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Comforting my dad wasn’t high on my list of priorities but I wasn’t fucking heartless. “Then why am I here?”
He gave me a sad smile, but it was gone in the blink of an eye, replaced by the hardened expression he wore when he was in full-on criminal mode. “To give him hope — so I can crush him with it.”
“He’s half-dead as it is.”
Sasha looked past me, studying the quaking blue lump of a human in the cell with a narrowed, calculating gaze. He didn’t look bothered in the slightest. “He’s fine,” he concluded, returning his attention to me.
“Fine? That’s your definition of fine? He’s on the verge of hypothermia! What if he strokes out or has a fucking heart attack? His cholesterol is through the roof, you know.”
Sasha still didn’t look concerned. I guess it was hard for someone who lived in one of the coldest places on the earth to be bothered by any temperature above freezing. “I lived through worse. He’ll be fine.”
“He’s not you, Sasha. He’s not built for…” I was at a loss for words, so I just gestured up and down, indicating his massive size. He could probably survive anything, thanks to a combination of his incredible physique and his fucking stubbornness.
“For what?” Sasha snapped, his eyes narrowed. “To be beaten? To be electrocuted? Starved? Strangled? Kept awake for days? To finally die, by the mercy of God, only to be brought back by the fucking doctor on standby?” He lowered his face fraction of an inch, his gravelly voice warning me I was dangerously close to territory I wasn’t supposed to wander. “No oneis built for that. That is the point. That is why it is torture.”
Guilt and sorrow ripped through my gut. I reached for his face, but Sasha jerked away, like I was trying to slap him. He stalked over to the cage, twisting one of the valves on the pipe overhead to shut off the water.
As soon as he unlocked the door, Dad started shaking his head, mumbling almost incoherently. “No. No. No more. No.”
Sasha ignored him. Ducking inside the cage, he grabbed ahold of my dad’s wrist and dragged him out, depositing him at my feet like a cat bringing its owner a mouse.
Dad didn’t even move. He curled up into a ball, breathing hard. Sasha planted a boot onto his shoulder and forcibly rolled him over, taking a picture of him with his phone.
My father looked… wretched. Like something out of a horror movie. His skin was pale and stretched a little too thin across his bones, his lips blue even in the dim light. His broken fingers were purple, gnarled and pressed to his chest tightly, like he could protect them. There were a couple of strange red blotches across his body, some ringed with white while others had black edges. Before I realized it, my gaze flicked back to the wires. They were electrical burns.
A second later, the photo popped up on my phone.
“Let’s see if someone cares enough to payyourransom, hmm?” Sasha crouched down next to him, patting his cheek roughly.
“I’m sorry,” Dad said, squeezing his eyes shut with a wince. He blinked them open again, tears or residual water droplets leaking from the corners. “Roan, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought they were bluffing.”
As much as I hated him, as much as I wanted him to suffer, seeing my father like that wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. It made me sick. Yet, at the same time, it brought about a sense of relief — knowing thiscouldhave been my fate had Sasha chosen differently. There was that black-and-white thinking again: me or him. If any Sinclair was going to be tortured to the brink of death, I’d rather it behim. I’d already suffered enough for one lifetime.
“It hurts to see how far you’ve fallen,” I quoted, surprised at the iciness of my own voice.
I couldn’t tell if he remembered saying that to me or not. Sasha didn’t give him the chance to respond. He dragged him back to the kennel and tossed him inside like a sack of potatoes, slamming the door shut.
“Let’s go,” he grumbled, steering me toward the door.
On the ride back to our apartment, I sent the ransom demand to my mother, complete with the horrifying proof of life picture.
As expected, she called me immediately. “Roan! Where are you?!”
“Driving,” I replied truthfully. “What’s wrong?”
She broke down into sobs, choking out the answer. I let the phone fall away from my ear and I still didn’t have any trouble hearing her high-pitched shrieking. She ended her hysterics with, “I don’t know what to do!”
“Mom, you have to pay it,” I said calmly. “It’s Dad we’re talking about.”
“They want thirty million, Roan! We don’t have that kind of money in savings! Where am I going to get the rest?”
“Liquidate everything,” I replied.
She gasped. There went those proverbial pearls again. “Everything?!”
“It’s the only way you’re going to have enough to cover it. Or you could always borrow it from your friends… Maybe Anita—”
She sobbed again, cutting me off. “No, no. I’ll call the accountant right away. Should I call the police?”
