Page 26

Jonah

The basement was worse in the wintertime.

The last time Jonah had been locked down here, it had been in the dead of summer. At the time, he’d thought nothing could be worse than the heat—the inescapability of it inside the small space, the way it seemed to take up volume of its own, bearing down on him like a physical weight. That was before he realized just how deep the cold could bury itself in his bones.

The cell—because that was what it was, a claustrophobic box intended to imprison—offered little shelter from the elements. It was a dank, windowless abyss.

If the building itself was old, the foundation was ancient, lined with stone blocks and wooden beams slatted along the low ceiling. A singular lightbulb was all Jonah had for light, but even that had been switched off before Shepard locked the door .

The hours passed differently with no way to track them. He didn’t know how long he’d been down here, and more to the point, he didn’t know how long Shepard intended to keep him down there. He couldn’t afford to think about it if he wanted to retain his sanity, but he couldn’t fool himself, either. Shepard was furious, and this time it was entirely Jonah’s fault.

Maybe if it had only been the money.

Maybe if it had only been the bloody knuckles and the client he’d left in a wailing heap on the hotel floor.

But Jonah’s mistakes hadn’t ended there.

Shepard had found Liam’s note.

It had slipped out of his pocket in the struggle—Shepard’s twisted way of ‘recouping’ a night of lost earnings. Maybe his punishment would have started and ended with the assault if not for the evidence of the other offense written in ink.

Dear Jonah, Call me, the note said.

He should have known his decision to keep it would come back to bite him, but it had felt more important to hold onto that last thread of connection. Each week, when he’d seen Liam, some part of him was always braced for the possibility that it would be the last time. Now that day had come and gone, and in the end, he hadn’t gotten to keep the Liam anyway.

It didn’t help that it was the second time in a matter of months that the use of Jonah’s real name had gotten back to him. Jonah had never seen Ross Shepard so angry.

The rest of the house had been asleep upstairs, so he had dragged Jonah into the cellar to dole out his punishment. Jonah hadn’t expected to be left down there afterward, but Shepard’s fury bordered on something like hysteria. It was unsettling in a way that made every one of his survival instincts stand on edge, watching Shepard’s cool, arrogant demeanor slip so quickly. Jonah was no stranger to his fits of anger and violence, but this had been different.

Jonah hadn’t been able to convince him that he hadn’t spilled the truth about Shepard’s operation to someone. He wouldn’t hear it. Before he locked him in, Shepard had left him with the vague warning that he needed to “figure out what to do with him.”

Jonah didn’t know what that meant, but he knew it wouldn’t land in his favor.

When he was a child, Jonah had been taught that God’s will would come to pass, no matter what. The things that happened in life—good or bad—happened because they were supposed to. Maybe this chain of events was, if not strictly what Jonah deserved, at least what he needed; a reminder that stringing hope along would only prolong the pain.

Someone like Liam was never meant to be in his life forever. Maybe it was better that there had been a clean cut, one that absolved either of them from the burden of being the one to end things.

Now, on the small mattress in the corner of the room, Jonah rolled onto his back, staring up into the darkness. It was the only position that didn’t irritate the full bloom of bruises across his face, but it left him even more vulnerable to the cold. He curled his toes in his shoes, trying to see if he had any feeling left in them. He squeezed his hands into fists to do the same, but immediately released them when the cut on his palm flared bright with pain. He let out a breath, knowing he would have seen a cloud of vapor if he could have seen anything at all.

As he lay there, waiting for numbness to claim him, the story from Sunday school that had returned to him time and time again took root like a weed in his brain.

Jonah had become his own namesake.

If he squinted up at the ceiling, he could almost convince his eyes of vague shapes taking form in the blackness. His memory filled in the blanks of rotted beams slotted one after the other, like the ivory arches of a ribcage. The messy threads of dangling wires woven like capillaries. The cold, wet walls like a prison of flesh.

This was it , he thought. He had found himself in the belly of the whale.