Page 28

Jonah

He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until the sound of footsteps on the stairs woke him. Shepard’s silhouette blocked most of the light from the upstairs hallway, but the sudden flicker of the basement bulb made Jonah wince. After so long in the dark, even the dimmest light was hard to take.

“Have a good nap, princess?”

Notably, he had come alone; no Marcus to shadow three steps behind him.

Jonah tracked his approach with wary eyes, the only part of his body capable of movement. Even as the distance closed between them, Jonah couldn’t find the will to retreat. There was nowhere to go, anyway.

“Oh, are you not talking to me? Is that what’s happening?” Shepard dropped into a slow, predatory crouch beside the mattress. “You’re lucky, you know,” he continued. “I could have left you down here to rot, but you’ve been requested for a job tonight. Big spender, friend of a friend. I thought it might be worth giving you a chance at redemption.”

Dread solidified in Jonah’s chest, like cooling magma. Anyone Shepard would risk sending him to, considering the evidence of a beating this bad still painted over his skin, clearly didn’t have Jonah’s best interest in mind.

“Nothing?” Shepard tilted his head. “No gratitude at all?”

He could feel the rise in tension as Jonah refused to look at him, refused to speak or move or otherwise acknowledge his presence. The throbbing in his face—a constant reminder of the price of his resistance—should have been motivation enough, but numbness settled over him, dulling his senses.

For a moment, he entertained the idea of going limp. Playing dead and accepting the consequences, whatever they might be. What would happen?

Would Shepard simply drag him upstairs, into the shower, and into a car by force? But then if Jonah still refused? After that? What would he do? Would he hit him? Rape him? He had done all that a hundred times before. What more was there left to fear from the devil he knew?

Maybe this would be the final straw. Would that really be all it took? Could ending this be as simple as lying flat on the basement floor and waiting?

Jonah closed his eyes. There was no order to his thoughts, if they were even complete thoughts at all. There wasn’t even any particularly strong feeling behind them. It was just a rush of numbness so sudden and intense that it rendered him a statue. He couldn’t obey even if he wanted to. He was no longer at the helm in his own body.

(How long had it been since he was?)

“Okay, then,” Shepard said, a frightening chill in his voice. “Let’s skip the pleasantries. I have something else I wanted to show you.”

Jonah wasn’t interested. What more could Shepard possibly have had on him? As if the threat of breaking his court order, the threat of turning him in for murder, and the constant threat of violence to him and his family wasn’t enough. What was there left to take from someone who had nothing?

That was what he had thought, anyway.

The moment Shepard pulled out his phone and showed Jonah what he had pulled up on the screen, he knew he had underestimated him.

“It’s amazing,” Shepard said with a smile, “how much information you can trace from a simple phone number.”

From the brightness of the screen, Liam’s green eyes stared back at him in a photo that looked only a few months old. He was wearing an apron and smiling, his arm around a woman with long, beaded braids. Jonah was going to be sick.

“Liam Cassidy,” Shepard said, the name sounding poisonous and wrong on his tongue. “Twenty-one years old, a student at the College of DuPage. Works at Lenny’s Diner in Naperville, Illinois. That’s not too far from here, Jonah. I could have someone there within the hour, if I wanted.”

“He hasn’t done anything.” Jonah’s voice was broken from disuse when he spoke.

“Oh, there he is.” Shepard grinned, clicking the phone off and pocketing it once again. “I don’t know if that’s true. He seems to know a lot more than he should.”

“He doesn’t know about you,” Jonah promised. “I never told him the truth.”

“How can I believe you? You’ve proven to me over and over again how much of a liar you are. No. On second thought, I think I’m done giving second chances.”

Jonah’s heart was beating out of his chest.

“You, my friend, are going to follow through on this job tonight. You are going to be a good boy and make me back the money you tried to steal from me yesterday. And then you can come back here, and we can discuss how things are going to work going forward.” He leaned down, dangerously close. “Because if you step one toe out of line from now on, little Liam is going to get a bullet in the head. Is that what you want? Two bodies on your conscience?”

He watched as Shepard stood to his full height.

It was never going to end. The realization spread over him like a physical chill.

If one threat ever weakened with time, there would always be one more thing to hold over him.

There was no expiration date on Shepard’s plan to run Jonah’s life into the ground, short of finding someone new to target, and Jonah didn’t want that either. He didn’t think he would last long enough to see it happen .

Shepard could do what he wanted to him as retribution; Jonah wouldn’t allow him to wield Liam’s life as a threat. He didn’t dare show him that it would work.

He felt the moment the final thread snapped. The rest was freefall.

“You can go fuck yourself,” he heard himself say.

An eerie stillness fell over Shepard. His eyes trained on him like a heat-seeking missile. “What was that?”

With all the strength left in his body, Jonah forced himself up and onto his knees, swaying slightly on the mattress. He braced one hand against the stone wall and looked Shepard in the eyes. “Go,” he said slowly, “ fuck yourself.”

He was weak enough already that the first backhand flattened him, but it didn’t matter. He had coaxed Shepard back into his space, and Jonah would fight like a cornered animal to kill him before he could ever lay a hand on Liam.

He barely recognized the fingers as his own as they scraped bloody lines down Shepard’s face. A scream—a year’s worth of anger and fear and bottled-up misery—erupted from his throat. He swung out wildly, never knowing if the hits landed before he threw the next. It all became too much to follow, just a storm-rocked ship of blood and pain and rage.

He didn’t see the kick coming until it crashed into his side.

Jonah fell flat off the mattress, a ragdoll against hard cement, and he didn’t get back up.

Still, the assault didn’t end .

He closed his eyes and saw himself on the ground outside a park bathroom, parting with his last three dollars. He saw himself at the kitchen table with his parents and his pastor in his childhood home. He saw himself on a supercut of hotel mattresses, and he thought: Was this death? Was this the only way out he was brave enough to pursue?

When Shepard grabbed him by the shoulders, turning him onto his back, Jonah drove the nail into his own coffin.

He looked the monster in the eyes and spit in his face.

Hands closed around his throat. The crush of fingers cut off his air immediately. Jonah scrambled and scratched, but the hold was unyielding. Black spots danced in his vision, growing and growing until he could barely see the glaring eyes looking down at him.

A sickening realization settled into place—that those eyes would be the last thing he ever saw.

Jonah’s death would be a silent one, confined within the walls of the same basement that had hosted his original descent into hell. It would likely be covered up, buried along with him, another disappearing statistic. A hapless ending to a tragic story that would never be told.

He hoped his mother and father might think of him again, someday, and regret what they had done. He hoped Liam might remember him and smile.

Everything went black. The only sound in the room became a ringing in his ears.

He was dying.

He was dead .

And then.

And then.

A blast so powerful he would have recoiled from the sound if his body had any life left inside of it. He could breathe again—just long enough for one desperate pull for oxygen—and then he couldn’t, as a heavy, immovable, weight dropped onto his chest.

The weight was gone as soon as it came, and suddenly everything felt lighter. Fuzzier. There was something wet and sticky on his skin. He still couldn’t open his eyes.

The noise faded out again, the ringing even stronger than before, and when it trickled back in, there was somebody else there with him.

“Jonah.”

A voice. One he recognized. There was a smell, too—faint, but present—of cigarette smoke and coffee. A smell that felt like leather upholstery and the rumble of tires on the freeway.

The voice called him by his name, telling him to “ wake up, come on kid, open your eyes.”

Marcus, he thought. But the puzzle piece didn’t fit. It couldn’t have been him, because the hands on his neck, on his face, were gentle. Because the voice spoke like it wanted him to live. Because the voice introduced itself to someone as, “Agent Ellis... need a bus to the house... dead...”

Was he talking about Jonah? Was Jonah dead?

That didn’t make sense. He was still in too much pain to be dead. Trying to piece the fragments together was too taxing, and Jonah didn’t see the point anymore. He felt himself slipping further underwater, the world around him growing more and more muffled until—

A bright flare of light shone directly into his eye. Jonah tried to make a noise of protest, but the effort lit flames down his throat. A woman with blue gloves hovered over him, just past the light. “Don’t try to speak,” she said from somewhere a million miles away. When his eye snapped shut again, he realized she must have been the one holding it open.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“Sir, please take a step back.”

Jonah slipped under again.

In his next lucid moment, Jonah was somewhere else entirely. The air around him was cold like the basement, but the light on the other side of his eyelids was bright enough to make his head pound. The concrete beneath him had gone soft. He was... moving.

“Male, age nineteen. Significant trauma to the head and abdomen.” Another voice carried somewhere far above him. “BP is seventy over forty... pupils are responsive but delayed... Patient lost flow of oxygen for an unknown period of time.” Then, softer, “Hon, can you tell us your name?”

Even now, Jonah knew the rules. Be good. Lie. Don’t tell anyone your real name.

“Leo,” he tried to say.

“His name is Jonah Prince.”

“Are you his father? ”

My father doesn’t care about me, Jonah tried to tell them, but there was something over his mouth and nose, trapping all of his words.

“ No, I— No, I’m not his father.”

“I’m going to ask you to wait out here, sir.”

“Please, just. . . Please, don’t let him die.”

“We’re going to do everything we can.”

This time, when the current dragged him under, Jonah wondered if it would take.