One with Victor’s ring at the other end. Victor, who’s always been so much stronger than me. And always will be.
I’m trapped! I’m trapped again, and this time, I’m at his complete mercy.
Speaking out loud again, Victor flashes me another malicious smile. “I told you you’d never be able to escape me. But you might as well get that.”
There’s a phone…a phone vibrating on the counter between us.
I wake up again.
But this time for real. The sun of a new day is shining through the window, and there’s no overly dramatic sitting up in bed. I just feel groggy, scared, and confused as I fumble for the secret burner phone I bought a few years ago. It’s vibrating—not on the kitchen counter at my Providence house prison—but on the bedside nightstand.
“Hello?” I ask without even pausing to check the caller ID. Only my family and Amber knows the number for this phone. And this early in the morning, it’s got to be the latter.
“Dawn, it’s Amber.” My savior lawyer’s crisp and efficient voice down the line, confirming my guess. “Sorry to call so early, but I think you’ll want to come to the main house for breakfast. I’ve got an update on this divorce of yours. A real weird update. And I need to tell you this in person because you’re going to have a whole lot of follow-up questions.”
2
VICTOR
“Nanny? Nanny?”
The little boy called out for the nanny who had brought him to this strange house with the promise of more sticky candy. His mother never let him have sticky candy. She’d said it was bad for his teeth. But Nanny gave him a piece at the park. And she said she knew a place where they could get more if the little boy were willing to sneak away from his guards with her.
After they gave his guards the slip, they got to ride on a train all the way to the mainland together, and then a real-life bus after that. The little boy had never been to the mainland or ridden on public transport before, and it seemed to him that his favorite nanny was taking him on a big adventure. They eventually arrived at a house that was only one story. And she told the little boy there was more sticky candy inside.
However, as soon as the door closed behind them, a man grabbed the little boy and threw him into a strange bedroom.
Perhaps it belonged to another boy. A pair of trousers and a red polo hung on the back of the locked door. But not a boy like him or any of his friends. The room was tiny, with nothing but a very small cot to sleep on and four dingy walls.
He had never spent time in or even seen a room like this in his life. And there was no candy that he could see.
But maybe this was a game. He looked everywhere for his promised candy, even pulling at the floorboards. Perhaps if he found it, Nanny and the man who grabbed him would let him out.
But he hadn’t found any candy anywhere. And no matter how many times he’d called for his nanny, who had always come right away before, she didn’t appear.
He wasn’t sure how long he had been in this room. He wished he had paid attention when Nanny tried to teach him how to read a clock so that he could decipher the one on the wall.
But it had been a too long time. Nanny hadn’t come when he called that he needed to use the toilet. Eventually, he lost the battle to hold his pee, and then his pants became wet and soggy.
And that made him cry, “Nanny! Nanny!” even louder.
The little boy was also hungry. And the more he called out for the nanny who never responded, the thirstier he got.
Eventually, his throat became so dry. He could only croak, “Nanny? Nanny? Where are you? I don’t like this game! Please come get me.”
He fell asleep, crying and begging for a nanny who wouldn’t come. But he was awoken sometime in the night by the sound of the tiny room’s door opening.
“Tak-lun? Tak-lun, is that you?
Tak-lun. That was his Chinese name, not the English one that Nanny, his father, and everyone else used. Only his mother called him by that name.
“Mama?” The little boy lifted his head, and all the misery cleared away when he saw his mother in the doorway.
“Tak-lun!” she cried out.
The little boy’s heart soared. His beautiful mother appeared just as happy to see him as he did to see her.
But then he saw the man standing behind her in the brightly lit hallway. It wasn’t one of the guards that his father sent with his mother everywhere but the same man who had locked the little boy in this room.
His mother also looked over her shoulder at the bad man.
“Let him go!” she demanded. Her voice was very angry. “He’s only a child.”
The man didn’t move from his position in the hallway. Not even an inch.
“Tell him no more crying. Keep him quiet,” the bad man told his mother. “Or else.”
Or else what? The little boy’s heart stopped with the terrible realization that his mother hadn’t come to take him home. That she, too, was being forced to play this game.
In the next moment, his terrifying guess was confirmed. The guard shoved his mother into the tiny room and slammed the door behind her. Darkness encased them, followed by the small-but-ominous click of the door re-locking.
“Mama? Mama? What’s happening?” the little boy asked. “I don’t like this game.”
The bed depressed, and his mother pulled him into her lap, even though he’d peed his pants and she was wearing a pretty dress. “It’s okay, Tak-lun. It’s okay. Everything will be all right. I promise you.”
That was the last promise his mother ever made to him.
And she didn’t keep it.
Victor jerks awake with tears stinging his eyes, his arms still clinging to a ghost.
Another dream, he realizes after a few panicked moments. He swipes the moisture away. Another blasted nightmare.
More like suppressed memories, struggling to get out. He hadn’t thought about what happened when he was just a little boy in years—much less dreamed about it. But these memories disguised as nightmares have been terrorizing him for weeks. Ever since…
Speaking of suppression, he ruthlessly does the same with all the emotions that well up inside of him whenever he thinks about Dawn. She is out of his surveillance for the first time in fifteen years. Fear and rage would consume him if he let himself think too long about that.
He also has to mute her father, Darrell, laughing as he congratulated Victor for “doing his job for him” and turning Dawn’s love into hate. That was after he revealed that almost all the things Victor had accused her of, had in fact, been a fabrication made up by a DEA agent willing to do anything to make his sting a success. Even use his unknowing daughter in his plot to take down Victor’s father.
Before that moment, Victor had lived in the past. He’d done terrible things in the name of revenge. Until a month ago, he thought Dawn’s misery was the only thing that could make up for his father’s death.
But Darrell’s revelation had thrust him unceremoniously out of the past and into the present.
And the present—to borrow a word from his American-born cousin Phantom—sucks.
But this is only temporary, Victor reminds himself.
Fighting back the encroaching sea of remorse and regrets, he slips on his wedding ring and puts himself through his usual morning workout. Adding extra reps to his strength training to make it much more brutal.