If there were ever a desperate heart, it pounded in the chest of Forth. He was consumed and in love but he couldn't find the man who was causing his pain.
There were other forces at work here. People who would see them torn apart.
Beam had slip...
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It took police forty-five minutes to rip Guzel and Cheap from their stitches. Guzel yelled until her face was blue but it didn't help avoid her embarrassment. It was a prize-winning bad hair day, and her denture was in a glass beside the bed. With her missing front teeth and her unsupported plastic boobies, the woman was a ghastly sight to behold. Her flimsy nightdress was stained with powdered cheese because she fell asleep with the snack bag in her hand.
They were both handcuffed and marched promptly out of the house. On display in front of the television cameras, they were loaded into a van and whisked off to the nearest detention centre.
Guzel made a good show of crying out in front of the crowd that had gathered. "Boys, I'm your mother. I was a prisoner too. It was all Cheap. He threatened me."
Maw and Forth sat with Beam and his brothers while police questioned them. Forth untangled and satisfied all the cops questions about things that didn't make sense. He put answers in their heads that explained the bizarre.
How the guys suddenly appeared back inside a house that had been searched.
How it was possible that Guzel and Cheap could be so meticulously sewn into their beds.
Where they'd been all this time and how it was that no one knew of their whereabouts.
One of the officers told Forth that he drove past the house just yesterday. "Who fixed the gate and the fence wall? How did all the gardening get done? And when did someone have time to replace the roof and paint the house?"
...
Grempe's secretary Pen, knocked and entered immediately thereafter. She sent the link for the live news coverage to his computer, and he, in turn, called Bonnie and did the same.
Flower, Yim and the rest of Forth's staff all stood together in the lobby of the fourth floor and watched the newscast.
The young female anchor was describing the scene into the microphone and the cameraman panned around the garden, house, and crowd. She said: "One of the brothers is coming out now. This looks like the youngest one."
There was a round of applause in the fourth-floor lobby, and upstairs in Grempe's office, he and Pen celebrated with a relieved sigh and smiles. Bonnie was online and Grempe could hear her happy scream. He looked in the monitor at the small corner feed and saw his wife dancing around the kitchen.
