He’s here.
Of all the men who come to visit his mom, Stan is the absolute worst.
He always looks at the boy in a way that makes the eleven-year-old want to crawl out of his skin. He doesn’t know what Stan wants to do to him, but he knows it isn’t good. Knows he won’t like it.
Stan walks out of the bedroom down the hall, and a smarmy grin spreads across his face when he spots the boy. The sound of him closing the bedroom door booms through the small apartment. “Glad you’re here, Ty. Thinking maybe you can help your mom out.”
A fission of fear rushes through the boy, but he locks it down, not about to let Stan see it. Showing this man any fear will only lead to his doom.
Stan makes quick work of the hallway, peering down. “Cat got your tongue?” He arches an eyebrow, but the boy still doesn’t say anything. “Seems your mom is down for the count, so I came here for nothing.”
“What’d you want me to do about it?” The boy’s vile comeback is instinctual, and he regrets allowing his anger and fear to rule him. Deep down, he knows that he’s outmatched.
“I know your mom needs some money, and since she can’t give me what I want, thought maybe you could.”
The little boy’s stomach pitches, and he has to bite back the bile racing up his throat. “No.” Though he doesn’t even know what Stan is asking, he knows enough that he doesn’t want whatever he’s offering.
Stan grips him at the back of the neck and tilts his face up so the boy can smell the booze on his breath. “C’mon now. After all I do for you and your mom? You can’t give a little to get a little?”
At the glint in Stan’s eyes, the boy screams for his mother over and over while Stan laughs in his face. When she doesn’t appear, the fracture in the little boy’s heart cracks into shards, ripping at his flesh.
“She’s never coming to save you, boy, haven’t you figured that out yet?” The grip on the back of his neck grows tighter, and Stan runs his hand down the boy’s side to his waist.
Whatever is going to happen next, the boy knows with every fiber of his small being that he needs to leave one of the only homes he’s known and never come back.
He brings his knee up and nails Stan in the groin. The boy flies out of the apartment, down the stairs, and across the parking lot. He continues to run. And run. And run.
When he can barely breathe, he stops and finds himself in a part of town he’s not familiar with. Staring around, that fear to escape shifts, and he grows scared. But it’s a different kind of scared than the one he felt at home with his mom. He whispers that he can do this. He’s grown enough to live on his own. She wasn’t doing anything for him anyway. He’s no stranger to having to survive alone.
A few weeks later, the weather is starting to turn, and he needs to steal enough money to get a jacket and better shoes from the secondhand shop down the street. He has managed to feed himself and found a place in the park he can hide out and sleep at night without anyone bothering him.
On his quest to find someone to steal from, the boy loiters on the sidewalk that edges along the park. If he gets caught, the park will give him a better chance of getting away, what with all its winding paths and vegetation and his speed.
He waits until a man walking his dog stops to let the dog sniff at one of the bushes beside the sidewalk. It’s always easier when the person is distracted—people with their dogs, teenagers with their friends, women with lots of shopping bags in hand.
The boy leisurely walks by the man. Sometimes he pretends to bump into people, but other times, like this one, it’s not necessary, because the corner of the man’s wallet is visible in the pocket of his coat. With a quick reach, the boy grabs and tucks the wallet into his waistband and keeps walking, the man none the wiser as he attempts to pull the dog away from the bush.
He’s just about to walk into the park and his hiding spot to see how much he scored when someone grips his upper arm, forcing him to keep walking ahead.
“Hey!” The boy looks up at the stranger and tries to yank his arm out of his hold, but the man only squeezes harder. “Let me go.”
“You’re coming with me, kid. We’re gonna have a little chat.”
His heartbeat hammers. He’s not afraid of getting caught and getting in trouble with the police. He’s only eleven, what could they really do? Put him in some foster home that he can escape from the first night? But he’s terrified of them tracking down his mom and forcing him to live with her. He yanks his arm again, but the man’s fingers press into his arm harder.
Once they get behind the jungle gym, the man releases him, keeping the boy’s back to the rock climbing wall and standing wide in front of him with his arms crossed.
“Relax, kid, you’re not in trouble.” The man flicks his gaze down at him, and for some reason, the boy believes him.
It wasn’t until years later that the boy realized just how much that meeting set his life on a path that he never could have predicted.
1
BASTION
The bass from the music at the front of the house thumps through my office at the back of the club. The Black Orchid has more than twenty locations in four different states, but I run the business out of the first club I started in Seattle.
A decade ago, when my sister married billionaire Obsidian Voss and a bunch of fucked-up shit went down, I made a promise to my sister, Ariana, that I’d get myself on the straight and narrow. So did our dad, but I knew if we were together, we’d likely revert to our old ways at some point.
