Chapter Twenty-Eight
Callum
When Tom and Callum had been discussing what would happen after Callum went back, they had decided to wait two weeks before Tom made contact with Carrie. That was long enough, Callum figured, to make sure nobody was watching anymore, but not so long that it would keep them from getting out of town quickly. That meant it would be two weeks before Tom and Leila could run. Two weeks before Callum knew they were safe.
He counted down the days. Only thirteen days left; only ten; only three. It gave him something encouraging to focus on while he beat his head against the impossible problem of figuring out how to bring down his father—by himself, from the opposite of a position of power, and hopefully while making it out alive in the process. Trapped in this bare room, he had nothing but time to think about how it could be done, and he still went to bed every night no closer to a solution than he had been that morning.
Had Tom been right? Had Callum made the wrong choice? The thought crept into his mind more frequently with every day that went by. Maybe he had thrown away his chance at a different life—and a future with Tom—for nothing.
During the days, he tried to put together his plan. At night, though, he thought about Tom. He lay awake, shivering from cold and solitude, remembering Tom’s warmth and weight next to him at the retreat, when they had curled up together on a bed only big enough for one of them. He wrapped his hand around his cock, trying to imagine Tom’s callused fingers in place of his own smooth ones, as he remembered their last moments together, and every time he brought himself to an unsatisfying climax, he wondered how that memory could possibly be enough to get him through the rest of his life.
Although if it was any consolation, judging by the quality of the plans he had come up with so far, it was starting to look like the rest of his life would be pretty short.
Sometimes Alec showed up to talk, but those visits only broke the monotony for a few minutes at a time. His father didn’t come back after that first day. Callum began to feel as if he had been tossed into an oubliette, left here to rot for the rest of his life while the world went on without him. His brief trips to the bathroom—twice a day, no more and no less, escorted by a guard with no talking allowed—only made him feel more trapped once the door closed behind him again.
Two days left until Tom was safe. One. Zero.
The day his countdown reached its end, Callum woke with a smile on his face for the first time since he had come back. Even if he had been forgotten, even if his plans never came together, this hadn’t been for nothing.
Even when his father opened the door that evening as he was eating the sandwich today’s guard had brought him, he couldn’t find it in himself to be nervous about what this visit might mean. Maybe his father was here to belittle him some more. Maybe he was here to give him his first assignment. It didn’t matter. Tom was safe.
Still, when his father took a seat beside him on the cot, he tensed up despite himself.
“I need you to do something for me,” his father said. Callum tensed further. It was starting. Now he would get an assignment, something that would mean hurting somebody else, something he would have to go along with or risk giving himself away. He had thought that with enough time, he could find some kind of loophole, some way to keep his place in the Syndicate without actually doing the things his father would ask him to do, but he’d had about as much luck with that as with the rest of his plan. And now his time had run out.
His father hmphed at his reaction. “You can relax, Callum. I’m not testing your cowardice just yet. This is something you can do right here from the comfort of this room. It will be easy, I promise.” He chuckled as if at some private joke, but there didn’t seem to be much humor in the sound.
“What do you want?” asked Callum, when his father didn’t continue.
His father shifted to face him. Callum had to force himself not to avoid his eyes. “My memory needs refreshing. The girl and her father—how did they die? Tell me how it happened one more time.”
Tom is safe, Callum reminded himself. Leila is safe. “I got up early that morning and waited for him in the hallway,” he said, the same story he had given his father two weeks ago. He didn’t need to worry about forgetting the details. After how many times he had practiced it with Tom, it would be burned into his memory forever. “When he came out of his bedroom, I hit him over the head with that trophy that used to sit over the fireplace—the one Mom got for swimming when she was in high school. He fell. I checked for a pulse, to make sure he was dead. He was.”
His father nodded. “And the girl?”
“Her father hit the wall when he fell,” said Callum. “It must have woken her up. She came out of her room, and when she saw her father on the floor and me there next to him, she ran. I tried to grab her arm, but she slipped away. She was fast—if she made it out the door, I didn’t know whether I could catch up with her. So I…” He let his voice trail off, closing his eyes in feigned grief.
“You hit her with the statue?” her father prompted. “Like her father?”
Callum nodded.
“You made sure she was dead?”
“Of course.”
His father gave a satisfied nod, as if this was exactly what he had expected to hear. But he didn’t look happy. His eyes glinted dangerously; his lips were white with anger. “Then how,” he asked, “do you explain this?” He tossed a Polaroid picture onto Callum’s lap.
Before he even looked down, Callum knew what he would see. Leila. She cowered against a brick wall, arms wrapped around her torso as if to shield herself from whoever was taking the photo. Callum didn’t recognize the clothes she was wearing. They weren’t what she had been wearing when he had seen her in this room. This picture hadn’t been taken that day.
The picture was new.
His father had found Leila.
This could still be some kind of trap, designed to trick him into admitting something his father only suspected. Just because the picture hadn’t been taken during Leila’s previous abduction didn’t mean it was more recent than that. “That’s not real. Or if it is, it’s old. The girl is dead—I made sure of it.”
It took all his willpower to keep his voice from shaking.
His father slapped him across the face, hard enough to make his ears ring. “Don’t lie to me.”
Callum wanted to believe that his father was still playing some kind of game with him. But hearing the genuine anger in his father’s voice, he knew better. It was real.
He raised a cold hand to his stinging lip. “How did you find her?” he asked, his voice resigned.
His father shifted as if he might strike him again. Callum couldn’t quite stop himself from flinching away. “I’m the one asking questions. Why is she alive?”
Callum thought fast. He would have to take a gamble that his father at least still believed Tom was dead. And if his father already knew about Tom, and could tell that his story was a lie… well, in that case Callum wouldn’t much care what happened to him.
“She saw that I had killed her father,” said Callum. “That much was true. But she didn’t run. She just… stood there. Like she didn’t know what was happening.” Now he allowed his voice to shake. The only way to get his father to believe him was to confirm what he already thought about Callum—that he was softhearted, weak, useless. “I couldn’t kill her. And I couldn’t bring her back here to face god-knows-what. Not when I had already taken her father away from her. I knocked her unconscious, faked the photo, and left her where she was. I figured she could find her own way to safety once she woke up. I don’t know what happened after that.”
Her father made a familiar noise of contempt. But he didn’t accuse Callum of lying again. That had to mean he didn’t know for sure that it was a lie—which meant he didn’t know Tom was alive. Callum bit his lip to hold in a desperate laugh of relief that threatened to burst out of him.
“And why should I believe this story, when you’ve already lied to me once before?” his father asked. “Am I supposed to believe you could kill the father easily, but you turned back into your old self the second you saw the girl? How do I know the father isn’t still alive as well, already working to bring us down?”
“I…” Callum scrambled for another new story. If not for Tom’s voice in his mind, reminding him that he was good at this, he didn’t know whether he could have done it. “I was trying to contact you. To tell you where to find them. I knew I had made a mistake, but I just… I couldn’t do it myself. Tom caught me making the call. He rushed me. I grabbed the trophy, and…” He stared down at his lap, blinking away feigned tears. He tried not to wonder what his eyebrows were doing.
His father made that contemptuous noise deep in his throat again. “That sounds more like it. I should have known better than to trust that other story of yours. I suppose I wanted too badly to believe that there was something useful in you after all.” He stood and began walking towards the door. He didn’t look at Callum again.
“What’s going to happen to Leila?” Callum asked his father’s retreating back.
“Leila. You think of her by name now, do you?” His father didn’t turn around as he spoke. “You should worry less about her and more about yourself.”
His father left. The door swung shut behind him with a terrible finality.
Callum picked up the picture of Leila from where it had fallen. He traced a finger over her face, wishing he could wipe away that terrified expression and replace it with one of her rare smiles. “I’ll save you,” he promised her in a whisper. “I will.”