Arden looked at Dylan the moment the sound of Ryan’s truck faded away. “Have you told him yet?” she asked. Some of the pain was gone from her voice, replaced by a tone that he knew rather well. Sharp, biting condescension.

“Told him...what?”

“That you want to fuck him.”

Dylan dropped his head into his hands again, something that he just couldn’t seem to stop doing today. His brain felt heavy and swollen, so full of bitter thoughts that he just didn’t know what to do with himself. “Arden, please. Not tonight. On any other night except for this one.”

“Why? You don’t get to be the only one who’s hurting, Dylan. While I was here dealing with our son’s abduction all by myself, you were off with that boneheaded alpha, jumping his Johnson!”

“Stop!” he snapped, baring his teeth at her. She growled in response, then lowered her head to wipe new tears from her eyes. Her fingers came away smudged with mascara. “We can’t do this. Look, you said you were tired. Go to bed. I’ll just sit here out on the couch by the phone. I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway.”

“What makes you think I will?”

Despite himself, he smiled. “You’ve always been able to sleep.”

For a moment, only a moment, some of the old warmth and familiarity passed between them. Then, Arden stood up, touched his hair, and walked down the hallway to her bedroom. The door shut behind her.

And what was that? A soft click that came just after the door was shut? She had locked her bedroom door. Did she honestly think he would try something, or was it just a force of habit?

He didn’t know what unnerved him more. Hunter was only five. He was hardly more than a baby. He was going to wake up some nights needing his mother but would be incapable of getting to her because of that lock. It wasn’t right.

But there was nothing he could do about it. He had no right to declare something right or wrong in Arden’s house.

He sat there in the living room, looking up at the ceiling fan while listening to the water running in Arden’s bathroom. He could have described what she was doing and in the exact order in which she would do it, and he probably could have relayed exactly how much time those various tasks would take to complete. If he had anything good to say about their marriage, it was that they were both creatures of routine who had respected the other’s habits.

Eventually the light shining beneath the bedroom door ceased to exist. Bedsprings groaned, and then there was nothing but the purring furnace and the sound of his own breathing to fill the house.

Where had he gone wrong? Surely going on that trip with Ryan hadn’t caused all this. That was a preposterous idea, one planted in his head by Arden. Even if he had been in Portsmouth today, even if he had been nearby, this would still have happened. It wasn’t as if he should have been involved with this in the first place. He wasn’t the one who had taken Hunter to school. He had nothing to do with this at all. He couldn’t have stopped this from happening.

Yet, the whole trip had been a waste anyway because his look into the well had been interrupted. He had nothing to show for his efforts, and in fact had less than before.

He wondered who Ryan had seen, feeling wretched about it. Surely Ryan hadn’t seen him or else he would have said so.

Or maybe not, as this wasn’t exactly an appropriate time.

There was still that hope, that wretched force of nature which kept him going onward even though he wanted to simply stop.

Overcome with his own wretchedness, Dylan just watched the ceiling and let the night pass him by. Towards midnight, a new sound joined the heater and the two performed an odd duet. Arden was snoring. She had always snored and had tried just about every product on the market, tested every home remedy in a vain attempt to rid herself of this ailment. Nothing had worked and she had been on the verge of doing her nasal cavity some harm, the doctors told her, so she moved on and accepted that it was part of her life.

The sound was like a rusty chainsaw, a high whine that ebbed on occasion before ripping back into life. She was completely out, down for the count.

Dylan shifted into his wolf form to move as silently as possible and slid off the couch.

No way am I going to disturb her after the day she’s had. She needs her sleep. To face what might come tomorrow.

He crept down the hallway and went into the only other room. Hunter’s room. Nosing the door mostly shut behind him, allowing just a sliver of pale light to filter in, he sat down and looked around at the wonderful innocence of childhood.

Hunter had long since transitioned to sleeping in a big-boy bed, though the Pokémon sheets and pillowcase would never allow anyone to mistake it as the sleeping place of an adult. The bed was made, though it was hard to tell when the entire mattress was covered in a swarm of big-eyed, cuddly monsters in all shapes and colors.

There were many shelves and an entire bookshelf shoved into the small room. There was hardly an inch of space left available on these shelves, they were so thoroughly occupied by toys, models, and figurines. There were hundreds of dollars’ worth of Lego sets here.

In one corner of the room was a miniature desk, painted blue. The paint was chipping now. Dylan suspected these chips were all deliberate. Sitting at that desk, needing something to do with his hands, Hunter probably picked at the paint. Like father, like son.

On top of the desk was an open laptop, plugged in.

Puzzled, Dylan shifted, moved over to the desk and crouched down to examine the computer. It was blue, small, and chunky, looking like a thing meant to take some tossing around. A label on the back declared it property of Hunter’s school.

A memory came back to him, of a few months before kindergarten started. The expected bill covering book fees had come in the mail, but it also included a staggering sum meant to be the rental cost for this very laptop. Schools were becoming more and more bound to the digital realm, transferring over from pen-and-paper assignments to ones given online. As this change progressed, students were given their own computers to take home.

Arden thought this was brilliant, and well worth the cost. The laptop basically belonged to Hunter until fourth grade, at which point he would get a more complex model to last him until eighth grade. After graduation, the laptop would be returned to be given to the next generation of students.

Dylan absolutely hated it.

He wasn’t against advancements in technology, because everything they had today was a result of a more intelligent society spreading its wings. Better food, better medicine, better quality of life. Children were smarter these days, able to access more information than ever before. Learning was in transition from something that had to be done, to something kids wanted to do.

At the same time, it made him very sad to see his son lounging around the house all day with his game system. Once-fun options like a walk around the block or a trip to the park was overshadowed by more time playing those games. Not that he was against games, either. In fact, what little he’d seen fascinated him, and he wished he’d had things like that as a kid. Just, moderation was important.

He thought that it was funny that studies had proved people remembered things better after writing them down by hand, versus typing on a computer, yet schools were leaning towards the latter. Counterintuitive, he thought.

He’d complained about it to anyone who would listen, which usually meant he was talking to Ryan. Ryan agreed with him, because Ryan always agreed.

Now, he wished he hadn’t ever said anything. He wished that, instead of nagging Hunter to do different things, he had sat down with his son to learn more about what had his interest. He should have tried harder, learned more, been better.

Heart aching, he reached out to touch the laptop’s keyboard, to stroke the keys where his son’s sticky fingers had been. Before he even touched it, the screen lit up and displayed a screen to ask him for a username and password.

Dylan frowned. Did the laptop need to update or something? It must have received a notification for something to just turn on like that, all on its own.

I should leave it alone.

But it would drive him crazy to do that, and he was much too close to insanity already to take that risk. He couldn’t leave anything unfinished.

But where would a little kid leave their password so they could remember it?

A soft smile tugged at the edges of his lips. He picked up the laptop and turned it over to look at the bottom. A piece of paper had been taped to the underside and two lines of text were scrawled in the painstaking hand of a child.

Username – hunterj

Password – pokemonarecool

Apparently the kids got to pick their own passwords. It took Dylan a bit to decipher it but after three tries, he was in.

Hunter had yet to learn the value of properly shutting down a computer when he was finished with it, it seemed. Rather than loading up as it should have, displaying a desktop background, he was immediately shown a white webpage.

This isn’t looking good.

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it, yet it also wasn’t what he’d feared it was at first. He didn’t allow Hunter online on his own without supervision, though Arden might not have the same rules. Seeing that website show up had ignited fear very deep inside him, in a place where no parent ever wanted to go. He thought Hunter might have wandered across some sort of human trafficking website, or...

But, no. It was an email homepage. A school email, he quickly figured out, looking at the logo and the address. Hunter’s school email.

Scanning the emails his son had received, he felt his heart rate go down somewhat as he saw that they were all either newsletters or homework reminders. Innocent stuff.

Up at the top of the list of received messages was a notification, presumably the one that had resulted in the computer awakening from its sleep.

Unknown Email Incoming, the notification read. The text was thick and blocky, written in exactly the sort of font a little kid would prefer. The wholesomeness of it was jarring in comparison to that notification, which seemed to carry all sorts of connotations, none of them good.

He shouldn’t do this. He shouldn’t click on that notification, shouldn’t hit the Accept button. It was probably spam that had wormed its way through the filters put in place to prevent it. The contents would either be worthless gibberish or sexual in nature, perhaps with a side of virus to boot. No good could come of this. He could feel it in the air, as if the entire world was warning him not to push that button.

He pushed the button.

The message didn’t immediately pop up but was instead allowed to enter his inbox.

Open Me, was the subject line.

“Well,” he growled, “how could I resist that?”

Sliding his finger over the sticky touchpad, Dylan selected the email and opened it.

His heart stopped.

He had heard that expression sometimes and thought it was a bit of an exaggeration, because the heart didn’t just stop unless something had gone terribly wrong.

Now, he understood.

Something had gone terribly wrong. And for a long moment, his heart stopped. The whole world ceased to exist before jumping forward to catch up on the time that had been lost. The room lurched around him. His heart began to pound, racing faster than it had ever before, beating too hard to even breathe. His pulse was like a force of nature, the unending, churning cadence of the ocean.

The message was short and simple.

“We have your son. We will have him for a week. $50,000 will be delivered to Baneberry, TN, before we have him no longer.”

Every parent’s worst nightmare had come true. His son had been stolen and was being held for ransom, for an impossible sum of money. They had a week. There was no telling what would happen in the duration of that week, what monstrous acts his son might be forced to suffer through. And at the end of the week...

“Arden!”

His first shout was nothing more than a weak gasp, his soul strangled by terror and pain.

He tried again. “Arden!” And this time what emerged from his throat was a howl of despair unlike anything the world had ever known. He heard a thump as his ex fell out of bed and he was at the door in an instant, hammering on it and hollering for her to come out.

The five seconds it took for her to get to the door and open it were much too long, as if he had been standing there for five years instead. “What the hell is your problem?” she demanded.

He couldn’t find the right words to express what he had seen or in how many ways the world had been turned on its head, so he grabbed her by the wrist and tugged her into their son’s bedroom to show her the computer. She protested the whole way, even threatening to call the police on him if he didn’t get a grip right now, but the onslaught of abuse and name-calling ended abruptly when she finally looked where he was pointing and saw the email.

Her face went flat and still. The earth had just dropped out from beneath her feet. He waited and it felt like the hardest thing he had ever done, to wait and know all the while that every second was counting down towards a terrible deed.

“Dilly?” Arden’s voice was very small.

“Yes?”

“Call the cops. Now.”