She lets out a strange whimper, closing her eyes and murmuring prayers under her breath. Why is that always the salvation of the wicked, to pray? God doesn’t want to hear their lies anymore than I do.
“You sold me—” I start, but Coraleigh surprises me by opening her eyes and leveling a glare on me that’s more irritated than anything else, like we’re inconveniencing her and ruining her perfectly planned afternoon. Well, I’ll tell you that I was supremely irritated with her when she sold me and my sisters to pedophiles.
“This is for the best, Bernadette. You can be so much more than just a lost girl from South Prescott; the Kushners have resources. If you’re a good girl, and you do what they say, I see a bright future for you.”
Lying cunt.
“I know who you are, Bernadette,” Leigh says, flicking her attention up to Oscar. He’s said nothing, but the way he’s staring down at her, I would think her instincts should tell her that something is going to go very, very wrong today. “I should’ve known this was a goddamn set-up.”
Coraleigh’s husband, still cradling his injured hand against his chest, gives her an insider sort of look, like he agrees with that statement. Figures. He must wonder how his wife brings home such hefty paychecks.
“A set-up?” I echo as Oscar adjusts his glasses and glances my way. It’s impossible for me to miss the wash of color on his arms and neck, his legs. He’s Aphrodite’s Achilles, but instead of dipping him in the river Styx, he was dipped in ink. I wonder if, like the hero of Greek legend, he has a vulnerable spot that I could pierce with an arrow of my own?
“Before Eric and Todd skipped town,” Oscar begins, tilting his head slightly to one side. His raven-black hair is tousled by the fingers of a coastal breeze, softening him for just the briefest of moments. But then I blink, and the image is gone. He’s as beautiful as a marble statue, but only half as warm. “They texted Leigh to set up this meeting.” A strange smile takes over Oscar’s face, one made up of endless voids and moonbeams. “The Kushners were going to buy a little girl.” He leans down and puts his palms on his knees in a very patronizing sort of way, like he’s leaning over to speak to a pair of naughty children. “Where is the child, Leigh?”
“You want the girl?” she asks, exchanging a look with her husband. His face is written up in a document of terror, but his wife doesn’t seem to get it. She turns back to Oscar, eyes hopeful. “We can get you the girl. As many as you want, for a good price, too.”
“Stop playing games,” Victor says mildly, casting his obsidian gaze in Oscar’s direction. He looks … bored? I take that as a good sign. There is no danger here, in this interaction. “We know the girl’s at their place. Shall we go pay her a visit?”
“No, we don’t do business at our home,” Leigh says, shaking her head, as if this is business as usual. Even Mr. Vincent looks mildly mollified, like getting his hand broken isn’t out of the ordinary for this line of work. I guess sex-trafficking young girls is risky business.
My vision colors with red as my hands begin to shake. I flex my fingers several times, trying to work out the violent quivering that’s taking over my body.
“You remember me?” I query, confused at her nonchalance at seeing my face. Eric looked terrified when he saw me. Why is Coraleigh so … businesslike? She turns to stare at me, her lips pulling down into a frown. The tiniest trickle of blood runs down the side of her face, plopping onto the front of the aqua-colored North Face jacket she’s wearing.
“No, but I’ve heard about you,” she says, folding her hands calmly in front of her. “I’ve heard about your gang, too. I have information to barter, if we can find an acceptable price.”
Heard about us? Color me confused.
Callum looks up at Vic and frowns, fingers twitching, like he’d enjoy putting a knife to Leigh’s throat the same way that he did to Todd Kushner. Instead, he stands still, like a good little Havoc soldier. Hael just lights up a cigarette, completely unconcerned with either of the Vincents.
“We can pay,” Vic says mildly, nodding his head as if he’s deep in thought. See, the thing is, he rubs his chin when he’s actually problem solving in that pretty head of his. This is all just for fun. “But first, we want to see the girl.”
Coraleigh and her husband exchange another look before she turns back to Victor and gives a nod of her own.
“Okay, then. But if the Kushners show up asking after her, I’ll have to say I sold her to you.”
Victor grins and even though I spent the morning fucking him, and sucking his cock, the expression gives me the chills.
“I don’t foresee that being a problem,” he says, and then Hael and Cal each use a balled-up fist to cuff both members of the Vincent couple in the back of the head. There’s a very disturbing cracking sound, like bone being shattered, red drops of blood flecking Hael’s knuckles as he shakes his hand out. The boys are like a pair of well-oiled machines, the muscles in their arms hardened through bullshit and bullying.
The couple crumples to the sand, and while Mr. Vincent is lucky enough not to still be awake, Leigh starts to moan.
I take a deep breath as Cal hits her again, and again, and again until she’s quiet, and then hefts her up to toss over his shoulder.
“What are we going to do about their buggy?” I ask as Hael does the same to Mr. Vincent. The boys load the couple up in the back seat of our rental. The front end is a bit scratched up, but not to the point where one might assume we’d ramrodded someone with it.
“Drive it back to their place,” Vic says with a smile. He moves over to the vehicle and, with all five of us pushing on the side, we manage to turn it back over. “It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump a-motherfucking-way.” Victor leans over and kisses my temple, banding an arm around my waist and pulling me up against him. “Let’s get this over with so we can get back to fucking, shall we? This is my goddamn honeymoon.”
“Our,” I correct, but I’m not sure if I’m trying to tell Vic that it belongs to me and him or … all of us.
The Vincents own a mansion at the edge of the sea. It’s a five-thousand square foot, six-bedroom, five-bath nightmare with a stone wall, a gated driveway with a keypad, and direct access to the beach. According to the Zillow listing I pull up on my phone, they paid three-point-nine million dollars for it.
Tell me again how a pediatrician and a social worker can afford a house worth nearly four mil?
Oh, that’s right.
By trafficking helpless young girls to perverts.
“Swanky,” Hael whistles, opening a drawer in the kitchen and raising his brows. “The fuck? There’s a freezer in here.” He lifts up a container of ice cream, checks the label, and then tears the plastic ring off the top. Three more drawers later and he’s found himself a spoon to eat it with.
“It’s called an undercounter freezer,” Oscar says, all without looking up from his iPad. “They’re extremely expensive, unquestionably bourgeois, and paid for with money the Vincents got from selling lost, little girls.”
“Please!” Coraleigh screams, tied to her own chair in her own living room. There’s an entire wall of windows to her left, looking out at the sea and the sunshine, but there isn’t a soul on that beach because, well, it’s a private beach. It’s not open to the rabble of peasantry, the ones silly enough to work normal jobs and not exploit people for gain. Therefore, nobody will hear her scream. Nobody will see our buggies parked out front of the house. And, because Oscar is a genius with that iPad of his, nobody will see the security footage from the Vincents’ cameras. “Listen to me: we can work things out amicably. This doesn’t have to devolve into violence.”
Callum laughs, sitting on the edge of one of the counters and eating an apple he’s stolen from a nearby fruit bowl. Meanwhile, Aaron is upstairs with all of our girls, making sure they change out of their sandy clothes and into fresh pj’s. There’s another girl up there, too, the one the Vincents were going to sell to the Kushners.
She’s little and raven-hai
red and even though she looks nothing like Penelope, I saw her, and I just suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about my sister. They have the same eyes. Not the color of them, because Pen was blue-eyed, and this girl has an obsidian gaze like Vic. But … there’s something else there, a vibrancy and a will to live that looks like it’s trapped under a tarp, a bubble waiting to float free just so long as it isn’t popped first.
I thought that once Neil was gone, I would feel better somehow, less sad about my sister’s being dead, as if vengeance is a cure-all for grief. While I’m happy that we’ve scrubbed that monster from existence, the sadness hasn’t dimmed an iota.
I stand there in front of the Vincents, looking around at this stupidly luxurious house and wondering how someone’s brain can be so corrupted by greed that they forget the basic tenets of humanity: compassion, empathy, and kindness.
“Are we going to kill them?” I ask, partially because I’m genuinely curious but also because I know the question will scare the crap out of Leigh and her husband (whose name I have yet to learn, mostly because I don’t care to).
“Not sure yet,” Vic replies, playing along as he lounges on the curved window seat, his back against the glass, a bottle of beer in his right hand. “Depends on that information they have, the information they wanted to, uh, barter with us about.” He gives a signature anti-smile as I move over to the drawer where Hael found the ice cream, looking for more.
“Wanna share?” he asks, offering it, and the spoon, up to me. I smile as I take it, feeling Vic’s eyes burn into my back as my fingers tangle with Hael’s. We stare at each other as I scoop out some chocolate ice cream and suck it off in the slowest, most sensual way possible.
“Listen,” Coraleigh continues, glaring at us as if we’ve invaded her private space. I wonder if she thinks about the girls she sells off, and how violated they must feel. Probably not, huh? “Marcus and I are respected members of the community. If we go missing, somebody will notice.”
“I mean, once we leak the information we have about your child sex-trafficking ring, nobody will look very hard.” Vic pauses, thinks for a moment, readjusts his statement. “Nobody will care.” He lets his mouth curl up into a sneer. “Like Epstein, and his mysterious suicide. Only, you’re much smaller potatoes, and you don’t have billionaires, politicians, and royalty as clients.”
“We have friends coming over,” Leigh continues as her husband whimpers from his location on her right, eyes closed, face wet with tears. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“Oh dear,” Oscar says, finally deigning to look up from his tablet. “I certainly hope not. I’d hate to have to shoot them and then, by consequence of your being witness, I’d then have to shoot you, too.”
I hop up on the counter beside Callum, our arms close enough to touch, and I enjoy that calm confidence of his. It seeps into my skin like a balm, reminding me of our conversation on the roof and the way he’d purred the word Yet back at me when I’d mentioned we hadn’t slept together.
He glances over at me and I look back at him, sucking chocolate ice cream off my spoon.
“There’s no need to resort to violence here,” Coraleigh says, still yammering along in that way of hers. “We don’t molest children. We don’t rape girls. We’re just two normal people trying to make it in a world that isn’t fair. You can understand that, right? You’re doing the same thing here tonight.”
“Why are they still alive and talking?” I ask, finally wrenching my gaze away from Cal to look at my social worker. Number three on my list and just as culpable as Eric in my opinion. If she actually looked out for the children under her care, maybe they wouldn’t keep disappearing into the netherworld?
It only takes one person to speak up and encourage others, to let them know you see darkness so they can see it, too. There are monsters hiding all around us, but if we each shine our light into that abyss, we can see them, we can find them, we can hunt them the way they hunt us.
I take another bite of ice cream. Its sinful decadence melts across my tongue, destroying my taste buds in the worst possible way. A pleasured groan escapes me, and Cal chuckles.
“You’re behaving remarkably well, considering the circumstances,” he whispers in that gorgeous voice of his, the one that sounds the way this double dark chocolate espresso ice cream tastes. I pretend like I’m not affected by his presence and shrug. It was Aaron who told me to try to find happiness in every, single moment. I’m really trying here. Oh, and besides, I’m starting to realize that I’m one seriously messed-up bitch who enjoys adrenaline rushes.
I, Bernadette Savannah Blackbird, am an adrenaline junkie.
“Your victim mentality crap is driving me nuts,” I tell Leigh, taking over the conversation, much to Hael’s pleasure. He’s just howling with laughter in that usual way of his, all reckless abandon and corrupted youth. He should be just a fun-loving kid, but the world has turned him into this cackling beast with a hard body and a perfect cock. I almost smile again, but then, I haven’t quite reached that level of creepy. “There’s nothing worse than someone who acts like they’re being bullied when, in reality, they are the bully themselves. It takes away from those who actually are being abused.” I point at the Vincents with my spoon. “You are not victims. You chose to exploit your position of power and trust in the community to bring harm to others solely for the purpose of, what, having a motherfucking undercounter freezer for your organic ice cream?” I feel myself getting growly and pause to wet my lips.
Leigh just keeps looking at me, her face nearly the same as the last time I saw it, six years ago. She’s had a nose job though, I’m pretty sure. And likely something with her tits, too. They were small and saggy last time we met up, but that wouldn’t have mattered if she was a good person. Alas, she is not, and I’m going to drag her looks through the mud, too.
“What do you want us to do?” she asks, finally getting the big picture.
Either she cooperates or, very likely, she dies and goes the way of the Kushners.
“First off, we’d like to double back on the idea of your on-the-way friends,” Oscar purrs, his gray eyes the same color as the ocean beyond the glass. As the afternoon’s worn on, the sun has started to hide behind the clouds, like she knows this isn’t her month or season to shine. “I’m curious as to how many holes we’ll have to dig to accommodate them.”
“Nobody’s coming,” Marcus Vincent says, finally finding his balls and speaking up. He glances over at his wife’s wide eyes and pursed lips. “It’s just us here until we go back to work on Monday.”
Wow. What a fucking moron.
“Excellent,” Oscar says, setting aside his tablet. “Now that I’ve disabled your security system, we can speak more freely.” He crosses his legs in front of him and then bands his hands around his knee, fingers intertwined together. “Tell us: what do you know that you think is worth trading for your life.”
“What?” Marcus chokes out, glancing over at his wife again. His hand must be killing him, broken and now bound behind his back. “You said this wouldn’t come back on us. Why is this happening, Leigh?”
“If I tell you what I know,” Coraleigh begins, flicking her eyes to me before turning them back to Oscar. She glances briefly at Vic, but then quickly switches to me and Oscar again. She’s decided that Victor isn’t a threat. Funny that, considering I’m quite sure he’s the most dangerous person in this room. After all, look at what a nightmare Oscar is; Victor controls that nightmare. I take another bite of my ice cream, tapping my heels against the front of the white cabinets. “Then you’ll kill me.”
“If you don’t tell us,” Oscar says right away, giving a hideous smile. “We’ll just have to torture it out of you then kill you.” He reaches up long fingers to rub at the demon hands tattooed on his throat. The way he holds his chin up like that, a smirk ribboned across his lips, he looks like an aristocrat born into the wrong life. “Your choice. We have some possible uses for keeping you alive, so there is hope, however
slim.”
The Vincents exchange a long, studying sort of look, like they’re actually debating their options. What choice do they really think they have here?
“You said you didn’t remember me, but that you’d heard of me,” I begin, drawing Coraleigh’s attention back around. “Want to explain that for me?”
Hael hops onto the counter on my other side, sitting as close to me as I am to Callum. All the places we touch burn, and when I breathe in, I smell coconut and motor oil—even though we’ve been staying in a hotel for three days straight. That scent must just be a part of who he is now. He steals the ice cream from me, and I stab him in the side with an elbow. May as well jab at a goddamn rock for all the good that does. Hael Harbin is hard and fit and he knows exactly how to undulate that pelvis of his.
“Ophelia Mars warned me about you,” Leigh says, and it takes me nearly a minute to process what it is that she’s said.
Ophelia.
As in Victor’s mother.
As in … what the actual fuck is going on?
“What contact have you had with Ophelia?” Victor asks, suddenly alert. He leans forward and parks his elbows on his knees. His stare is intense, like looking into the dark eyes of a shark before it bites down. No malice there, just survival. Doesn’t mean you’ll bleed any less.
Leigh sputters, like she’s been caught with her hands in the cookie jar.
“Ophelia is … well, she’s well-known in our circle …” The disgraced social worker trails off as Aaron comes down the steps, lips pinched, eyes hard. He has a soft spot for children and not only because of his sister and cousin, but because every person that matters to him had their childhood stolen away.
Innocence is precious and these people profit off of breaking it.
There’s nothing worse.
“The girls are watching a movie in the home theater,” Aaron says, one hand resting on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. He looks at the Vincents the way one might examine a pile of dog shit. “And that kid … she’s fucking nine years old. Her name’s Alyssa.” His voice is staccato, almost robotic. I imagine that he’s trying really hard not to kill somebody right now.
Mayhem at Prescott High Page 4