A concussion? What about Maxine? Her situation is more than I even care to explore, and my regret for involving her is more than I can take. The list of injuries could be an extensive one for the both of them, and all I have is this gut-wrenching fear.
My jaw grinds as I do my best to force those thoughts back. I need to focus on finding them, not what's happening. The more I allow my imagination to dive deeper into the possible horrors they’re facing, the more I will lose my sanity, and that won’t help either of them.
It’s also why I haven’t told Luce about this shitstorm, and despite him being out of surgery relatively fast, I can’t risk him losing his shit and flying off the handle no matter how badly I want to. If he knew that Maxine was in Alan's hands, he’d kill himself trying to find her. For now, he thinks I’ve kept her in the dark on the situation we find ourselves in. My lies just keep piling up, and the odds of him hating me for them are stacked against me.
As it is, it’s been a damn feat to get him to focus on healing when all he can think about is how Lexi was hurt in the wreckage. His guilt eats away at me, breaking down my resolve not to tell him the truth. He doesn’t need to feel guilty, there’s nothing he could have done to prevent Alan from ramming his truck into the side of Luce’s car, breaking his bones and knocking Lexi unconscious before taking her.
I blow out a heavy breath and try to refocus on my task. I hit the enter key and wait for Maxine’s records to load before leaning back in my chair and squeezing my eyes shut. I rub them with the heels of my hands before forcing them open once again. They feel like they’re covered in glue, making a simple blink feel like I’m lifting weights with my eyelids, but I refuse to sleep.
In the forty-eight hours that Lexi has been taken, I’ve only slept a total of four hours. Each time my eyes close, I see visions of blood, rape, and torture…everything that would make anyone pray for death. No, sleep is not what I need and not something I'll have willingly, right about now, it’ll take a tranq dart to make me waste a moment sleeping.
I grab the pill bottle from the table, seeing an incoming call from my boss, Drake Renzetti, but I ignore it and swallow down eighty milligrams of Adderall.
Alan thinks he’s won, and in a way, he has because it’s my family in his hands, but he won’t have them for long. Not now that I’m connected to the mother of all fucking hacker’s board. The eyes and ears of the deep web have been hired to find Alan, and when I finally have him in my grasp, there’ll be no escaping the pain and death I will bring.
Finally, the documents load, and I scroll through Maxine’s banking history. My eyes stop on a transaction that took place only three days prior to the kidnapping. It’s an electronic room purchase for a hotel in Queens, so I quickly pull up the hotel information and call.
“Marionette Hotel, this is Cindy. How may I help you?”
“Hi, this is Alan Vaccari. I rented a room from you online about a week ago, but I seem to have lost my key.”
I hold my breath for a minute, hoping my plan on the fly goes smoothly. I hear her fingers clicking on the keyboard as she types.
“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t see you in the system. You said you booked a room online; do you have a confirmation number?”
I sigh loudly to make her feel like she’s inconveniencing a guest and tell her the date of the booking. “Now listen, I’m a very good guest, I’ve been to this hotel time and time again, but if I’m late for a meeting with my business partners, I’ll let them know how unprofessional the Marionette is.”
I hear her typing away faster than before, her voice coming back apologetically, “Forgive me, sir, we strive to make your stay as stress free as possible. Ah, I see the issue, the room was booked under your wife’s name, Elena Donatello-Vaccari?”
I feel my brain stutter into silence as my mom’s face flashes in my mind, her kind eyes staring into mine as she waved at me the last day I ever saw her again. Saying my mother and father had issues is gross understatement. I witnessed my father beating her more times than I care to remember, and knowing how he treated Lexi when he married her, I’m positive he raped my mother as well. Not a single doubt about it. She split when I was shipped off to private school in St. Petersburg, making an escape from the madman who held us both by leashes and never looked back. Not a single phone call, letter, or a fucking smoke signal to let me know that she would come back for me.
I held out hope that she would, but she never did.
“Sir? Are you there?” The woman’s voice calls out just as I pull the phone from my ear and end the call.
“What the fuck?” I stare at the phone like it holds all the answers.
I toss it onto the sofa as it begins to ring again, probably the hotel calling due to disconnection, but I don’t answer it as I sit and stare at the laptop screen.
The phone call ends but starts right back up. Still, I pay it no mind.
Rage and resentment don’t even begin to scratch the surface for how I felt towards my mother, but as I grew up, I understood the reasoning behind her disappearance, but I’ll never understand how she was able to leave me behind so easily. So, why is my mother here now? Has she been behind the scenes, still involved with my father all these years?
No, that doesn’t make sense. Why would she talk to Alan, much less help the bastard? Why would she go through all that effort to escape him, only to show up years later and book a hotel for her abusive ex-husband? How in the hell would she get her hands on Maxine’s credit card? It makes absolutely no sense, leaving me with more questions and unconnected dots.
I jump to my feet when my front door gets kicked in, my gun is in my hand and aimed when Drake and a couple of his guys come rushing in.
“You fuck!” I growl, dropping my gun to my side at the same time Drake lowers his.
“Watch it, guy. Next time you’ll fucking answer the goddamn phone when I call you a hundred times. You do realize your dickface father is out there, right? I’ve got one of my best men in the hospital because of him,” he walks over to me, grabbing me by the collar and yanking me toward him, “what the fuck was I supposed to think when you didn’t answer, huh?”
