Oba started counting. “One . . .”
What to do, what to do? My head was all confused. Could I shoot Oba? No, the kid would die first. I remembered how Oba had killed Nobo. He never bluffed.
“Two . . .” Shooting Blado had been horrible, but he’d been a bully. This kid was young, like Thea, innocent. I couldn’t let it happen. Papa always told me to look after anyone younger than me. My hands shook on the rifle.
“Three.”
I fired straight at Mr. Grantam. Bang, bang, bang. Three red blotches dotted his chest. He slipped to the ground, reaching for his son.
Brandon screamed.
Oh, God, what had I done? I’d just shot the boy’s father in front of him. I let my AK drop. My legs felt like big rubber bands. I leaned over and puked. Standing up straight, I watched Oba fire a bullet into the boy’s head. Brain matter splattered the ground. Oba dropped the tiny body onto the red earth.
I ran over and knelt beside the boy. “No! You said you’d save him if I shot his father.”
“Too young to fight. Don’t need more mouths to feed. We’re not UNICEF.”
Oba walked over to the truck, grabbed the sack of food, and emptied it on the ground, opening packages, shoving food into his mouth. Apples, candy bars, sandwiches—everything I’d dreamed about for the last few months. But now I couldn’t eat them if I tried. I was dead inside.
Thea’s mind reeled as she placed the pages on the bed. The words were poignant, but they couldn’t properly convey what had transpired. She’d had no idea he’d been turned into a child soldier, twelve years old and forced to kill. The damage that had been done to her brother’s psyche was unfathomable.
An overwhelming mix of emotions filled her. Hatred for Oba, for forcing Nikos to commit such atrocious acts of violence. Another emotion surged from beneath the surface. Anger, red-hot anger, toward her father.
Papa had kept her in the dark. She understood how he might not have disclosed this sensitive information to her as a child, but why not tell her in later years? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t witnessed horrific situations in her job. But, no, Christos had chosen not to tell her what had happened to her own brother.
She agreed that it was smart to keep this information out of the public eye. Nikos already had enough celebrity as a former child hostage and scion of the head of Paris Industries. If the press discovered that he’d been a boy soldier, murdering people, he might never have had a chance at a normal life. She had to give Papa credit there. Still, why had he given up on his own child, excluding him from the family business, acting as if he was a leper?
It all started to make a sick sort of sense. Nikos might have been given everything he needed and more, financially, but he’d been forced to hide the brutality of what he’d experienced, forced to hide the truth of what had really happened, forced to live a lie.
Their father didn’t require such silence purely to protect Nikos from the public. He’d also done it for himself. Papa had muted his son because he didn’t know how to handle a damaged child. With no wife to help, he’d been overwhelmed, channeling his energy into his business, where he could flourish, instead of dealing with the difficult task of reforming someone who’d been so psychologically scarred. He’d sent Nikos away so he didn’t have a daily reminder of the horror that had befallen his son.
Papa must have used his wealth and power to whitewash any mention of Nikos’s activities during captivity. Most of the press coverage had been about the million-dollar reward he’d given General Ita Jemwa. Hush money. She wondered if there was even more she didn’t know about.
Emotion overwhelmed her. She was saddened and angered by Papa’s reaction to Nikos’s ordeal, yet she felt guilty about that anger. For God’s sake, he himself was being held captive now, locked in his own private hell.
And Nikos—how did she feel about him? “Complicated” didn’t begin to describe it. Her brother had been taken in her place. She owed him in the most profound way. That guilt haunted her, too.
Still, reading about what Nikos had done filled her with fear. What was her brother capable of? Was it possible that he was behind Papa’s kidnapping? Part of it made a sick sort of sense: swooping in to kidnap Christos right before the biggest deal of his career. The ultimate payback. But Nikos had seemed genuinely disturbed when he found out about the kidnapping. Could he really be that good a liar?