He’s sent me videos of himself branding his initials into her left butt cheek. Raping her anally. Whipping her until she passes out.
Thanks to a lifetime’s worth of brutal self-denial of my feelings, I don’t even break a sweat as I watch. My heartbeat actually drops a little. An observer who didn’t know better would think I was watching a corporate training video. But there’s a part of me that’s an enraged, screaming animal, torn away from its mate. I am still walling that part of me away for now, but it’s coming at a cost. I can feel it. I spent an entire lifetime of moving through life fueled only by anger and revenge and lust. Now I realize that many other emotions were living inside me the whole time, raging and hurling themselves against the prison bars of my mind.
Sorrow. Terrible grief at the loss of my mother and my brothers, at the loss of the childhood we never had.
Burning, corroding hatred of my father.
Tamara’s kidnapping broke some kind of dam inside me. All those emotions are bubbling up like hot lava. It is taking more and more mental effort to keep them suppressed, and soon there will be a reckoning. An explosion that will tear me apart.
But to save Tamara, I need to keep those emotions locked away, because I must think with a clear head. Panic and rage are not useful to me; those emotions cloud the senses and muddy the thinking. Until she’s safe, the bad feelings and dangerous thoughts will stay right where they need to, festering in a toxic sludge that’s eroding my sanity.
My heartbeat is speeding up.
No.
I need to focus.
As I sit in my office, working the computer, I remind myself of the control I still have.
I am confident that Charlemagne doesn’t know I’m here, which is helpful. I accessed the location tracker on the cell phone he gave me, and I rewrote the software so the phone would still report that I was in New York.
And I have figured out how he fooled the surveillance team I paid to watch Dr. Barnard and his family. Ever since the day I had my brother trapped at the Blackthorne Institute, I had them under guard. I needed Dr. Barnard to know that if he ever let Charlemagne escape, his family would pay the price.
But somehow, Charlemagne’s been free for six months, and Dr. Barnard never said a word to me. Even worse, he lied to me and showed me fake video making it look as if Charlemagne was still locked up.
Looking over the surveillance video of the Barnard family, I have a good idea of why he did that.
Charlemagne was holding different members of Dr. Barnard’s family prisoner. That’s how he got Dr. Barnard to cooperate, to maintain the ruse that he was still safely tucked away at the Blackthorne Institute.
Dr. Barnard would go out for a walk with his wife and a couple of his kids. A week later, he’d be seen taking three of his kids out to dinner, but this time, the wife and other two kids weren’t there. The entire family hasn’t been seen together at one time in six months.
And close-ups of the videos show the strained looks on their faces, the tightness of their smiles. I should have noticed that a lot sooner. If I were better at understanding and interpreting human emotions, I would have.
If Charlemagne has been holding members of the family prisoner, that means they know where he’s staying. Early this morning, I had my men stage a raid on Dr. Barnard’s house, and they snatched up Dr. Barnard and the two boys who are currently with him.
It’s midmorning when Dr. Barnard and his two sons, Fletcher and Paul, arrive. Fletcher is twelve and Paul is ten. The whole family is blond with pale blue eyes and fair complexions. They’re all pale from strain, and there’s a haunted look in their eyes, but Dr. Barnard is the only one who’s been crying. His cheeks are still wet with tears and his lean face is puckered with self-pity. His sons just look angry and resolute. They’re more man than he is, and their voices haven’t even changed yet.
Fletcher looks at me suspiciously. “You’re not Micah,” he says to me. “You look like him, but you walk differently.”
Smart boys.
“I’m his twin brother. My name is Joshua. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I just need to talk to you.” I’ve never been the type to say reassuring things before. Tamara’s influence again.
I gesture at Garrett. “Take them down the hall and give them some video games while I talk to their father,” I say to him.
They glance at their father. He looks away, avoiding their eyes, and he wails as I lead him down the hall. He’s actually crying out loud in front of his children. Jesus. What a pussy.
Once I get him into my sound-proofed workroom, I tie Dr. Barnard to a chair and I pull up my cart of tools. I pick up a skinning knife. I don’t have time to screw around.
He starts crying louder, like a big miserable infant.
“I wish I’d never met you,” he snivels. “Do you know what your brother did to me?”
“No, but I hope it hurt. Now you’re going to start talking.”
He tells me everything he knows. Charlemagne seduced one of the nurses and, with her help, escaped six months ago. Dr. Barnard was stupid enough to try to cover it up so I wouldn’t find out.
That was a mistake.
My brother kidnapped Dr. Barnard and took him to a big empty warehouse and cut his balls off to pay him back for keeping him prisoner. He interrogated Dr. Barnard and found out I was the one behind his continued imprisonment. He also showed Dr. Barnard’s the head of the nurse who helped him escape. Left it sitting on a table next to him while he tortured him.
Then he set him free, but only after kidnapping Dr. Barnard’s wife and two of his daughters. And ever since then, he’s swapped them out like pieces in a chess game. Sometimes he’d keep the daughters, sometimes the sons, sometimes the wife would get to stay with her kids, sometimes he’d send her back home and keep a few of her children. There are three girls and two boys.
If Dr. Barnard utters a word, they’ll be killed.
His wife and his daughters were snatched up a week ago, and his sons returned to him. He has no idea, of course, where they’re being held.
So here he is, a neutered, pathetic, sniveling shell of his former self. His life unraveled by greed and stupidity.
But what he’s telling me is the biggest break I’ve gotten so far.
For this to work, Charlemagne would have to be staying in a house that’s reasonably close to Dr. Barnard’s family. My search area just shrunk considerably.
I hurry to the room where Fletcher and Paul are waiting. They’re sitting on a couch, huddled close together. Garrett gave them Nintendo Switches, but they’re just ignoring them, talking to each other in low voices.
“Are you friends with your brother?” Fletcher blurts out when I walk over to them.
“No, I’m not. He wants to kill me, but I’m going to kill him first. And I brought you here so you can help me find him. Then you’ll be free.”
Long ago, I told Dr. Barnard that if he let my brother escape, I’d kill his family. He’d nodded and smiled and cashed my checks. I meant it then. But Tamara has worked her magic on me, and now I couldn’t do it. I won’t hurt these boys. They’ve already had enough of a rotten hand dealt to them, with a father like Dr. Barnard. He didn’t even say a word about his sons when I left him.
Paul glances at Fletcher for reassurance. Fletcher pats his brother on the shoulder. I’m strangely fascinated. My brothers and I never dared to offer each other comfort; our father would have seen it as a sign of weakness and punished us both until we bled.
“He has our mother and our sisters,” Fletcher says, clenching his fists. “Can you find them?”
“Yes, but only with your help. I need you to tell me everything you can. Think about places he kept you. Did you go by car or in a plane? And was it always the same place?”
“It was always the same place,” Fletcher says. “He put us in the back of a van, and he tried to trick us by driving around and taking different routes. But I paid attention while we were driving, and I counted in my head to keep
track of time. The shortest time it ever took was three hours, and the longest it took was five. But his house isn’t three hours from ours. Even the time he drove for three hours, he was driving back and forth for a while to make it seem like it was farther away than it really was.”
I nod approvingly. “Excellent! You guys are geniuses.” The words feel strange on my tongue. Kindness. Reassurance. I’m a new man, Tamara. Please survive so I can show you.
Fletcher smiles just a little, then the smile vanishes. “Sometimes we smelled this really foul manure smell, like from some kind of farm, and that was about half an hour before we got there. We didn’t smell it every time, though.”
Hope floods through me. “This is fantastic. You’re helping me narrow it down. Anything else you can tell me will be helpful. Did you get any sense of how big the house was inside? I can start searching property records.”
Fletcher frowns in concentration. “Not really. We’d drive into a garage, and the door would close behind us, and we’d have to wear hoods on our heads until we got to the part of the house where he kept us. We never saw the outside of the house, and the windows were all blocked off.”
“Oh! The bird.” Paul speaks up suddenly. He looks at his older brother, who shrugs, looking skeptical. “I heard it one time when we were pulling into the garage. It was a double ring-necked warbler that’s mostly found in Tehama County.” At Fletcher’s skeptical look, he tells him, “I know what I heard.”
Tehama County would make sense. It’s within the driving range we’re talking about, and it’s remote and rural. A perfect place for Micah’s needs.
“But that was one time. And different birds can sound like each other. If you’re wrong, if you send him to the wrong place…” Fletcher protests.
“I know what I heard. I know birds.” Paul looks at me. “I’m going to be a wildlife biologist,” he says with pride. Then his face falls. “If you don’t murder us.”
Something twists inside me. I remember waking up every morning as a child, wondering if this would be the day my father would kill me. I grew numb to it in the end.
“I am nothing like my brother. That’s why he’s my enemy. Nobody is going to kill you, because I will keep you safe,” I say fiercely. “I’m going to find your mother and your sisters, and it’s going to be because of what you just told me, and I’m going to make sure you stay safe and protected. I swear to you. Your days of living in fear are over.”
Who is saying these words? Superhero Joshua?
And I actually mean those words. I wish Tamara could see me now.
I see both boys visibly relax, and Fletcher puts his arm around his brother’s shoulder. They exchange glances, and I see the hope in their eyes.
“He’s telling the truth,” Fletcher says to Paul. “He’s not like his brother.”
“You’ve given me some good tips,” I say. “Let me get to work.”
Now that I’ve taken them, the clock is ticking down. I’ve got to make my move. I call Ruiz and tell him what I’ve just learned. Then I return to my computer to search property records again with a renewed sense of hope.
Chapter Seven
Tamara
When Micah walks through the door right around lunchtime, my muscles lock up in fear. I see the look on his face. It’s that look he gets when he’s about to hurt me. Manic glee lights up his eyes, and there’s a bounce to his step.
He skipped the last three days of torture sessions. He hasn’t made any videos in the last three days either.
He’s dragging this out, letting me heal before he starts in on me again. And for Joshua, not getting those videos will be a nightmare. He’ll be thinking the worst, picturing me dead.
If he’s still looking for me.
I’m struggling to hold on to hope, but with every day, it’s fading. I was able to survive my time with Joshua because underneath it all, I knew I had at least some control over my fate. And I knew Joshua wanted me. He wanted to own me, yes, to possess me completely, but I knew he didn’t want me dead. Micah wants me dead.
And from the nasty gleam in his eyes, I can see he’s got something especially harsh in store for me today. There’s something made of cloth bunched up in his hand. What is it hiding? Something bad. It can only be something bad.
“Today’s going to be a little different,” Micah says to me as he unchains me. I stand up slowly, painfully. I feel tight and swollen and hot all over, despite Astrid coming in every day to change my bandages, clean my wounds, and give me medication. Every part of my body is battered. The cut marks on my chest, the brand on my buttocks, the whip marks on my back… will he start in on my face today? There’s not much unmarked flesh left.
I stare at the floor, waiting for him to do whatever he’s going to do.
He grabs my chin and turns my head to make me look at him. His mouth is twisted into a smirk. His eyes are cruel, eager to drink in my suffering. “What, no smart remarks?”
“They’d be wasted,” I reply coolly. I won’t reward him with tears or screams unless he forces them out of me. When I’m in between torture sessions, I retreat into my shell, wearing an indifferent mask. There’s no drawn-out sobbing or hysteria, not like Heather, who punctuates long bouts of silence with fits of crying.
“Careful.” His smirk tightens, his lips drawing back into a grimace. “Piss me off and I’ll go have fun with your friend instead. And it will be your fault.”
I stare right into his ice blue eyes. “Micah, or Charlemagne, or whatever dress-up game you’re playing today, nothing I say or do is going to make any difference. You’ll do whatever your inadequate, perverted little brain dreams up, no matter what. And either Joshua will find us in time to save us, or he won’t.”
“You’re so brave,” he croons sarcastically. “I see why Joshua loves you.”
“He doesn’t love me,” I snap. “I told you that already. I was just another possession. Another project.” Do I believe that, or am I just saying it in the faint hope that he’ll stop torturing me? I’m not sure what I think about Joshua, or about anything anymore. My only thoughts now are how to survive the next few minutes, the next few hours.
He smiles with triumph. “Oh, I saw the way he looked at you, drinking you in like the finest wine. That was love, Tamara.”
Is that true? I want it to be true, and not just because it means he won’t abandon me here. If I have to die here, I want to die knowing I was loved. That someone will miss me fiercely. I want to have mattered.
Micah holds out the cloth in his hand. I see it’s a dress.
“Hold out your arms. I’ll help you get dressed.” I do, wincing as he roughly pulls my arms through the sleeves of a wraparound dress, then pulls it around me, tying it at the waist. The place where he carved his initials into my chest is partially exposed, the “S” peeking out in a hideous red squiggle.
This is the first time I’ve had clothes on since I’ve been here. I can’t fathom why he’s dressing me. What does this mean?
I glance over at Heather, who hasn’t spoken to me in the last twenty-four hours. She doesn’t look up from her bed.
He wraps his fingers around my arm. “Come with me,” he says. And he takes me, not to the side of the room where he tortures me, but out of the room. We pause for that retina scanner on the way out, and when we step into the hallway, he slams the barred door shut behind us with a resounding clang.
I curse my physical weakness. I can barely move now without crying. While I know where to strike him to take him out, I lack the strength to do it. I had these big dreams of using my secret sparring knowledge to disable him, and they’ve come to nothing.
The hallway is bare of decoration; no pictures on the white plaster walls, no carpet on the laminate floor. Micah hauls me limping past several doors, around a corner, down another long, plain hallway, and into a big, sparsely furnished living room. Astrid is sitting on a black leather couch with a girl who looks to be nine or ten, and two young teenaged girls. They look like their mo
ther, lean and pretty with dirty-blond hair. They’re all wearing jeans, blouses, sneakers, and wary, frightened expressions.
He introduces them. Her daughters are named Darlie, Julianne and Robin. Darlie looks like she’s about nine or ten, and Julianne and Robin are teenagers.
My heart aches for them. They’re so young. They don’t deserve this hell. Even if they survive this, they’ll never be the same.
“Oh, don’t look so sad,” Micah says with cruel cheerfulness. “I promised them when I first took them that I wouldn’t hurt them as long as they cooperated with me and followed my orders to the letter.” He puts particular emphasis on those last three words, and I feel a faint shiver of alarm. Astrid doesn’t seem to notice. “That’s the deal we have, isn’t, Astrid?”
I see her eyes flicker with annoyance. His insistence on using her first name when she asked him not to is just another of his stupid bullying power moves. What a petty little tyrant. Even more reason to loathe him.
“Yes,” she says quietly, not looking at him. “You have reminded me of that many times.”
He glances at me. “Why don’t you sit here and socialize for a while? Lunch is on the table.” He points at a coffee table sitting in front of a sofa, and I see there is a platter of sandwiches and a pitcher of what looks like iced tea, with glasses. “I’ll be back whenever I fucking feel like it.”
Darlie flinches at his language, and Astrid’s lips thin as she presses them together. For some reason, the fact that he’s using that kind of language in front of a child ignites a flare of rage deep inside me, even though it’s the least of his transgressions.
Of course, there’s nothing I can do about it, or anything that he’s doing to us. A dull, leaden lump of despair settles in my stomach.
There’s another of those retina scanner panels next to the door. He uses it to exit the room.
I walk very slowly over to the couch, my breath hitching with every step, and Astrid helps me to sit down. I groan as I settle back against the cushions. Her daughters look at me with dismayed expressions, their gazes flicking to my scarred chest. I’m suddenly conscious of the barbell piercings; are they visible through the fabric? Shame burns through me, and I cross one arm over my chest, awkwardly trying to hide myself.
The Trials of Tamara Page 6
