by Anne Malcom
She’d added weight now. Muscle. She was wearing a simple tank and leggings. Her face was slightly flushed, a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. She was barely breathing hard, but she was working hard. You only needed to look at the sculpted muscles of her arms to see that.
She’d been taking care of herself too. Her face was brighter, her skin looked healthier. Her hair looked full and vibrant.
Since he was not allowed to visit or keep in contact beyond what was required for the investigation, April had been filling him in on whether she was eating—fancy stuff that was really fricking good, according to April. Whether she was drinking too much—she wasn’t drinking enough, according to April. And finally, if she was showing any signs of significant clinical depression.
“Of course she’s showing signs of depression, dip shit!” April had snapped when he’d all but pounced on her walking in the door from yet another visit with Orion. He was jealous of those visits though he’d never tell her that. She’d been there nearly the entire night. It must’ve been progress. “She was held captive for ten fucking years, Maddox. She’s going to be fucked up for the foreseeable future. Most likely forever.”
Her words stung him in the way she had intended.
She must’ve seen it on his face because she went off the attack immediately and leaned in to grasp his hand. “She’s doing better than she should be,” she said softly. “Which is, she’s not swinging from the rafters, injecting herself with drugs, or painting the walls with her bodily fluids. She’s coping, Maddox. On her own. So, let her be.”
“Kind of like you are,” he had snapped back, but he turned and left before she could give him a dose of attitude in return.
He knew April was only half joking, her light tone to try to mask the hurt he knew she was feeling. Maddox fucking hated that, seeing his little sister in any kind of pain and not being able to protect her. Fuck, that was the reason he’d moved her into his apartment, because he was usually never there. His parents gave him the down payment—he paid the mortgage. April had a knack for trouble. Whether or not she might’ve chosen the path she was on if Orion hadn’t been taken wasn’t worth thinking about. Because she was taken. And there was no point in thinking about shit like that. Shit he couldn’t change. Had no power over.
What he did have power over was his job. This case.
He’d been working himself to the bone to find answers. To find justice. And, if he was honest, a little fucking vengeance. Or a lot. Maddox craved the blood of the men that had done this to Orion. To all of those girls.
They found remains of six girls in that backyard. Had to make calls to parents who had long thought their children had run off, forgotten about them.
Part of the job was delivering ugly news. Maddox had done it plenty of times. But it didn’t get any easier. It was acid, sitting in his stomach, ready to come up with the words he had to utter to a family member, friend, spouse. Then he had to watch them break down, split apart, or worse, just shut down. Watch as life scooped something whole out of them, leaving nothing behind.
And that was happening to Orion right now.
After he’d uttered the news he’d been sick about delivering. Telling her that her main torturer, jailer, rapist, and would-be-murderer (if she hadn’t fought her way out), took the coward’s way out before any real justice could be served.
“Orion?” he said, taking care to make his voice soft but firm. It had been two minutes since he told her the bad news. Two minutes since any words were spoken.
She blinked rapidly, as if coming out of a trance. “He’s dead,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but he answered as if it were anyway. “That bastard’s dead.”
“He hung himself last night.”
“You don’t have any other leads?” she asked. “On the others? The clients?”
Maddox found it strange, the way she asked. Not in the way a fearful victim might, to make sure she didn’t have to look over her shoulder or check the locks three times before going to sleep. In his experience, most victims did that long after the perp was caught.
No, Orion wasn’t asking like a victim. She was asking like a . . . criminal. Like she didn’t want the obvious answer. Like she didn’t want him to have caught anyone. Fuck, his lack of sleep was catching up to him.
“No,” he said, ashamed at having to admit it. Ashamed that he was failing her once again. “Despite seeming like they were slobs and addicts, in addition to being animals, the house didn’t have any evidence that could lead us to the others. We’ve got the computer forensic team digging through hard drives and phones. It’s only a matter of time before we link these guys to something larger. This isn’t over yet, Orion. My job isn’t done. And it won’t be until I get all these fucks who did this to you.”
The house had plenty of evidence of other things though. Torture. Horror. Hardened cops he looked up to had gotten sick at the sight of it. At the evidence of what was done there. And Orion was standing in front of him, having had all of that shit done to her. She was healthy, she was sober, she was upright, she was strong—physically, at least.
Orion nodded calmly, as if she wasn’t hearing that the men who had tortured and raped her were still walking free. Like he was telling her the store was out of her favorite fucking cereal.
“I’m sorry, Orion,” he said, voice catching. It hit him then how fucking weak those two words were, how much he’d used them with her since she escaped. They made him sick.
Something moved in her eyes. It could’ve been a trick of the light. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “He’s dead. I guess that’s a victory.”
He didn’t believe her.
“Is that it?” she asked after a few moments of awkward silence.
He jerked back.
No, that wasn’t fucking it. He wanted to tell her that not a day in these past ten years had gone by without him thinking about her. He wanted to say that he was in awe of her, of her strength, her power. How she was standing up straight, how she managed to maintain her beauty when ugliness was all she had known for the past ten years. He wanted to ask her out to fucking dinner so he could look at her. How he wanted to kill every single piece of shit who hurt her . . . and then some.
He wanted to tell her that if he lived one thousand lifetimes, he would carry the guilt of what happened to Adam with him. But he said none of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Thank you, Detective Novak.” She held the door tightly, motioning toward the exit with her head.
He moved toward the door, tipped his imaginary cap. “Ms. Darby.”
Then she closed the door in his face.
Orion tasted acid as she walked through the door of Jaclyn’s apartment. She had thrown up in the kitchen sink right after she’d slammed the door in Maddox’s face.
Was it because of the news he carried or the man himself?
It had to be the former. It was the former. Something cracked inside her with the knowledge that he could do that, that he could take his own life. It was a mercy not given to them. Nothing was theirs, not even their deaths.
Orion didn’t know how Jaclyn was going to take it. She had watched her spiral this past month. Watched her change, her eyes hooded, shoulders drooped. Orion postulated Jaclyn wasn’t acclimating all that well, and how could she? She had spent five more years in The Cell than Orion. Five more years of rape, savagery, brutality. Orion thought back to her own issues with the news, the bouts of sobbing in the shower, the anger so visceral she could feel it pumping through her veins, the hunger for vengeance blooming within her. She could only imagine what Jaclyn was going through, and how she would respond.
Their apartments had the same layout. They were both on the same floor, but at opposite ends of the building. Jaclyn’s was wildly different than Orion’s, cluttered and messy, the sight of it making Orion cringe.
“What are you doing?” Orion asked, looking around the small room piled high with books she did
n’t recognize, food in packaging that was somewhat familiar. That’s what everything was now, strange but familiar. The world hadn’t changed completely, but the snack food wrappers had fucking moved on. And the phones. And the TV channels. And the people, consumed with technology, with themselves.
“I’m catching up,” Jaclyn said, mouth full. She was holding a bag of chips in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other.
“On what? Alcoholism? Obesity?” Orion asked dryly.
Jaclyn chuckled. “The past fifteen years,” she replied, not looking up from the television. “We’ve missed out on so much, Orion.” She couldn’t hide the catch in her voice. The slight hint of sorrow. “So fucking much has passed us by.” She pointed to a small black box on the coffee table, plugs leading from the back of it to the big screen in front of them. A remote control laid beside it. “I mean, these fucking video games.” She pointed to the box, made an exploding gesture. “Have you played one yet?”
Orion shook her head.
“I’m telling you, girl. It’s some crazy shit. They have every game you could imagine. And you don’t have to buy it or put it in. You just download it!”
Orion glanced at the screen. A blonde woman was riding what Orion guessed was a dragon. She wasn’t much for fantasy TV. She loved reading about it, but she didn’t like seeing someone else’s depiction of what the story could be. She liked having the power of imagination in her own mind.
“That’s Daenerys,” Jaclyn explained. “She’s the mother of dragons and all-around badass. I was meant to read the books before watching this, but they’re long and I’m more of a visual girl.”
Orion had them on her Kindle. Game of Thrones. She’d been meaning to get around to reading that one, but she only had a limited amount of time for reading for pleasure.
“I’m taking a break from Grand Theft Auto at the moment,” Jaclyn said, motioning toward the screen.
“Taking a break from stealing cars?” Orion asked, scrunching her brows.
Jaclyn laughed. “It’s a game, dummy.”
Orion looked at the TV and watched for a few beats, if only to put off what she had to tell Jaclyn. She was being a coward, but she was worried. Jaclyn was hanging on by a thread. It was obvious. They all were, one way or another. But it was easier to worry about Jaclyn’s future and her sanity than it was her own.
“Thing One is dead,” she blurted in the middle of a graphic sex scene that turned her stomach. She usually made herself watch them in movies or shows. Made herself read them in books. All her mind wanted to do was skip over, avert her eyes, so her mind didn’t take her back there.
Sex was meant to be something special. Fun. But it had been ruined for her. It was dirt under her skin. It was pain in her bones. It was filth in her blood.
Jaclyn didn’t look up. “Oh yeah?”
Orion stared at her. “That’s it? ‘Oh yeah?’”
Jaclyn finally met her eyes, and what was in them worried Orion. They seemed detached, out of focus. “What else is there? Didn’t we want him dead all along? That’s the goal, right? Outlive everyone who was planning to eventually kill us when they were done raping us? Stolen girls, two. Things, nothing.” Jaclyn faked a cheer.
Orion flinched at the cadence to her words. At the words themselves.
Jaclyn had always been calloused. Brutal. Orion liked and respected that about her. It was the reason she’d survived.
But this was something more than that.
Something less.
It was like there was no fight in her anymore. She seemed vacant, detached. Seemed to be without the life, the glow, the bad-assery she had exuded in The Cell.
“He killed himself,” Orion said, hoping that this would break something in Jaclyn like it had her. “Hung his cowardly ass with his bed sheet.”
Jaclyn shoved another handful of Hot Cheetos in her mouth. “Not surprising.”
Anger crawled up Orion’s throat. “He didn’t deserve that!” Orion yelled. “He didn’t deserve to get off that easy after only a fucking month in a cell. He deserved to be locked up and ass-raped for the rest of his life. He deserved to feel everything we felt, everything we went through.”
Jaclyn paused the show, turned to give Orion her full attention. “Orion, we are living, breathing, fucked-up proof that people don’t get what they deserve. That justice is not going to be served. But we got out, we’ve got money. We’ve got enough issues to buy our therapists homes in the Hamptons and a fucking private jet to fly them there. It’s the best we’re gonna get. This is life for us now.”
Jaclyn sounded tired. Resigned. Orion had never heard her like this before. Sitting on the sofa, binging junk food, watching TV like she was some normal twenty-something woman. Like this world had turned inside out and Orion was the only one left that had a brain craving blood.
She didn’t know how to reply to that. She could yell some more, maybe try to get through to her. But what was that doing? Was that really helping her friend? By urging her to hold on to that need for vengeance, as if that vengeance was some magic pill that would make all the pain and nightmares go away. It was just shackling another kind of ankle cuff to her. She knew that. But, like the sickos who bought her, used her, sold her had acted on their own innate yearning, unable to deny its wicked calling, she too felt that yearning . . . a yearning for the blood of her abusers, the blood of all abusers.
“Do you ever wonder about the stories we tell ourselves?” Orion asked after a long silence. Long enough for Jaclyn to turn the show back on and take a long swig from her bottle. “About how we cast ourselves all these years in The Cell? Not even to the police, to whatever family is still left, but to each other, and ourselves? Do you wonder if we have been lying to ourselves about what role we played?”
Jaclyn paused the show again. This time she sat up and focused on Orion. She eyed her with that hard stare of hers that would never soften. “No, I don’t give a fuck about whether my story is a lie. Or if yours is. All that matters is that we’re alive to tell them. All that matters is we can watch what we want, eat what we want, and say what we want.”
She narrowed her eyes even further, looking at Orion in the same way Orion was looking at her, searching her face, looking beyond. “Fuck, you’re not still hung up on this whole revenge in the form of murder thing are you? You can’t be fucking serious.”
Orion’s blood warmed. “How can you not want revenge?” she demanded. “After what they did to us?”
“I want revenge,” Jaclyn said quietly, more quiet than Orion had ever heard her. “Don’t you think that if I had a dragon, I’d burn this whole fucking city down just to find them?” She didn’t wait for Orion to answer. “Of course I would. But I don’t have a dragon. A kingdom. I don’t have a fucking army to take them down. It’s just me. And I know I can survive a lot, but I won’t survive some campaign for revenge or justice or whatever the fuck you think you’re doing, which can only end with my ass right behind bars again along with you. Because we’re never going to get it. No matter what we do, it will never be enough to even the scales. What they did can’t be repaired or revenged away, Orion. And when you’re sitting in a cell again one day for thinking it can, you’re gonna remember these words.”
She hated that Jaclyn was surrendering. She hated that the angry, rebellious girl in The Cell wasn’t the same out here. Mostly she hated that she was making sense. “So, you’re just going to give up? Sit here for the rest of your life and eat junk, watch TV?”
Jaclyn shrugged. “Maybe. But I think I’ve earned that choice, Orion, don’t you? As much as I love you, I’m not letting you drag me into whatever twisted web you think you’re capable of weaving.”
Eleven
Things had changed since Maddox’s visit.
Since his news.
Orion had always been planning on revenge. She’d been planning for blood. But in a way that might only ever be a plan. Never to be executed.
She liked to think that she would’ve gone f
orward no matter what, but something told her that she would have lost her nerve. She’d become too domesticated in this new world where torture and monsters were hidden. She, like everyone else, might fall into the habit of thinking monsters only existed in stories.
So, in that respect, Thing One did her a favor by killing himself. By proving to her that even in prison, he had more rights than she did. More control.
Bob Collins was still walking around a hospital in a white coat saving lives like he hadn’t ruined hers. And being celebrated for it.
She was going to do it.
What she’d been planning.
But before she got her hands dirty, stained with blood that would never wash off, she had a promise to keep.
Dark whispers taunted her with the truth that Mary Lou was dead and no one else had witnessed the promise made. Orion could break it and no one would know the difference. But Mary Lou had done more for her in The Cell than Orion’s parents had done her entire life before it. Nurtured and cared for her in a way that ultimately saved her life. She owed her this much.
She had plenty of time to damn herself, to sully her soul. Before she submitted to the monster inside, she would do this one thing. She would repay her debt to an old friend.
In order to keep her promise, she had to make a phone call, had to speak to someone she needed to never see again. Promises made in basements with chains on your ankles were never going to be easy to keep.
“I need a favor.” Orion forced out the words as soon as she heard him pick up.
“Well, hello to you too,” Maddox replied, sounding far too fucking easy. Casual.
Orion’s palms were sweating, and her lunch—homemade quiche Lorraine—was churning in her stomach. Stupid choice to eat before the call, but she’d been putting it off since she woke at six, and she would never go hungry for a man again.
She didn’t want to call Maddox. Didn’t want to hear his throaty, deep, fucking easy voice and have anything but an impassive reaction to it. It had been her plan to cut all ties to her past. Threads, really. And there were only two of them, so it should’ve been easy.
