Broken: Book 3 of The Owned Series

by Masters, Derek

  “Okay, I’ll do you one better. I bet I can get a lady to come home with me before you can.”

  “You’re on. Prepare to kiss your hundred bucks goodbye.”

  At that point, my dream jumps ahead to later that afternoon. We were in a C-17 Globemaster III and the goal of the day was to jump into the drop zone and land as close to the target as possible. The target was simply a large bullseye painted onto the ground.

  “Hey fuckhead, you going to land anywhere near that target today?” Brian started in on me almost as soon as we were in the air.”

  “What the fuck do you mean? I’m going to land right in the center like I always do!”

  “Are you shitting me? The last time we did this exercise, you were so far off the mark, I thought we were going to have to send a search party to find you.”

  “Fuck off,” I said as I extended my middle finger. I didn’t really have a comeback for that because he wasn’t wrong. “The wind was strong that day and carried my chute.”

  “You better hope that we only drop in on the bad guys when the weather is nice and calm.”

  The two of us both shared a good laugh and made our way to the open doors. We were both jumping at the same time and were trying to hit one of the two targets on the ground. The exercise was made more difficult by the fact that the targets looked like fairly small dots on the ground to everyone in the air.

  “On three,” Brian said and I nodded in agreement.

  At the count of three, the two of us jumped out of the plane and started racing to the ground. These drills were enjoyable to me, but I knew Brian looked forward to them. He was the definition of an adrenaline junkie.

  As we performed our free fall in the sky, the target began to come into view more and more. There wasn’t a lot we could do before deploying our chutes, so we focused on keeping track of out altitude. Once the parachutes were out, we would be able to steer ourselves towards our targets.

  I pulled my chute at exactly 5,000 feet, but noticed that Brian hadn’t pulled his. Sometimes he liked to show off and pull it at the last possible second.

  Watching closely, I noticed that he had pulled the ripcord and nothing happened. Horror took over when I realized that he pulled the backup chute and experienced the same result.

  There was nothing I could do to help him. I screamed his name as I watched him hit the ground, falling to his death.

  6

  Reed

  I was yelling Brian’s name as I woke up from the horrific dream, just as I yelled his name the day it all happened. Drenched in sweat, I sat straight up in bed, sucking in as much air as I could even though I felt like I was suffocating. Much to my surprise, when I turned my head, I saw Hannah sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked her.

  “You’ve been yelling out random things for a while. When I came in to check on you, it sounded like you were whimpering in your sleep. I decided to stick around to make sure you were okay”

  Was she being serious? After what I had put her through, she still cared enough to make sure I was okay. I did not deserve this woman. Not even a little bit.

  “I was having a nightmare. A very vivid one. Actually, it was more than that. I was having a full-blown flashback.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not particularly. I basically just re-lived the event in its entirety.”

  “Are you sure? It might help to get it out.”

  “All right, to make a long story short, I had a best friend named Brian back when I was a paratrooper. We might as well have been brothers. I gave him shit and he gave it right back to me. We were doing a training mission one afternoon and his parachute didn’t open. His chute failed and I had to watch helplessly as he fell to his death.”

  “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” Hannah said, reaching her arm around me and placing my head on her shoulder.

  “That’s not the worst part. The worst part is that his death is all my fault!”

  “All your fault? What happened?”

  “I was the one who packed the parachutes that day. I must have made a mistake somewhere along the way. Whatever the mistake was, caused his chute to not open. Had I not been the one packing the chutes that day, Brian would still be here today.”

  “Take a deep breath, Reed. It sounds like you’ve been carrying a lot of guilt around for many years. Is this something you think about a lot?”

  “I try not to, but when I sleep, I have no control over what enters my mind.”

  “Okay, the day this happened, was it your first time packing the parachutes?”

  “No, I’d packed hundreds of chutes by that time. It was like second nature.”

  “All right, was there anything you did differently that day than the other hundreds of parachutes you packed?”

  “I did everything like I always did. Like I said, it was second nature so I was able to do it without really thinking about it.”

  “If that’s the case, then you need to accept the fact that this wasn’t your fault at all. Sometimes there are freak accidents. His parachute wouldn’t have opened no matter who packed it that day. There’s no sense in beating yourself up over something you had absolutely no control over. It’s okay to be sad that he’s gone, but you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

  Maybe Hannah was right. I had been holding onto the guilt of him dying ever since the day it happened. I was so mad that he was gone and felt like somebody had to take the blame for it. I felt that if nobody was responsible, then his death would be in vain and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if that was the case. In the end, it really was just an accident and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it short of not jumping that day.

  For the first time since the accident happened, I felt like I could finally breathe. All of the guilt didn’t suddenly dissipate and I still felt a lot of anger, but maybe, just maybe I could learn to believe that his blood wasn’t on my hands.

  I expected Hannah to start making her way back towards her room, although I wanted nothing more than for her to stay in the room with me. I was surprised when she climbed over me and onto the other side of the bed.

  “Are you staying in here with me tonight?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

  Lying my head down on the pillow, I reiterated one fact in my mind. I really, really didn’t deserve her.

  * * *

  “Good morning,” I said to Hannah as she walked into the kitchen as I was drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper. “Can we talk for a minute?”

  “Reed, if it’s about what happened yesterday, there’s really no need. I know you were just in the moment. It scared me a little, but I’m all right.”

  “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about. You helped me a lot last night and I think you deserve to hear a few things from me about the situation that we have found ourselves in.”

  “Okay, this doesn’t sound good. Do I need to sit down for this?”

  “This isn’t necessarily bad. I mean, it isn’t very good, but it’s something you deserve to hear, but only if you’re ready to hear it.”

  “Okay, I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be,” she sighed, taking a seat across from me at the table.

  “Hannah, last night I realized something. I realized that you deserve so much better than me. For one thing, you deserve to know the truth about who I am and why you’re here.”

  “Reed, this is scaring me a bit.”

  “Please, just hear me out. These are all things you need to know. First of all, our story didn’t begin the night of the auction. You were on my radar long before then.”

  “On your radar? What does that mean?”

  “I’ve seen you around town. This might sound really creepy but I’ve watched you on more than one occasion. I don’t mean that in a stalker type way. You just happened to be ou
t running or shopping when I was in the area. You stuck out to me right away. I was smitten to say the least, and believe me when I say that becoming smitten with someone is not something that I do.”

  “So you watched me?”

  “Yeah, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I knew all about you. I looked you up. I researched you. I knew your name and a lot of your history before I met you. I don’t know what it was about you, but I needed to know who you were. I didn’t have a specific reason why. There was just something inside of me that told me I needed to know who you were.”

  “How did you pull that off without knowing anything about me?” Hannah asked with a puzzled look on her face.

  “It was actually pretty easy. All I needed was your license plate number, which I got when you were leaving a restaurant one evening. That was all I needed to know your name, your date of birth, address, and everything else. I am surprised that there weren’t details about your mom anywhere, but that may be because you were so young.”

  “So is there a website or something where you can just enter in a license plate number and get all of this information?”

  “No Hannah, it’s not nearly that simple. I’m a mercenary by trade, but I’m actually working as a contractor for the FBI at the moment. Although I’m not an official employee, I have access to most of their systems. These systems have more information in them than anyone could imagine.”

  “What do you do for the FBI and what does your job have to do with this?”

  “I am contracted to monitor the sex auctions. I gather as much information as possible at the auctions and take them back to the investigators. Once they have all the information they need, they’re able to locate the group responsible for the sex trafficking and take them down from the top of the organization, saving many sold girls in the process.”

  “Oh, so this isn’t the first time you’ve done something like this?”

  “No, this is a first for me. I was monitoring the dark web like I always do and got invited to the auction. When I saw the list of girls available, you stuck out to me right away. I knew right then that I needed to save you. I went to my contacts in the FBI and begged for the funds to buy you, but they wouldn’t allow it. They reiterated the importance of gathering information and nothing more.”

  “So they knew about the auction and were still going to let us be taken as sex slaves or whatever?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s the way it works. The people who actually hold the power in these organizations stay far, far away from the auctions. We have to collect information on whoever we can, let the FBI arrest them, and gather information on the men in charge. If they can manage to get one or two people to flip, they offer them protection in exchange for helping to bring the organization down.”

  “All right, what was different about me?” she inquired, fighting back tears as she realized how dire her situation could have been.

  “I don’t know. I just knew that I had to save you. I broke the rules and used my own money to ensure you didn’t get shipped off to God knows where. I very much broke the rules and could get in a lot of trouble. I could be criminally charged if anyone were to find out. You’re here and safe and right now, that’s all that matters.”

  7

  Hannah

  It’s crazy to think about how close I came to being sold into a life of sex slavery. Perhaps I would have been rescued one day, but it’s just as possible that I would have been killed by either a John or whoever my handler would have been. I literally owed my life to Reed and although our situation was more than just a little fucked up, I knew that I owed my life to him. I hoped that one day I’d be able to find a way to repay him.

  The thought that my father allowed the men to take me was really bothering me, especially after the nightmares I’d been having. Surely he couldn’t have known what type of men he was releasing me to, could he? Surely he didn’t know that by him allowing those men to take me, I would be sold to the highest bidder. No, it couldn’t possible be true.

  Later that afternoon, I was sitting in the study reading a copy of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It was the type of book that I would have read in high school. It was the perfect combination of romance and psychological thriller. When you add in the dash of mystery it provided, you had just the right mix to hook me in. I could not put the book down.

  As I was finishing it up, Reed’s phone rang. I heard him answer it in the other room and a couple minutes later, he was bringing the handset to me.

  “Everything okay?” I asked as I closed the book and put it on the table next to the chair.

  “Hannah, this is one of my contacts at the Las Vegas Police Department. I let them in on everything you told me about the day your mother died. They can clearly see that the events you remembered did not match what’s written in the police report.”

  “Okay, so what do they need from me?”

  “They’ve gotten the go ahead to exhume your mother’s body for a new autopsy. The only problem is that they need your father’s permission to do so. The only way around that is to make him an official suspect in their records but in order to do that, you’ll have to greenlight the exhumation since you’re the next of kin.”

  I was trying to absorb the information that Reed was telling me. I wanted to have some time to mull it over.

  “How long do I have to think about it?”

  “You don’t. If this is something you want to do, they’re going to have to move on it now before your dad finds out and has a lawyer try to block it.”

  “There’s really something to the dream I had, isn’t there?”

  “I’m sorry Hannah, but it’s looking that way.”

  “All right, I’ll give the okay. At least in the end, I’ll know one way or another.”

  “Perfect. I’ll have to take you in to the station to fill out the paperwork.”

  “Wait, won’t that get you in trouble? Being seen with me?”

  “No, when I filled out the paperwork about my findings at the auction, your name was nowhere to be found. Even when I was asking about funds to rescue you, I never gave them your name. You’re safe. Don’t worry about me.”

  * * *

  I didn’t hear anything for over three weeks after giving the state of Las Vegas permission to dig up my mother’s grave and perform an autopsy. I was amazed to learn that a thorough autopsy had not been performed after she died. I was stunned to learn that it wasn’t performed at my father’s request. Even more shocking was the fact that I learned that he looked into having her cremated, but my grandparents stepped in, leading him to step down pretty quickly.

  “Hannah, have a seat,” Reed said as he walked into the room.

  “What’s up?”

  “I just got a call from the coroner. Your mom’s autopsy was completed a few days ago.”

  My stomach was suddenly tied in knots and my entire body started to shake.

  “What did they find?”

  “Unfortunately, it’s been a long time since your mom died so all they were able to do was find what they already knew: that she was injured during a fall down the stairs. Since the police report already determined that the cause of death was the fall, there isn’t really anything to connect your dad to the death.”

  “So that’s it? I’m not going to get any answers? I don’t want him to be the person responsible, but I just need to know one way or another. I know that if I just go to him and ask him, his story will be the same as always, but things just don’t add up.”

  Reed slid over and put his arm around me.

  “I spoke to investigators and this can basically go one of two ways, depending on what you want to do. Option one is to leave things alone and continue living your life. The second option is to go in and speak to the homicide detective. I can’t promise anything will come of it, but at least your story will be told.”

  “I don’t want to leave things alone, but at the same time, I don’t necessarily want to speak to investigators because w
hat if I’m wrong? Then my father will hate me for the rest of his life.”

  “Hannah, I understand you feeling that way, but you have to remember that as far as your dad knows, you’ve been sold at auction and he hasn’t taken any steps to try to find you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve been watching him. He’s been living his life like everything is fine. There’s not even a missing person report out on you. He knows what happened to you and he doesn’t want to bring any attention to it because it all comes back to him.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, but it sure seems like there’s more to this.

  “All right, I’ll get it set up and take you in the morning.

  * * *

  I felt sick to my stomach and couldn’t eat for the rest of the day. When I went to bed, I tossed and turned, wondering what kind of feelings the meeting the next day would bring up. I didn’t sleep much, and when I did manage to fall asleep, all I could do was relive the horrible night over and over again. It was as though my mind knew what was coming and wanted my memories to be as fresh as possible.

  As nauseous as I felt that night, the next morning was something else entirely. I had to have Reed stop the car several times on the way to the police station because I thought I was going to vomit. Thankfully, I made it through the trip without actually losing it.

  At the police station, I was taken back to one of the interview rooms to wait for the detective that was leading the investigation. The room was cold and a bit musty. The plain white walls were broken up only by a mirror on the wall, which I assumed was actually a two-way where the detectives could look in on suspects without them knowing. There was also a single video camera in the corner of the room.