Page 104 of Into the Dark, We Go
My world shrank to a single point: agony. I couldn’t even scream.
"Enough," Robert’s voice came through the blur.
The punches stopped, but the residual pain lingered, a throbbing ache that pulsed through my body. I lay there, whimpering, shaking on the ground.
I felt myself being yanked back into the chair. Robert crouched in front of me, offering a plastic bottle of water. I took a few sips, most of it spilling over my chin and onto my dirty shirt. He stepped back.
"It was you," I croaked, anger searing inside me like a wildfire, no turning back now. "You killed Lucas. You killed your own son."
Robert calmly closed the lid on the bottle and set it aside. Then, he turned to me, his eyes glinting with a cold, calculated menace, and said matter-of-factly, "Don’t talk about things you don’t know nothin’ about."
Another blow landed, less ferocious than the previous ones, but still sending shockwaves of pain through my battered body. I somehow managed to stay in the chair, my vision blurring at the edges.
Robert gave me a few seconds to catch my breath before asking again, "I need to know where your friends are. And what they know."
"I don’t know!" I blurted, catching a glimpse of movement to the left. "Please! I really don’t know! I’ve been trying to reach them all day! I have no idea what happened to them!"
"All three gone?" Robert didn’t buy it.
"No, just Mitch and June."
"What about the other one? Tall, dark hair?"
"He went home two days ago."
"Home where?" He pressed, drawing his minions closer with a wag of his fingers.
"Minnesota."
"Minnesota…" he repeated thoughtfully. "And he is…?"
"He was trying to find out what happened to his mother. She died here about a year ago." I deliberately didn’t say ‘got murdered’ to avoid triggering Robert and his lackeys.
"His mother died here?" Something crept into his voice. Disbelief, or perhaps surprise.
"Yes!" I exhaled.
Robert glanced at the wide-open front door, as though calculating his next move. He gave a subtle nod to one of the men, and my phone was handed to him. I hadn’t even noticed them take it.
"Give me the passcode."
I didn’t hesitate. Any defiance would only bring more pain.
He adjusted his eyeglasses, the frames glinting in the dim light, and measured the comfortable distance between his faceand the screen, then scrolled through my contacts with a detached air.
"Is this one of them?" he turned the phone toward me. Mitchell’s name was on the screen.
A dark heaviness settled over me, fear and desperation swirling inside like a maelstrom. I nodded. If anything were to happen to Mitch, it would all be my fault.
He continued scrolling, stopping at Nick’s name. "And this one?"
I nodded again.
"I believe you," he finally said. "One last question: do you have it?"
"Have what?"
"The grimoire. One of you must have it."
