It was a rainy afternoon when he arrived at the factory. It was a Sunday, and no one was supposed to be there. He sometimes made his own rounds around town to make sure everything was in order.
He’d been the Chief of the town for over 15 years and the people had started to put their trust in him. Even though he started quite young, at 27 he was appointed to be responsible for the safety of Mofocity at a very dangerous time the city had ever known, the day of the separation.
He didn’t have any experience to take up any rank of law enforcement let alone the Chief of Police, but he had proven that he could earn the title as he went along. The crime rate was impressively low, the town was a quiet and peaceful place to live, given the circumstances, but it was safe to say that Mofonians were happy with their way of living.
He had Matthew to thank for his newfound career path. Although he was not quite on board with the idea at first, because he was well on his way climbing up the corporate ladder which later on the position was filled by none other than Matthew’s own son, Jacob. Somehow everything worked out for everyone.
But on that particular day, he saw Matthew’s car parked at the back of the factory. It was unusual for him to visit the factory on a Sunday. Colby thought he would go in and say ‘hello’ while he was there.
The rain didn’t stop him from getting off his car and ran toward the back door that was unlocked. The rain was pouring hard on the roof that the sound had swallowed his calls for Matthew. He kept walking and calling his friend, but it was useless, he couldn’t even hear his own voice. He went up the stairs going to Matthew’s office, there was a long corridor lined up with a clear glass window that could see the operational area downstairs.
That’s when he saw it. Matthew was talking to a woman, but he was holding her wrist. The woman seemed to be struggling, trying to free her hand from Matthew’s grip. A rush of blood went to his head, he saw Matthew’s face, he didn’t look like himself, it was a face of evil.
His heart was racing, not sure of what’s happening downstairs. Before he could think, Matthew hit her face and the woman shrieked. It looked like she was trying to run away from him, but he grabbed her with both arms and he bear-hugged her from behind. The poor woman was almost half his size, she was crying and terrified. Colby read her lips, “Please don’t do this … please … don’t …” But Matthew’s hands were all over her breasts, he tore her blouse wide open and her screams were buried under the sound of the pouring rain and thunder.
Colby now realized what Matthew was doing and he just stood there frozen. Matthew was tearing out the woman’s skirt and underwear as he pushed her bending on the working table. She wriggled and hit him with her small arms, but he overpowered her, she didn’t stand a chance.
Not wanting to be a witness of his best friend’s crime, Colby decided to step back, and back, and back, and finally turned around and ran all the way to the back door where he came from.
That was the first time he ever failed to do his job, and it was all for Matthew and their friendship. He learned to live with it all these years, but then again, he’d learned to live with a lot of other things that Matthew had put him through.
He later found out that the woman he saw in the factory was Ava Addams. It became the one evil deed that he couldn’t really forgive himself for turning a blind eye.
But the day Adrian showed up at the doorstep with the baby, he started to confuse his own crime with fate. After all, he wasn’t so innocent himself. All the terrible things Matthew had done were almost as hideous as the fact that he was sleeping with his wife, Sabina, which started not long after what happened in the factory. He had a strange sense of justice. To him, justice was served.
Colby was back in his car, driving away from the Cromwell’s Estate. Matthew had suggested to him yet another injustice solution to the town’s problem.
He never liked Adrian, ever since he saw him run away after leaving a baby on the porch, he knew the boy had seen him with a dead baby in his arms, his utmost darkest secret.
It was a sigh of relief when he found out the boy had lost his memory, he really didn’t enjoy spying on him and taunting him not to tell anyone about what he saw. It was pure luck when Adrian lost his memory at the event of his father’s disappearance.
He always had one eye on Adrian because of this. As he grew older, Colby finds him more repulsive because he reminded him of himself when he was young, totally devoted to his friendship. Made him wonder if Adrian had made the same mistake he did.
He was a bully to the boy, it was something he’d been accustomed to, even when he knew the boy was no longer a threat to him, he never stopped giving him a hard time, he just didn’t like him.
Now he has the chance to make the boy suffer, Matthew’s order was an unwritten law in Mofocity. But the image of Ava Addams being brutally raped by Matthew haunts him still, he may be a bully, a liar, a cheat, but he never robbed anyone of their basic right and forced himself to a woman.
He owed her justice that he could never deliver to her. He knew that Ava was eventually murdered by her husband because of the pregnancy, something that nobody else knew but him. He owed Ava her life.
Oliver had killed her in a jealous rage when he found out his wife had given birth to a baby that he was not aware of. He was quick to conclude that his wife had been unfaithful and that was the reason she hid her pregnancy. Colby was first at the scene and saw the boy, he never charged Oliver for the murder and made a deal with him instead. Oliver was never to pursue the real father of the child. He complied. So the murder was concluded as a random act of crime, the perpetrator was never found.
Colby turned off his engine and sat back in the car. His mind wandered to the past, has everything changed, or was it pretty much the same? After all these years, he did everything in his power to keep the order of things and he’d succeeded.
But what’s coming is something bigger than himself, he knew it in his core, these missing people cases had everything to do with what was ahead. He closed his eyes and felt it for the first time, terrified, he needed a plan, a really good one. And when he opened his eyes, Adrian was climbing down the stairs of The Dungeon and walked further into the dark.