Chapter 2

"All right, baby, I'm starting. You're not going to feel sorry for him, are you?"

"Not a chance. Hurry up and make him behave so he'll start pulling in money."

The baton came down across my head and split my forehead open in an instant.

My skull rang. My scalp went numb all over.

Something warm ran down the bridge of my nose, and with it a thick smell of iron.

Blood.

Drops of it the size of beans hit the floor one after another.

Derek kicked me over.

My hands and feet were tied. My right leg had snapped in the fall out the window, and the pain of it went straight through the middle of me.

"Run. You like running. You going to run now?"

His face was ugly with it. The tendons stood out along the arm holding the baton.

He grabbed a fistful of my hair and hauled my head up off the ground to ask me again.

When I didn't answer, he hit me again.

Every time the baton landed I could feel the current crawling through my nerves.

I clenched my jaw until my mouth was slick with blood.

At the edge of my vision, Claire was scrolling her phone like none of it was happening. Then, bored, she opened the camera and pointed it at my face.

"This is great.

"Ryan, why aren't you screaming? Doesn't it hurt?"

I cursed her inside my head. Cold-blooded. Did she need me howling and begging before she'd be satisfied?

Derek was breathing hard, soaked through.

"Yeah, why isn't he screaming? Must not be enough voltage."

He turned it up a notch and drove it into my arm.

Everything inside me felt scorched at once. Every nerve in my body shook.

I don't have the vocabulary for that kind of pain. I never will.

"Aagh!"

That was when I couldn't hold it anymore.

Facedown on the floor I was a stray dog. Helpless, pitiful, small.

If somebody had cut my hands and feet loose I would have put both of them on the ground and beaten them into it.

But I couldn't.

Then I felt the heat spreading through my shorts.

And when I looked down at myself, the shame of it finished off whatever I had left.

A yellow pool spreading out under me across the floor.

"He pissed himself!

"He got shocked so hard he pissed himself!"

Claire pointed at my lap and doubled over laughing.

Derek made a face and fanned the air in front of his nose.

In that moment I wanted to die on the spot.

Then I thought about the academy. About the letter. About the life that was sitting there waiting for me.

Twelve years of work. If I threw my life away here, I'd be spitting on every one of them.

I thought about something a man used to say on a fraud-awareness program I never missed.

"Be ready, every day of your life, to stand against the dark.

"Even at the very last minute, you don't quit."

The coincidence was that the man who said it was Director Daniel Foster, the admissions director of that academy.

Weeks earlier he had driven out and put my acceptance letter in my hand himself.

Claire knew nothing about any of it. I had been saving it as a surprise for her.

Instead it had become the one weapon nobody knew I was holding.

A plan assembled itself in my head.

"Ryan, now that you know what pain is, behave. You come here and don't cooperate, there's only one way that ends."

He slapped my cheek, hard, eyes flat.

"Say something, you little piece of garbage. You gone mute?

"Want me to hit you again?"

He crouched and brought the baton back toward my arm.

"No. No more running."

I let the fear show.

"I'll cooperate.

"I'll cooperate with you. Please stop. Don't hit me again."

Wait for it, both of you.

You really think I'm that easy to squeeze?

As long as I was alive, there was a chance.