by Keri Lake
My blood froze, every muscle locked up in a state of shock, as the weight of his words settled over me. For a moment, I was fifteen years old again, watching the man who’d abducted me break down, minutes before he’d blown his brains out. When he’d told me everything like it was his last confession.
I’d felt guilty for years after, haunted by his monstrous face, wishing I’d said something to keep him from killing himself. Something that might’ve urged him to get help.
“They deserved it, then.”
Ty lifted his head, a humorless darkness swimming behind his eyes. “You believe that?”
“I loved him, too.” The sting in my eyes fizzled to a watery mist, and with a trembling hand, I reached over to him, searching for his.
Ty leaned toward me, both hands gripping either side of my face, and rested his forehead to mine. His shaky breaths beating down on my face carried an edge of desperation. “I want you to know, Sera. I would never hurt you. Not in a million years.”
I nodded, gripping to his wrists at either side of me. “I know.”
“I’d stab my own fucking heart out first. I’d do anything for you.”
“That money … how did you …”
“You needed it. Jo needed it. Just keep it. I don’t want you to worry about anything anymore.” He thumbed the tears from my cheek and kissed my forehead.
“So, then, the ledger … the one you asked me to steal. It wasn’t about the money.”
With a huff, he gave one more kiss to my head and sat back in his seat. “Your father has been receiving payments from a man believed to be involved in the trafficking of teenage girls, mostly. According to Dax, he’s taken a young girl named Nicoleta. One Dax has been searching for, for quite some time.”
It wasn’t doubt that stirred a knot of dread in my stomach, because I certainly believed him. No, the sickness threatening to rise to my throat had to do with the fact that I was genetically tied to a piece of shit who hardly even qualified as human. A man I’d spent too many years trying to turn into a father, when I should’ve been seeing him for the monster he was.
“My … fuck.” I buried my face into my palms and shook my head. “He’s not a good man. I’ve known that for a long time.” Lowering my hands, I gripped the steering wheel, disgusted with my father and what I’d be tasked with as a result. Contrary to what Ty might’ve thought, retrieving anything from my father’s office wouldn’t be easy. “Who is it?”
“His name is Tesarik. He’s pretty well known in the underground scene.”
I recognized the name. That day at Butchers when it’d flashed across his phone. My father had fumbled, as if the man’s name alone had made him nervous. “I’ll get the ledger. Whatever I need to do, I’ll get it to you.”
“No. I’ll find another way.” Exhaling a weary sigh, he shook his head. “I shouldn’t have involved you. In any of this.”
“What exactly … was my involvement? What part of this did I play?”
“Sera, I have to ask you something. Please don’t lie to me. I need the truth.” Every word spilling from his mouth stoked my pulse, and my hands went cold with the anticipation. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Somewhere inside my head, an alarm sounded, warning of a breach. I mentally silenced it, telling myself he didn’t know my past. He didn’t know the things I’d locked so deep, even I couldn’t entirely recall them. “Tell anyone what?”
“You know what.” He glanced over to me then back toward the windshield. “You saw everything.”
The alarms blared again. I fought the urge to shake my head and dismiss them, because how the hell could he have known something to which only two other people had been privy? He couldn’t. Not that.
My heart thumped off rhythm in my chest. Hands fidgeting, I stared down at my lap to keep from having to look at him. Only one explanation came to mind.
“Eli told you.”
“No.” Reaching into his pocket, he produced a folded piece of paper held tight in his palm. “He started to go a little loopy for a while. Told me about a letter he’d written to his father. He told him where to find a secret he’d hidden in an abandoned car at the Packard. I went looking for it a few years back.”
The paper taunted me, leaving me to wonder what Eli had said, how he’d described my actions that day.
“You were there. You saw what happened. You didn’t tell anyone.”
I blinked away the tears in my eyes, while his words took me back seven years ago, on my twelfth birthday.
* * *
Alyssa Jenkins can kiss my ass.
Sitting on the lounge chair beside the pool, I watch the small group of girls my father insisted I invite to my own birthday party sit and gossip about things I don’t care about. Alyssa’s father is friends with mine, but that doesn’t automatically make me friends with her—obviously, since they’ve gathered in their own little circle, leaving me out. I can’t stand her, or her snobby little minions, who like to poke fun at other girls, including me. They’ve made today the exception, since I agreed to invite all of their little clique, but none of them have said more than the fake happy birthday greeting they offered at the door.
I’d give anything to sneak off to my room right now and read a book, but my father says I need to mingle. He says it’s important for a young lady like myself to socialize with other girls my age.
He just doesn’t like the fact that I find conversation with the maid’s son so much more appealing.
In the two years I’ve lived with my father and attended the same, stupid private school as half the kids on the block, Eli’s become my closest friend. A kid with nothing, from Detroit. My only confidant in this fake fantasy life.
I glance back to the stately mansion that’s become my home. Not my home, my house. I have no connection to this place, other than it’s where I sleep.
Eli’s somewhere inside, likely hiding from his mom and reading comic books, as he sometimes does when he tags along with her. My father will kill me if I leave my own party, but I’m not interested in listening to who Alyssa Jenkins and her crew of haughty hags thinks is going to ask her out to the Snow Ball next week.
I’ve no intentions of going myself, so why bother to jump in like I care?
Careful not to draw their attention, as if I could, anyway, I slip down the path between the hedges toward the back door of the house.
The dark hallway inside opens onto the mud room, and another leads to the kitchen, where Jo wipes down the countertops, wearing the stain of strawberry lemonade on her apron. “Oy, what a mess!”
“Where’s Eli?” I whisper.
She smiles, leaning forward on the counter, on which she rests her elbows. “Think I saw him upstairs. How’s the gossip factory?” Jo rolls her eyes, and I giggle, backing myself out of the kitchen.
She knows how much I’ve dreaded this day, because just like I do with Eli, I sometimes sneak away and talk with Jo about stuff.
“Tell me when it’s over,” I say, spinning toward the door, and I race down the hallway, as Jo calls after me.
“Be back down for cake! I’m not doing this alone, girlfriend!” she shouts.
Racing up the stairs, I keep an eye out for my father. If he sees me, he’ll send me back to the henhouse, and I’d rather drown in the pool than sit watching my so-called friends talk about their so-called friends behind their backs.
As I round the staircase, voices, one of them my father’s, draw me against the wall, and I slide along until I’m just outside of the linen room.
“What were you doing in here?” My father’s question stifles the urge to run.
“I was …. I was just.” Eli’s voice is all shaky and quiet like I’ve never heard before. My dad makes him nervous, though. He told me once.
“Turn around.”
“Please. I’ll leave. I wasn’t. I didn’t.” The embarrassment bleeding through the crack in the door is enough to make me barge in and cut Eli a break, so I take a step closer.
I freeze at that, the sting of jealousy burning my chest.
“No, sir.”
“No?” The intrigue in my father’s voice has a wicked pitch, but the betrayal I feel toward Eli for watching those other girls hurts too much to care right then. “Let me see. Show me.”
“No.”
“Show me now, or I’ll call your mother up here.”
I duck low, onto my hands and knees, and peer through the narrow crack in the door, catching Eli standing in front of the window beside my father, who’s cloaked from the others outside by the long drapes.
The folding table in the center of the room hides their lower halves, showing only the red flare of Eli’s cheeks, which is almost painful to watch, as I try to make sense of what they’re talking about.
“Please. I promise I won’t do this again.” He faces my father, head bowed in shame. “Please don’t tell my mother.”
“Show me how you touched yourself while watching those girls.”
I can’t see behind the table to know what has my father’s eyes so rapt, but the prompting tone in his words spins knots in my stomach.
“Mister Kutscher, I swear, I …”
“Perhaps you’d like me to tell your mother what a perverted young man she has for a son. She’ll never clean another house in this neighborhood, this whole city, again.”
I should run to get Jo, but I’m afraid to leave Eli alone. Eyes clinched, I will myself to stand, and my legs obey. I know my father is evil, I’ve seen it in him, and I won’t let him scare Eli that way.
He’s my friend. My only friend.
Harsh breaths, broken by Eli’s sniffles, tell me he’s doing as he was told. Touching his privates. In front of my father. My sick and perverted father who watches him do those things.
“Do you enjoy watching those girls, Eli? Do you imagine prying their skinny little thighs apart and—”
“Father!” I call out, pretending to approach the room.
The scrambling about and jangle of what I presume must be Eli’s belt tells me I’ve startled them. The moment I step into the doorway, making my presence known, Eli spins around to face the window, while my father stares from behind the linen table, a stern expression carved into the irritating pinch of his frown.
“What is it, Sera? Why are you not entertaining your guests like a good host?”
My mind scrambles for a reason to have interrupted them. I didn’t think that far ahead, only that I wanted to help my friend, to save him from the humiliation. “Alyssa … she … she asked …”
The pause in between is my brain flying a mile a minute, searching for an excuse.
“Spit it out, for Christ’s sake!”
“Alyssa slipped and hit her head on the edge of the pool. She said something about suing.” Before I can weave another word of my lie, he peers out the window and swings back to me. “She’s calling her father to come pick her up.”
He rounds the table, charging toward me like a mad bull. “Is she bleeding? Did you call for Jo?”
“No. No blood.”
He squeezes past me through the doorway, grabbing both my shoulders for one brief moment, before he takes off down the hallway. “Dear God, these children and their theatrics! This party is over.”
My father’s going to kill me when he discovers I’ve lied. Well, perhaps not kill me, but make me wish I’m dead. I have maybe twenty minutes for him to reach Alyssa, discover my lie, and come looking for me.
I decide not to waste a minute of it, and step inside the room, locking the door behind me. “I … I heard him. With you.”
Eli’s jaw clenches, eyes nail shut, and he presses his forehead into the wall beside him, hiding his face behind balled fists.
“Are you going to tell your mother?”
He shakes his head, still hiding himself from me. “Just forget it. All right? Forget what you heard, forget what you … saw.” Though muffled, the tears he doesn’t want me to see touch his voice.
“Why?”
“My mom needs this job. She needs it bad, Sera. She’ll be so pissed at me.”
“But it’s wrong. What he did was wrong, Eli. He made you—”
He snaps his head toward me, the light from the window catching the glisten of tears across his cheek. “I said, forget it! Okay? Just forget it! Are you stupid?”
The words cut like knives, but I know he doesn’t mean them. He’s embarrassed, and that’s what Eli does when he’s embarrassed. He lashes out, cutting the first thing he sees.
“Why haven’t you said anything?” The accusing expression on his face adds a painful punch to his question.
I can’t even look at him, for fear he’ll see right through my eyes, into my brain, and know my secrets. “What do you mean?” I feel like glass, as if he can see everything inside of me, my heart pumping too fast, my lungs squeezing too tight.
“I’ve seen the way he watches you. The way he touches you all the time.” There’s no repulsion in Eli’s words, only observation.
My father is very careful about how he touches me in public, so Eli must watch closely to see those things. The light brushes across the front of my shirt. Too-affectionate caresses against my leg, or my throat.
“He’s made you do things, too. Hasn’t he?”
The dark brown carpeting widens to a pale blur with my tears, and I refuse to answer him, because doing so would make me something else in Eli’s eyes. Something I can’t bear to see when he looks at me.
“Don’t say anything,” he says. “Promise me you won’t.”
Gaze still cast toward the floor, I don’t see him come around the table, until he grabs my arms and shakes me.
“Promise me, Sera. My mom needs the money so bad.”
“Just tell me this. Is it the first time?”
His brows pinch together as he lets me go, and he shakes his head.
The slam against the door skates down my spine, and my whole body trembles at the rattle of the lock.
“Sera! Sera, open this door immediately!” The anger in my father’s voice explodes through like a crack of a whip.
“Promise me you won’t ever say a word about this, Sera. It’ll ruin everything, if you tell.”
Another thundering pound at the door sends a rush of adrenaline through my body, and I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I promise.”
* * *
The memory fizzled away and I stared at my white knuckles, my fingers curled tight around the steering wheel in front of me, as I’d confessed secrets I’d held for too long. The needling guilt and remorse I’d carried for so many years.
“I had no idea.” Up until that point, Ty had remained silent through every word of it. “Eli never mentioned any of that in the letter. Only that you knew about it. It killed him to know you’d seen it all. That you thought he was weak.”
“I never once thought he was weak. If he was weak, then I was …” I clutched the wheel tighter, while shame gnawed at my gut.
My father had always been careful about his advancements toward me, not wanting to rouse suspicion. Curious touches teetering on the fine line between doting father and predator. He’d always been paranoid about me saying something at school, or to someone who wasn’t on his payroll, but it was clear that, if not for the tether of his publicity, he might’ve been more forceful. He might’ve taken the opportunity to ruin my innocence, the way he had with Eli.
As I grew older, I learned to stifle his interest by keeping busy with after-school activities and locking my bedroom door at night. After the incident with the man who’d kidnapped me, my school counselors had become more attentive to my emotional state, and his curiosity toward me eventually waned.
“There’s something else, Sera. Something you should know.” Ty unraveled the paper still clutched in his hand, and flipped it over to show a list of four names, three of which were crossed out. Only The John remained. “Your
father is the one who had Eli kidnapped. He’s the one who arranged to have Gideon pick him up from where we’d hang out at the Packard Plant. He violated him, Sera. Your father is the reason he’s dead.”
The heavy blow of his words pressed down on me, crushing me into a million tiny pieces. I rested my head against the steering wheel and breathed deep in an effort keep the dizzying blackness at bay. Guilt hung like an anchor from my throat, his words suffocating me, killing me from the inside out. I thought about that day, and the fury in my father’s eyes, as if Eli’s insolence had slapped his pride. How he’d warned him to stay away from me, once we’d opened that door, and Eli’s refusal to follow my father’s demands, sneaking away with me at every chance.
“If I’d told someone …” My words choked on a sob, and I wiped the tears from my cheek. “I should’ve told someone.”
“It’s not your fault. Hey, it’s not your fault.” Ty’s hand slid beneath my cheek, and he guided me round, capturing my face in his palm. “Look at me, Sera. You were just a kid. You didn’t do this.”
“You don’t believe that, Ty. That’s why you came after me. Why you … pursued me. You hated me. You wanted to hurt my father, so you came after me.” I wiped my cheeks again and stared out the window, unable to look at him. “How could you sleep with me and hate me at the same time?”
“I’ve struggled with that same question. Every minute of every day. Because the truth is, I wanted to hate you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t fucking hate you, and at the time, it made no sense, but I get it now.” He pulled me against his chest, and I clutched onto him, my whole body succumbing to the shame and misery of what a part of me had suspected all along. “I get it. I get why Eli cared about you. You’re nothing like your dad. You act tough on the outside, but you’ve got a lot of heart on the inside.”
“My father used to say the most horrible things to me. About how easily he could have someone killed and get away with it. He’d say how simple it would be, with his connections, to eliminate anyone he considered an enemy. And that if I ever spoke to anyone outside of that house about anything, he would consider me one of his enemies.” My body turned sickly cold at the memories of his threats, and how I’d felt trapped inside that house. I slid from Ty’s embrace, catching sight of the paper with the scratched names in his lap. “You plan to kill him. Don’t you?”
