Page 80 of Cole: Bloodlines
Cole heaved against the heavy, corroded door at the foot of the stairs, its hinges shrieking in protest. The stench hit them first—a nauseating cocktail of human waste, mold, and the unmistakable copper-penny reek of dried blood. Their flashlight beams swept across a concrete floor stained with dark splatter patterns, illuminating a chamber that could have been transplanted from the Spanish Inquisition. Six rusted cages, barely tall enough for a person to sit upright, lined the back wall like metal coffins. In the center stood a stainless steel table, its surface dulled by years of inadequate cleaning, leather restraints hanging from each corner—the brown-black stains on both telling stories no one should ever have to hear.
Halting, Cole’s Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. He gestured toward the furthest cage. “Clint said there's a body in that one. A teenage boy.” His voice dropped to a rasp, tension pulling the lines of his face taut. “He said the boy was dead when he found them.” His face paled to a sickly pallor as hestared distantly at the cages. As Wil understood… the man who had abducted these boys and brutally abused them—was Cole’s biological brother. In his place, Wil would have felt equally sickened.
They entered the office where three boys sat huddled around an old space heater that ticked and popped as it struggled against the basement chill, casting orange light across their hollow faces. Dirt-streaked cheeks glistened with dried tears, their limbs pulled tight against thin torsos. The air was warmer in here, carrying the metallic scent of rusted radiators and unwashed bodies. The paramedics immediately went to the boys, providing quick examinations before wrapping them in blankets.
Wil and Cole’s attention was drawn to a large wooden crate in the corner, its splintered lid propped open with a broken, rusted pipe, the heavy-duty padlock dangling broken from the lid.
“What’s in there?” Wil murmured as dread spread through his chest.
Cole shook his head. “Clint didn’t say,” he whispered. “He didn’t seemableto say. Whatever it is… I think it may have caused him some trauma.Him.”
Wil swallowed, his heartbeat spiking. If it was terrifying enough to traumatize agangster, Wil was afraid to look for himself. Cole seemed in no hurry, either, to move closer.
It was a paramedic who approached the crate first. Wil followed, his stomach knotting, sure he didn’t want to see whatever was in there. As the contents became visible beneath his flashlight beam, he recoiled, acid rising in his throat.
Inside lay a naked young man—who appeared to be no more than nineteen or twenty—curled in fetal position like a discarded marionette, knees drawn to chest, arms wrapped protectively around himself even in this half-death. His skin, mottled blue-white beneath the flashlight beam, stretched taut over juttingcollarbones and ribs, interrupted by archipelagos of purple-black bruises and raw abrasions crusted with dried blood. His lips, cracked into a spiderweb of fissures, had lost all color save for the corners where they'd split and bled. His hair—once brown, now dulled to the color of wet ash—was patchy and thin, with angry red scalp visible in circular patches where he'd apparently torn out clumps in fistfuls. His eyes—the worst part—stared unblinking, pupils blown so wide the irises were mere copper rings, fixed on some middle distance as if witnessing atrocities playing on an endless loop.
“Jesus...” The word escaped Wil in a rush of breath tainted with revulsion. “What...” He raised his eyes to Cole, who had followed him to the crate—his face suddenly ashen beneath his weathered tan, eyes blown wide in horror.
Nightmare and reality slammed into Cole with cataclysmic force, shattering him from the inside out. His body convulsed, muscles seizing as his lungs petrified mid-breath, throat closing until black spots exploded across his vision. Each desperate gasp shredded his airway raw until he was hunched forward, gagging on his own suffocation.
“Cole?” Detective Jordan's voice came from miles away as Cole's legs betrayed him, sending him staggering backward.
A paramedic stepped toward him. Cole recoiled violently, crashing against the wall. The veins in his neck bulged like live wires beneath his skin. His head jerked—a twitch at first, then a violent seizure of denial.“No... no... NOOO!”The scream tore from his gut, primal and feral as he ripped at his scalp, drawing blood as his knees smashed against the floor. His howl—animal, unrecognizable—ricocheted off the walls, a sound so raw and broken it silenced everyone who heard it.
The three boys cowered together in the corner, their shoulders pressed against each other. The youngest one's bottom lip quivered uncontrollably, a thin line of saliva connecting to his chin.
“Take them out of here,” the lead paramedic instructed his colleague, his voice low but sharp with urgency.
The second paramedic—a woman with copper-red hair escaping her ponytail—ushered the kids around Cole's crumpled form and out of the office, her hand hovering protectively close without quite touching them. The senior paramedic sank next to Cole, his latex-covered hand pressing firmly between Cole's shoulder blades, feeling the violent tremors beneath the sweat-soaked fabric. “Easy,” he said quietly, each syllable measured and even, a clinical calmness to his voice that contrasted with the chaos raging inside Cole. “Take slow, deep breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth.”
Cole's body convulsed with tremors that rattled his bones, the screams in his skull drowning out the medical worker's voice as the killer's words gouged into his brain:I kept Ezra alive after our dad went to prison.
“No...noooo...”The denial tore from his throat, raw and bleeding.
For years, I raped him and tortured him until he finally went insane...
Cole's fingernails ripped into his scalp until blood slicked under his nails, his spine bowing forward as if something inside him was physically breaking. His wail climbed octaves until it shattered against the walls, the sound of a soul being flayed alive.
I made him suffer for you.
Convulsions racked Cole's body as he crawled to the crate, dragging himself upright on legs that threatened to collapse beneath the weight of his horror. Each breath ripped throughhis lungs in ragged shards, the world tilting and spinning until bile scorched the back of his throat. His white-knuckled fingers gripped the splintered edge, hot tears gushing down his face and raining onto the tormented husk that had once been his best friend—the first love of his young, innocent heart.
He’s dead. You’re a liar.
Cole reached toward the broken body—desperate to touch, to confirm, to deny—then froze mid-reach, trembling so violently his bones seemed ready to shatter beneath his skin.
Too bad for Ezra… that you don’t believe me.
Cole crashed to his knees with a jarringcrack, a howl of pure anguish ripping from the deepest part of him—a sound beyond human grief, beyond rational thought. He clung to the crate as his screams shredded the air, each one more guttural than the last, until something fundamental inside him fractured, his consciousness splintering into a thousand bleeding pieces as his soul wilted in on itself.
Cole’s visceral reaction to the body in the crate wasn’t something Wil was prepared for. The man’s cries were harrowing to the soul and sent icy shivers racing up and down the detective’s spine. The depth ofanguishwas matched only by the cries Wil heard at the park the night before.
The paramedic tending to Cole carefully coaxed him to the chair behind the desk. “We need to get him to the hospital as soon as possible,” he told Cole. “You can ride with him, but you need to stay calm so we can give him the attention he needs. Can you do that?”
Cole trembled in the chair, eyes wide, nearly vacant, and streaming tears, but he nodded. Wil joined Cole behind the desk to make more room for the paramedics.
The medics approached with practiced caution, their gloved hands moving with the delicacy of bomb technicians as they assessed the broken figure. When they finally extracted him from the wooden prison, his limbs remained locked in their protective curl, as if his body had forgotten any other position existed. The stretcher's canvas creaked under even his negligible weight.
