Page 110 of Poisoned Promise
“You saw him,” she says as she walks toward the gas pumps. “He looks tired. It’s been so long. Too long. I should have done more. I should have gotten away from Caterina sooner.”
“You couldn’t,” I remind her as gently as I can. “Neither of us could. But Alex looked fine. Alive. He was moving fast and wasted no time. You taught him well.”
Both her hands drop to her lower back as she stops walking, then she turns to me with tears glistening in her eyes. “We used to make a game of it. You’re right. I never truly left and I taught him to survive because I knew we never could leave. And I turned it into games for him so he’d think it was normal. Hide and seek in the city. Sometimes I’d give him money, drop him off somewhere and promise him something great if he made it home in time. I always followed him of course but…” Her voice wavers and her head drops.
“You did the best you could.” I approach slowly. “And it’s paying off. He’s evading Caterina and Bree, everyone who is out looking for him.”
“Got harder when he got older,” Dove murmurs, kicking at the ground. “How do you keep these games up with a teenager smart enough to ask too many questions?” After a beat of silence, she lifts her head. “They won’t find him because they don’t know where to look.”
“So where do we look?” I jerk my head toward the car. “We have the car and we have protection. Let’s go.”
She meets my gaze and hesitates as if there’s more to say, but she holds herself back and after a moment, her gaze hardens as if coming to a silent decision with herself. Then she nods and walks toward me.
“Okay. I know where to look.”
The first stop off is an abandoned fire station on the edge of the city, completely boarded up and empty.
At least at first glance.
Dove finds a loose panel on a broken window and after we force ourselves inside, it’s clear Alex was here for a short while.
Mold on the pizza boxes and the stink of stale piss suggest this was his first stop.
“He left willingly,” Dove murmurs as she picks up something small from on top of a cushion. Approaching her from behind, I peer over her shoulder to the tiny folded paper star in the palm of her hand.
“A sign?” I ask.
She nods. “When hide and seek would get extreme, we would leave these for each other as a taunt but I think this is a sign that he left here of his own accord. If he was taken, he wouldn’t have had time.”
“Smart kid.”
“Look at his parents.” She turns and gazes up at me. “He’s got the smarts of both of us.”
“That’s… still so weird to think about.”
“I know.” Her lips press together. “I wish things had been different in that regard. Maybe life would have been different for him.”
“From what I’ve seen, you did a better job raising him than anyone else. And I stand by what I said. It’s amazing to think that he’s mine and I have a chance at being a father but it’s your choice.”
“And his,” Dove murmurs. “In the end, I can’t stop him from tracking down his father if he chooses. Given everything else I’velied to him about, I doubt he’ll keep believing that his father died.”
“You killed me?” I mock softly, weakly attempting to lift her mood as we leave the fire station.
“Of course I did,” she replies with a weak smile. “You were too powerful to leave alive.”
The second place we visit is an old apartment that Dove purchased ten years ago, paid off and then completely locked up.
The signs that Alex was even here are minimal.
He did a much better job of covering his tracks in this place compared to the fire station and once again, Dove finds a little paper star.
Our journey remains hopeful, but after visiting three more abandoned, run-down places with absolutely no sign of Alex, and no paper stars either, the late hour forces us to call it quits.
That and Bree calls us back to her Estate before our wanderings around the city bring the wrong kind of attention down on us.
Each empty place we visit, Dove uses receipt papers from the car to make her own paper starts and she leaves them lying around just in case Alex visits one of those places after we leave.
Back at Bree’s home, Dove vanishes as soon as we walk through the door.
