Unleashed (3 page)

The blisters were still growing. Tight bubbles of clear pus on my palms.

“Not good,” Jo said to Raven. “Someone was serious about getting answers from him. But in his favor, the statement on the paper was that he lied. I’m willing to
assume he didn’t give us up. So let’s give him a chance to tell us what favor he wants from us.”

“Favor?” I said. “
Favor
? Both of you owe me. I set up the meeting to collect on a debt.”

They
did
owe me. For how I had ensured Bentley would hack for them. For helping them deliver retribution. And now it was my turn.

To Jo, I said, “I want you to forge a painting so we can exchange it for the real thing.”

To Raven, I said, “And once we have the real thing, you need to plant it for me.”

FIVE

It was Tuesday evening, and my father, Dr. Winchester Wyatt, showed up for dinner, which was an unexpected and unpleasant surprise. Bentley and I rarely saw him, because he filled his calendar with work, bridge, golf and separate vacations to our other houses. He was, it appeared, content to be a self-indulgent loner.

Winchester surveyed the glossy and freshly servant-polished table and the five-course meal set up for my mother and Bentley and me and spoke in the cold, neutral voice he used whenever he and Bentley were in the same room.

“Bridge game canceled,” Winchester announced. “You two and the midget leave anything decent for me to eat?”

By
the midget
, he meant Bentley. Here’s some advice for you well-meaning people who will ask questions like,
What do I call a dwarf?

Um, how about his or her first name?

And you should know that to someone like my brother, who was born with Laron syndrome,
midget
is a word that’s as offensive as any racial slur. Winchester knew how offensive the word was and used it as often as possible.

As Winchester seated himself at the dining-room table, Bentley did what he always did when my father appeared. He left the room and retreated to his own bedroom, where he could assume a different persona at the computer. He truly was a computer genius, and that’s where he escaped from the daily wounds of life resulting from how he appeared to those who did not know him and love him like I did.
Boxing for me, computer for him. See, the trust-fund life isn’t as wonderful as you might think it is from the outside.

Bentley was born with Laron syndrome. It’s a disorder resulting from an insensitivity to growth hormone. Bentley is very short and will remain that way all his life. He was born with a prominent forehead and a distinctly depressed nasal bridge, so there had been no mistaking how his life’s destiny had been set for him.

It’s a recessive-gene thing. Or, as Winchester would look at it, a faulty-gene thing. For a child to have Laron-type dwarfism, he or she needs to get the recessive gene from both parents. In other words, Bentley was proof to the world that not only did our mother carry the faulty gene, but so did the oh-so-perfect Winchester. And in his circles, everyone understood recessive genes and what that meant about Winchester.

It’s not something a person gets tested for ahead of time. If so, I’m sure
Winchester would not have taken the chance of being a father, because if both parents had the recessive gene, it meant there was a one-in-four chance their child would be born with the dwarfism.

One in four.

Bentley and I haven’t ever spoken about this, but that means I’m the one who dodged the genetic bullet. It could just as easily have been me who got both recessive genes when the game-winning sperm slammed into the egg to launch my blueprint for life.

And it could just as easily have been me to face the surgery inflicted on Bentley because of Winchester.

It involved sawing Bentley’s thigh bones in half to insert titanium lengtheners. Um,
adjustable
lengtheners. The idea was that as soon as Bentley’s muscles adapted and stretched, the titanium could be screwed a few notches longer. Like braces that gradually shape teeth.

It had happened a few years back, when Bentley was still doing everything possible
to earn any kind of love from Winchester he could. Bentley had put on a brave, it-doesn’t-hurt kind of face so Winchester wouldn’t be disappointed. But I’d seen the tears. Bentley rocking as he clutched his ribs with both arms to try to contain the pain. And the heartache, knowing he’d never be good enough for Winchester.

Bentley was my brother, and I would die for him if that meant saving his life. I’d long since learned, however, that Winchester took great satisfaction whenever I tried to defend Bentley from his attacks, because it gave him a chance to degrade Bentley even more. My father was to all appearances a perfect man. It didn’t take Bentley’s genius to realize that to Winchester, Bentley was an imperfection that let the world know Dr. Winchester Wyatt had spoiled seed.

“Food?” my father asked upon entering the dining room.

“Ring the maid for leftovers,” my mother said. And she left the room.

This was their usual way of communicating. By
not
communicating. They had separate bedrooms and did not hide the fact that any love they’d once shared had not only disappeared, but also had been replaced by cold indifference to one another.

“Just you and me then,” Winchester said to me. “How was school?”

He looked at the way I was holding my fork.

“Something happen to your hand?” he asked.

I opened my hand and showed him the blisters that were so painful they were turning my hands into claws. He was a brilliant man, and it would be futile to try to hide them from him.

“Grabbed a Bunsen burner that I thought was cold,” I said. I tried to make a joke. “It got me out of chemistry class at least.”

“Don’t miss too much class,” Winchester said. “No mark lower than a ninety-seven. At least one of my sons should be able to make our family proud.”

Some fathers might have shown concern about whether I was getting proper treatment for the burns.

I pushed away from the table and left in silence. He was my father, and I’d done my best not to hate him. But over the last few years, I’d been losing that battle, so all I could do was say as little as possible when I was in his presence.

I intended to stop by Bentley’s room and update him on the detective and our plans to find out why the anonymous email had been sent to us.

As soon as possible after that, I would escape the house and lead my other life. The life that was real because no one in it knew that I had been born into the Croft fortune.

SIX

When I reached Bentley’s suite of rooms, I knew exactly where to look for him. On a cushion on a window seat in a far alcove.

The irony of his living situation wasn’t lost on either of us, given the contrast between his size and the size of his living quarters. His bedroom was double the size of most living rooms. One door led to a bathroom, with tub, steam shower and separate shower, that was bigger than most bedrooms. On the far side of the bedroom, a wide opening led to a den area with a couch and a monstrous wide-screen television. Beyond that, a room for his computers and then a small library
with the window alcove that overlooked the grounds.

My own living quarters mirrored his, but where he’d made a library, I had chosen to set up a small workout area with weights and treadmills. Don’t think for a moment that we had these luxuries because Winchester wanted us to enjoy life. Not a chance. He wanted to be able to parade guests through the mansion and show them that he was the type of man who spared nothing for his family.

“Hey,” Bentley said.

“Hey,” I said. No point in any encouraging words, like,
Yeah, Dad must be in a bad mood—he didn’t really mean what he said
. First, it would have been laughable to call Winchester by any other name than Winchester. He wasn’t a dad. He was a biological father. Second, Bentley and I both knew that Winchester always meant what he said when he threw out barbed words. And third, we’d been through that conversation endlessly during our
younger years, with Bentley crying and me raging, until we’d finally accepted that it wouldn’t change, and then we’d come to a more important understanding: we weren’t going to blame ourselves for Winchester’s treating us the way he did. And, no surprise, that made us tight as brothers.

“Tell me about your hands,” Bentley said. He was looking out the window at the rich greens of the trees and lawn against the backdrop of the mountains. Billion-dollar view. Still didn’t make up for a biological father who scorned us as failures.

“Thought you’d notice,” I said. “It was a pair of curling irons.”

Bentley swung his legs toward me, and his feet hung over the edge of the window seat.

There had been a time when his feet wouldn’t even reach the edge. Then Winchester had arranged for Bentley to have an artificial growth spurt compliments
of Frankenstein surgery. It didn’t matter to Winchester that following the surgery Bentley would be in agony for months. What did matter to Winchester was an attempt for Bentley to look normal. As I mentioned, Winchester was supposed to spawn manly football-hero type boys, not boys with Laron-type dwarfism.

“Curling irons?” Bentley said. Around me, he was different than he was around other people. He could be gentle and vulnerable.

“Curling irons.” In a flat voice, I recounted it for him, including my suspicions about Jo and Raven.

“Bro,” he said, “I tend to trust them.”

He caught my look. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not because they are hot, and believe me, I’m aware they’re hot. And it’s not because they’re cool around me.”

Which meant they didn’t pity him. Nor did they pretend he was built normally. It was impossible not to notice his size.

“I think they share some kind of honor code,” Bentley said. “Them against the world. Lie to authorities, but not to those the authorities are trying to crush.”

“If not them,” I said, “who? Schmedley has reported nothing back to me.”

Schmedley wasn’t the guy’s real name—we called him that because he dressed sloppy and had a sloppy haircut and sloppy gut. It was Vince Crowther. He was a former Vancouver cop, now set up as a private investigator. He’d worked for the family of a kid we knew at school. And after receiving the email with the accusation against Winchester, I’d been happy to hire him to look into it, trusting him because of his reputation and not his looks.

“But,” Bentley said, “what if all the poking around Schmedley has done actually knocked something loose?”

I snorted. “Like, Winchester is suddenly scared and did that to me himself?”

For a second I considered it. But Winchester wouldn’t do his own dirty work.

“Not his style,” Bentley confirmed, as if he was reading my mind. “Would he send someone after you?”

“Look,” I said. “That person would have to know how to find me. Remember, at the gym I have my secret identity.”

I paced a few steps and came back. “It might prove, though, that there is some truth to what’s in the email. I think you’ve been right all along. The key is Dr. Evans, the chief of staff. He’s the one who has handled discipline hearings at the hospital for years. We’re going to have to go down that road.”

“Jo and Raven on board?”

“Do they have a choice? Remember, we helped them when they needed it.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Jo and Raven will be there to help me.”

My job was Evans and I needed them for that. I didn’t think it was a good plan, but it was the best that Bentley and I had been able to come up with.

Bentley’s job was computer stuff. “Any success on your end?” I asked. He lifted his right fist, like it was a salute. On his wrist was a tattoo. It was the shape of an elongated eight, on its side. The symbol for infinity.

I smiled. “All those possibilities.”

That’s one of the things I loved about Bentley. He believed that life was filled with endless possibilities. And opportunities. My love for him was reflected in that same tattoo on my right shoulder blade.

“Nothing yet on the hospital computers,” he said, then dropped his wrist. “I got in again and roamed around, but zilch to point us to anything Winchester’s done wrong.”

“No worries,” I said. “That’s why we hired the detective.”

Bentley and I had agreed I should do it as the inner-city boxer kid, my identity
away from the mansion. Better protection for us. So I had worn grungy clothes when I’d visited the detective. I’d paid him in crumpled bills. I’d told him my name was Jace Sanders, the name I used at the gym as a boxer. No way did Bentley and I want Schmedley knowing we were hiring him to investigate our own father, a high-society darling of the local media.

“What about the email that started all this?” I asked Bentley. “Any luck there?”

“Yeah,” he said, voice flat. “Success.”

Something about Bentley’s tone of voice sounded like alarm bells.

“Jace,” he said. “I was able to trace the email to the ip address. It came from the computer in her office.”