Hostage by Skye Warren & Annika Martin

Author:Skye Warren & Annika Martin [Warren, Skye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944736057
Published: 2018-01-26T18:30:00+00:00

In the days and weeks that follow my birthday ride, I replay everything Stone said about Keeper. Somebody who’d found the abandoned houses. Somebody looking the other way.

…the only reason I made it out of the basement alive was the knowledge that I would make them suffer.

My dad would never knowingly let young boys be hurt the way Stone was hurt. But would he look the other way?

Stone got those boys out of the basement when he was fifteen, he said. He’s around ten years older than me, so I would’ve been about five. And Madsen, one of the men who preyed on those trapped boys, was at my sweet-sixteen party. Which means my parents knew him. Granted, there were hundreds of people there, but still.

If somebody had gone to my father when he was first starting out and asked to rent a place off the books, no questions asked, would he have agreed?

Sometimes I think maybe yes. But I know in my heart he would never have said yes if he knew children were being hurt. I know that for sure.

But what if he’d thought it was for something less awful? Maybe illegal card games, a mistress, sports betting, things like that. Dad loves to bet on college football with his buddies.

What if he didn’t know?

That wouldn’t matter to Stone, though. Why should it? Children are hurt every day by people looking the other way. People not noticing, not caring. When you’re a boy in a basement, looking away is its own kind of crime. He made it clear that he wants them all to pay.

I can never let Stone find out.

Not that I’ll ever see him again. There was something final about that trip to the basement. He wanted to ward me off. Like the Mr. Yuck sticker on the bottles and jugs of detergents under the sink. A sign that I should probably listen to.

Poison. Stay away.

The worst part of it is that, after he told me about Keeper, he could tell something was wrong. He could tell I pulled away, and I know what he thought. That I’d decided he was too damaged after all.

Too much a monster.

I hate that he’d think that. But what can I do? Explain to him that it was really a suspicion that he’s talking about my father? Tell him how the shock of it nearly made me throw up?

“Tell me about the Innkeeper,” I finally blurt out to my mother.

She pauses with her teacup in midair, her other hand holding her phone where she scrolls through the newspaper’s society page website. “What?”

“For Christmas. The story you tell every Christmas.”

She looks at me oddly, a little worried. That worry has been there ever since the last time Stone took me, like one of these days I’ll finally splinter into a million pieces. Sometimes it feels like that would be a relief.

“Oh, that.” She gives me a small smile. “You’ve heard it enough times to tell it yourself. That’s always been your father.

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