Silent

59. You'll get through this.

The private investigator Sam had hired had managed to gather some beneficial information for the case, but it did not take away his failure in the most important task. Sam found it difficult, almost impossible to forgive him for it. His failure to report him when Ricky left the country had led to irreversible consequences. If he had known, he could have protected Michael, he would have dragged him to the police right there and then, sparing them from all this pain.

The list of men who were part of the exploitation ring had grown and finally, the missing boy had also been found. He was alive but severely traumatized and needed hospital care.

He had been held captive in a dark basement for a couple of weeks. It was Ricky's new twisted experiment, different from the one with Michael. A risk he had been willing to take, cocky enough that he wouldn't get caught. Most likely, the boy had never been meant to get out alive, and the police had been fortunate enough to find him in time.

The boy had had extreme bad luck. It had been a whim of chance that he had run into Ricky on that dark, quiet road, after leaving his friend's party drunk and having argued with his girlfriend. Ricky had stopped the car and offered a ride, and of course, the boy could not have understood what kind of life-destroying nightmare he stepped into by accepting.

Ricky hadn't been able to resist the temptation. No one could see him, so he thought, and the monster in him had been held restrained far too long. Those dark desires of the demon in him demanded satisfaction, and he believed that fate had led the boy to him. He believed that fate wanted him to accept the opportunity it so conveniently presented for him.

The boy's accounts of his terrible ordeal were muddled. However, he had told that he had fallen asleep in the car and woken to find them in a secluded area where Ricky had raped him. He had lost consciousness and woken up to find himself in that horrible basement of torture

Several men had raped him during his imprisonment. How many, the boy could not say. The man in whose house he had been kept in, was a retired court judge, whose wife had passed away ten years earlier and his adult children had moved out long ago. The man was known as a reputable and respected man whose dark side came as a shock to all who thought they knew him.

So, the boy was alive, but the experience had inevitably destroyed the life he had known for good. He was being treated at the psychiatric hospital ward and now the boy's fate weighed on Michael's consciousness. If only he would have told sooner. How many lives could he have saved from being completely wrecked? He should have... If only he had...

Ricky's list of charges just kept on growing, and surely no jury would acquit him or his fellow criminals. But Michael knew as well as Jack that many still hadn't been caught and might never have to face justice for their crimes. It seemed unlikely, however, that those men would come after them. Surely they would not want to invite any possibility of being linked to Ricky and Joe now that the matter was so public. The thought brought only a small amount of comfort, but even that small amount was desperately needed.

The nightmares continued persistent, waking him practically every night, making him dread going to bed. The nights were equally hard on both of them. Sam was exhausted though he tried his best to hide it from him, but of course Michael could see it and It pained him. 

Sam did his best to keep at least the facade of normal life in the middle of everything and continued going to work. It was an escape for Sam to be at the gym working and Michael knew that as well. Any comfort Sam could get, Michael fully supported.

He was not alone after all in these moments when Sam was gone. Jack would stay at least till the trial and then there was his mother. Someone was always with him, of course, it was also partly because of his surgical wound, but partly perhaps out of fear of his fragile state of mind, which fluctuated in waves. Sometimes he was determined to make it, other times it was more difficult.