Hello everyone! Thank you for your generous reviews and comments. I loved hearing what you thought of the story so far, and I am hoping this chapter doesn't disappoint. PLEASE, please take the time to review it - this chapter is rather central to the fic, and your feedback will be enormously helpful in guiding the next update. Without a beta, I truly rely on readers to gauge who well I succeeded in communicating my point. Help make this story better!

Here it is...


"You-you found him?" Damien blinked owlishly as he processed the words. "What do you mean you ifound/i him? It's Monday!"

"Yes, sir."

"But…how do you know it's him? On Friday, I give you one letter of a name and a birthmark, and on Monday you …are you sure it's him?"

"Yes, sir. I'm sure."

Kurt took two measured steps and seemed to consider sitting into the chair across Damien's desk, but thought better of it. Instead, he rested his fisted hands on the back of the chair and remained on his feet. His hands shook ever so slightly.

"Sir…" his voice rang, "how are you related to the Andersons?"

"The Andersons? Care to be more specific?"

"Senator Charles Anderson, and his wife, Mary-Ann Anderson."

Damien leaned back in his chair, appraising his intern. One wrong word, and the thin ice he was walking would crack.

"Why do you ask?"

Instead of responding, Kurt looked to the side, plunging the room back into silence. When his gaze snapped back to his boss, whatever caution or fear had been in his eyes was replaced with simmering fury.

"What's your sister's name?"

"My sister?"

"Yes! Goddamn it, your sister!" Exploding, Kurt shoved at the armchair between him and his target, bracing his hands on the desk to cut the distance between them. "You said this sub was your cousin, so I'm asking! What is your sister's name!"

"My god, Kurt! What's the matter!"

"Tell me!"

"Calm down!"

"No! Cause either you're a damn good liar or you are a fucking Trader. So which is it?"

That word, that hideous word, sucked the air out of the room. Shock still, Damien waited for the ringing in his ears to subside, for the heat in his chest to cool. For the first time since Kurt entered the room, Damien saw the terror in the boy's eyes. What he mistook for violence was desperation – a desperation to hold on, to believe, in a vision of the world that was quickly turning black.

Perhaps it was foolish, and certainly short-sighted, to ask Kurt to look into Lea's runaway. But at the time, all he could hear was the tremor of her voice as she described the injuries on the young sub's body, the way her voice grew dim and distant as she lost herself in questions of how someone could so completely destroy a life. He knew what scared her – not the injuries, the bruises, the concussions. It was the undeniable fact that every person who came in contact with the sub chose to destroy him. Intentionally, deliberately, tore him apart. There is no sight more terrifying than the vision of man's capacity for cruelty.

And now, Kurt had seen it too. Whatever path his research took him brought him here, shaken and scared, distrusting and desperate for some shred of reassurance.

"I have no sister." Damien relaxed his features and slowly lowered himself into his chair. He watched Kurt's Adam's apple bop as the boy fought for composure. "I am in no way related to any Anderson, particularly not the Senator or his wife. And I am sorry I lied to you."

Cautiously, Kurt moved toward the chair he'd brushed aside just moments earlier and slowly turned it toward his boss. He sank onto its very edge and gave a brief nod for Damien to continue.

"I needed you to find this sub, but I was sure it would take longer than a weekend. By then, you'd have forgotten the context of this favor, or I would have come up with a far better lie."

"How do you know him?" Kurt croaked.

"I don't. But a friend of mine does. She called me on Friday evening, asking for my help. She'd taken in a stray – a runaway sub who teetered on death's door. His body wore all the signs of abuse, malnourished, beaten. He was hypothermic when they found him, frostbite, pneumonia, the works. When he woke up, it was obvious the abuse ran deeper. The kid had no safeword. Had never even heard of such a thing. So she called me. It's impossible to register a Claim without a safeword. And yet, he had a Claiming mark on his right arm. She asked me to find him. But, even with access to the Registration logs, I cannot just walk up and start pulling records. You, on the other hand, have cause – your research on populations would give you unquestioned access to all the records you could need. So I asked you."

"Why lie?" the note of distrust hung heavy in the air as Kurt asked his question. "Why make up a connection that doesn't exist? Couldn't it have sent me down a blind-alley?"

"It could've…if I had a cousin whose name starts with a B and who has a birthmark over his shoulder. But I don't, and I didn't anticipate you giving up so easily. Plus, you forget - taking in runaways is a federal offense. The fewer people know, the lower the risk of the police knocking on their doors. I thought it would be better this way."

Damien watched Kurt struggle to believe him. He couldn't blame the kid – how do you trust while riding the coattails of a lie? So he sat back, hands lightly crossed over his kneecap, and waited.

"How is he?"

"The boy?" Kurt nodded. "Recovering, I believe. The people he's with-" Damien reconsidered. Vague intimations won't earn Kurt's trust, and the kid deserved better than empty insinuations. "He's in a house on Beacon Hill. It's shared among five people, two Doms, two switches, and a sub. Two subs, now. They're all good people. I know they will do all they can to help this boy."

Another nod and with a breath, the strings holding Kurt taunt snapped, releasing the tense line of his spine and shoulders. He melted into the chair, deflated and scrubbed raw. It felt as if he'd cried for hours, drained of the capacity to feel anything but the steady buzz of weariness. After a long weekend poring over documents and breathing in the dust of untouched records, after putting together the pieces of a puzzle that tugged at every instinct to protect, and after spending all his Monday gathering courage for this confrontation, Kurt wanted a nap. He wanted the cool touch of his hypoallergenic pillow and the soothing scent of his sandalwood candle.

"His name is Blaine Anderson." Kurt picked a spot on the thick Persian rug and started talking. "He was the youngest son to Charles and Mary-Ann Anderson, born 1995, twelve years after the birth of their first son, Cooper. His medical records start in Colton Hospital – it's where I checked for the birthmark; Blaine has one on his right shoulder blade, between his neck and collarbone. It seems like he was raised by nannies back at whatever mansion the Andersons owned at that point, but Blaine started preschool at the Saint Gregory's School for Boys. At least he was enrolled. Before starting school, he was tested along with everyone else. His Designation form was in the records, but his Assignment – it's blotted out. Like someone pipetted a drop of acid right over the word. I'm guessing- well, I think we both know what it said."

Kurt raised his head for the first time. His eyes were empty when they met Damien's gaze.

"Why are you so sure it's him?"

"Because of what happened next. Blaine died. Some freaky reaction to the flu. There's an official report, signed by the Anderson family doctor; apparently he was the only person to see the boy before he passed. No hospital visits, no testing. There was a funeral – it was covered by the local news. And then a couple months later, some aid in the coroner's office spoke to a journalist, said that Blaine's blood didn't show signs of an infection. Said the family insisted on keeping the body at the house, refused access. Of course, the family lawyer quickly shut her up – accused her of trying to get attention by blaming the death of their beloved child on the grieving family. The woman, a Sandy Miller, lost her job, and as the official story does, started drinking, got into debt, and overdosed one night on painkillers."

The leather of Damien's chair crackled as he leaned back. His hands came up to massage his forehead, a habit acquired from years of severe headaches, before he let out a long breath.

"Are you telling me," he addressed Kurt, "that the Senator and his wife killed their youngest son, paid off a doctor to fabricate a false cause of death, put on an act for the whole community, and later killed someone for putting a crack in their story? All because, what? He was a sub?"

"No. I think they sold him." Every word put more conviction in Kurt's voice. When the story was scattered along several boxes worth of dusty documents, Kurt believed it, but he didn't have the utter conviction he had now. Something had happened in that family and Kurt knew the current chapter of this story was now recovering in a house on Beacon Hill. "Remember that family lawyer I mentioned? Curtis Fisher. Right around the time of the funeral, he came into some money. The only reason it's on record was a random audit the IRS ran a couple of years later – it uncovered $127,600 of unaccounted income. With an apology and a shrug, he paid the taxes on this sum, but since a couple of years had passed, no one insisted on an explanation and everybody went home happy. I think the Andersons gave their son to him to sell off to the highest bidder. Probably let him keep the money as an annual bonus."

"How old was he?"

"Blaine?" Kurt looked out at the lit city, wondering how it could glow so bright in so much darkness. "Blaine Anderson died when he was six years old. Whoever owned him had him for twelve years."


The clocks had just brushed past seven-thirty when the two men exit the Stanley-Broeker building. Rush hours had long passed, leaving the business district sparsely populated with empty cabs and the occasional straggler. Damien pulled up the collar of his coat and tightened the scarf about his neck in an empty gesture; the cold seeping into his bones had nothing to do with the weather. With a quick glance at his companion, Damien tightened his hold on the briefcase and turned in the direction of the nearest bar. Kurt looked exhausted. Clearly, the kid spent the past three days holed up in some basement, digging through archives and drowning in coffee. Damien knew this exhaustion well; the one where you've pushed your body past the point of endurance, where your biological clock gives up and sends out a final SOS. If he went home now, Kurt would spend the night staring at the edge of his pillow and yelling at his mind to shut off.

"Let's get a drink."

Kurt nodded, his unfocused eyes directed at the pavement as he let his legs carry him a step or two behind his boss. Five minutes on foot took them the edge of the business district, into an underground pub where the risks of running into a coworker were mitigated by the cheap booze and the sticky tables. Damien slid into a booth in the far corner of the room before ordering two whiskeys from a middle-aged waitress whose breasts threatened to spill from her top.

After a moment of watching Kurt sway in his seat, Damien broke the silence, "You know, this is actually good news."

With a struggle, Kurt drew his eyes up and frowned. "What part of any of this is good news?"

"He was sold," Damien responded, starting to play with the salt shaker, "which means he wasn't Claimed. Can't be a runaway if you're not Claimed."

"But if he has a Claiming pin…"

"Those can be removed." Damien dismissed the concern with a brush of his hand. "The trick 'll be registering him. If he's to have his life back…oh, thank you." He nodded to the waitress as she set two glasses on the table. Even from a distance, he could smell the sharp bite of cheap alcohol and poorly washed dishes.

"As I was saying," he continued, placing one of the uncomfortably warm glasses by Kurt's right hand, "he'll need new records. And we'll need to somehow forge 'em, file 'em, and even then…someone knows him. Whoever owned him – he knows what Blaine looks like. Knows where he came from. And we can't ignore the possibility that his parents, or that lawyer, also know. Fuck."

He took a long drink of his whiskey, grateful for the fire that scalded his throat.

"I'm sorry." Kurt whispered before taking a small sip of his drink. "I'm sorry I thought-"

"No need. You've done nothing wrong."

"It's just that…after reading…it's like he came alive. The boy, who he was, what he must have felt. The terror of losing his home, his shit family. Getting thrown into the hands of a Buyer. And all those years! What must have happened to him! And then- you said. You said he was your cousin. And I thought...you must have known. You must be complicit. I just…"

"You wanted to protect him." Damien gentled. "There's nothing wrong with that. I lied to you. You had every reason to distrust me."

As Kurt sipped at his drink, his eyes grew heavier and it took more and more effort to open them with each blink. Damien sat back and let the chatter of a half empty bar, with its cheering patrons, its clinking glasses, and its clattering chairs wash through him and dance with the awoken domination in his chest. He let it calm him, carried on the waves of his instincts.

"What now?"

Damien blinked open his eyes. "Now, you go home. Tomorrow you're talking a day off. So am I, for that matter. I want you to sleep it off, rest, recover – you've done incredible work, and there's so much left to be done. Now I need to make some calls, figure out where we can go from here. Plus, we need to fill in the blanks. Blaine Anderson's story has too many potholes, and we know some were dug up on purpose. It's time to fill them in – we're not bringing the kid back to life just to put it in danger. And then, when we have all the pieces, I think it'll be time to visit some friends on Beacon Hill."


Thoughts? Comments? Concerns?