“I guess not,” Noah muttered. If he lived through this, Adam was never going to let him do anything alone ever again.
Gary gestured to his desk chair. “Have a seat.”
Noah was grateful Gary hadn’t put a bullet in his head with that cannon he was holding but couldn’t help but wonder why? He was somehow both terrified and numb at the same time. As if, once more, his brain was trying to keep him removed from how fucked he was. He couldn’t let Gary know. He needed to play it cool until Adam came for him.
If Adam was coming for him.
Please, let Adam be coming for me.
“Sorry about the mess,” Noah quipped, a slow smirk spreading across his face. “I might be a street rat, but you’re kind of a pack rat.”
Gary took two steps into the room, eyes glinting with hatred. “You have always been far more trouble than you were worth.”
Noah leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. “Then maybe you and Holt should have left me in Mexico.”
Gary’s eyes widened, mouth opening and closing before he seemed to regain his composure. “How did you figure that out? That’s not even in those records you stole from me. It’s also not on the hard drive you took from the cabin.”
“I submitted my DNA to one of those ancestry sites. You’d be amazed at what you can find on those things. Like the fact Holt wasn’t my dad. Or how I have a whole other family in Texas. A real family. One you deprived me of.”
Gary took his time with that bit of information. “You really are a nosey little bastard. Where’s my backpack? I want it back.”
Noah eased back in the chair, rocking slowly. “What for? Seems like you make plenty of money and you clearly don’t need any more guns. What could possibly be so interesting about that ugly black backpack?” Noah queried.
“None of your business.”
“Could it be that random string of letters and numbers I found rolled up in the pocket? The encryption key.”
Noah had thought to shock Gary again, but his physical response was troubling. He flushed an almost purple color, beads of sweat erupting on his forehead and upper lip. “You don’t get it, do you? You fucked everything.” He shook his head. “This whole thing”—he gestured around with the gun—“just got out of hand.”
“This whole thing?” Noah echoed. “You mean your pedophile ring? What’s the matter? No longer just an intimate gathering of depraved rapists? Too many people crash your party?”
Sweat was actively rolling down Gary’s face. Noah wondered if he might be on the verge of a heart attack. “It wasn’t like that. We cared about those boys. We tried to be gent—”
Noah slammed his fist down on the desk, startling Gary. “Don’t. Don’t you dare say you were…” Noah sucked in a breath through his nose, trying to pull himself together. Now wasn’t the time to piss Gary off. Noah needed to stay alive.
Besides, Gary had a date with Adam and his brothers. “I’ve got a hard drive and two boxes full of records that say otherwise. Did O’Hara teach you all of his tricks for abusing kids? Did he think of all of you as his proteges? Keep the tradition going?”
Gary wiped at his brow with the sleeve of his black button down shirt. “He taught us that our impulses were natural. Showed us books and…other things that proved we weren’t crazy or perverts. That it’s just evolutionary.”
Jesus fucking Christ. “Do you really believe that shit? Really? Like, deep down, do you hear the things you’re saying and think it makes sense, or do you just use it as an excuse for all the suffering you’ve caused? These are little kids. Do you know how many lives you’ve ruined? If your intentions are so pure, why is it so many kids have ended up dead once you’re done with them?”
Gary sniffed as if the topic of dead children was somehow more distasteful than abusing them. “You’ll never understand. The outside world…polite society, they’ll never understand. We didn’t kill all of them. Just the troublemakers. The ones who swore they would talk no matter how many times we tried to persuade them otherwise. We didn’t want to do that, but there are too many power players in the mix now. It just keeps growing, and the higher up the food chain the members go, the more dangerous it becomes if we get caught. But you…you turned out fine.”
“Fine?” Noah snapped. “What you did to me was so traumatic I blocked it out entirely.”
Gary blinked sweat from his eyes. Noah couldn’t help but wonder if he was on something or if he was truly afraid of what might happen to him if he couldn’t get that encryption key back from Noah.
“You were our first,” he said. “Did you know that? Wayne and I were down in Mexico. He knew some people down that way who could…find us what we were looking for.”
Noah frowned, heartbeat hammering against his ribs. “So, somebody arranged for you to kidnap me?”
Gary scoffed, shaking his head. “No, that’s the thing. Your father saw you—”
“Stop calling him that,” Noah snapped, like it was he who had the gun, not Gary. “That man was never my father.”
“Fine, Wayne saw you and was instantly in love. You were so pretty. You were playing in the street with some older kids. And he just walked right up and held out his hand…and you took it. Just walked right off with him like it was fate.”
Noah’s vision began to go fuzzy at the edges. This time, it was him beginning to sweat. Was Gary rewriting history? Had Noah truly just walked away with Holt? How had nobody noticed?
“It wasn’t planned,” Gary continued wistfully, like he was enjoying his stroll down memory lane. “We honestly thought we’d get caught almost instantly. But…somehow, the stars aligned. A little cough syrup and a short ride in the trunk and we made it back to the States with you without any issues at all. Then you were ours. A child completely off the grid. Nobody knew you existed.”