Page 108 of Take the Sub and Run

“This is a home. A place where you will be safe and you can do what you love.”

“No! No. I love art, but there’s something I love more.” She caught herself before she said “someone.”

“This is your home, Sofie. I have always made sure you have a home, and this is it.”

“No!”

Noah shook his head. “I’m needed in Rome, which means we cannot take any more time with you than we already have. We cannot stay so you…” He sighed again. “I will have to make it so you cannot leave, even if you get the door open.”

What did that mean?

Sofie yanked free of the men’s hold and started backing toward the windows.

“Perhaps it is a good lesson anyway.” Real regret touched Noah’s face. “Put her on the ground please and hold her legs.”

Sofie fought, even though she knew it was hopeless. She tried to punch, kick, run around them. She couldn’t stop them from doing what they wanted with her, lifting and carrying her to the center of the room and facing her down on her back.

Once they had her on the ground, one man pinning her arms beside her head, the other pressing her shoulders into the ground, while the third held her ankles, her father stepped up beside her.

Then he slowly and deliberately reversed his hold on his cane, the heavy marble ball dangling.

He was going to hit her with it.

She stared at the gray and green marble ball, about the size of a billiard, and it loomed larger and larger the longer she looked at it.

“Let this serve as mortification of the flesh. With each step, the pain will remind you of your greater purpose here. Let your spirit grow in strength, as your physical body feels the pain.”

Noah was no longer a strong man, but he had physics on his side as he brought the cane up and back like a golf club and then swung, the heavy marble head cracking against the side of her knee.

Sofie screamed at the tearing sensation. Finally, finally, stupid girl that she was, she believed what everyone else had tried to tell her.

Yes, her father would hurt her.

“I don’t have the strength for her other leg. Help me.”

Her other leg? Tears tracked from the corners of her eyes into her hair. She thrashed, but not hard because every movement sent shards of pain up and down her left leg.

She begged and whimpered as the man holding down her shoulders rose to his feet and took the cane.

“Please, Father! Please no! I won’t…I won’t leave. I’ll stay home. Like you told me. This is my home and I won’t leave home.”

“I know, my child.” He smiled down at her, then nodded to the man, who swung the cane high as he grinned.

This time, she heard bone crack.

Twenty-Three

Andrei waited and watched as the dawn light brightened to full morning. There was a single rental car parked by the house, and so far, he’d seen two different men step out at various points to smoke.

Without knowing how many of them there were, or if Sofie was even inside, he didn’t dare move any closer.

He had a horrible kind of déjà vu, to the point that he even eyed one of the trees and considered climbing it. But there was too much open ground between where he now crouched in the heavy vegetation along the property line and the one good tree.

Finally, what he'd been hoping for happened, and two men walked out together.

They were speaking Italian, but a parabolic mic app on his phone and live translation software took care of that.

“We have to leave in an hour, but she's barely started painting,” the shorter one said.

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