by Anne Malcom
“I need you to do something for me,” Mary Lou said. Her voice was low. It didn’t have the same hope and cheer it had when Orion had first arrived all those years before.
It slowly drained out of her, that hope.
“Want me to run to McDonald’s and grab some burgers?” Orion deadpanned. Her legs ached, her insides roiling with hunger.
Mary Lou laughed hollowly. “Maybe later.” Her chain rattled as she moved so slightly. Orion knew she was trying to find a way to sit so it didn’t feel like knives were jabbing into her uterus. She had been the latest victim. It had been rough, by the way she’d limped back into the room.
“I’m getting older,” she said.
“I’ll get you some wrinkle cream while I’m out,” Orion said.
No laugh this time. “Too old,” she whispered. “For them. I know my time is coming up. When I’m of no use.”
Orion stiffened. “The only time coming is for us to get out of here.”
Jaclyn snorted. “Keep dreaming, girl.”
“Just in case,” Mary Lou said, ignoring Jaclyn. “I need you to make a promise. Because one day I know you’ll make it out of here.”
“We’ll make it out of here,” Orion said through gritted teeth.
“Can you just make me a promise or not?” A little steel in her voice now.
“No,” Orion shot back.
“I have a little girl,” Mary Lou said, little more than a rasp.
Orion jerked. Mary Lou had told them many things about her life. About her preacher father, her mother who liked to bake apple pies and judge her daughter if her dress was wrinkled. Her family didn’t sound real. Orion thought they seemed like assholes, but Mary Lou loved them.
She’d told them about her boyfriend. Quarterback, all-American handsomeness. Good family.
Orion had heard every detail of her pastel life. Or thought she had.
“I didn’t say anything about her because . . .” Mary Lou trailed off. “It hurts to think about her,” she whispered. “My parents weren’t happy, to say the least. They wanted to send me away at first.”
She paused. “Well, my mother did. I thought for sure my father would’ve agreed, clutching his Bible. But he didn’t. He sided with me. Didn’t even force me to marry Johnny like Mom was trying to. Of course, he would’ve preferred I didn’t have his granddaughter out of wedlock, but he wasn’t going to hold a shotgun to my or Johnny’s back.”
She sucked in a rough breath, then coughed. Orion didn’t like the way it rattled in her chest.
They often got sick down here. They weren’t given blankets or enough water. Never enough food. They were kept alive, but not healthy. Somehow, cruelly, they always recovered.
Orion wasn’t so sure this time. Mary Lou had been coughing like this for weeks.
“I was allowed at school until I began to show,” she continued, her voice rougher than before. “Then I was homeschooled. Mom said it was mono.”
Mary Lou rolled her eyes like a teenager would. It surprised Orion. She always seemed older than she was, wise beyond her years. Orion understood why now.
“Everyone knew, though. I was so mad.” Mary Lou looked down at her hands. The nails were bitten down to the skin. “Embarrassed. Johnny was distant. He tried to be supportive, but he was a teenage boy with dreams of leaving our town in his rearview and I was giving him an anchor he didn’t want.” She looked at her ankle, fiddled with the chain.
“He was bound by honor his parents instilled in him.” Her eyes went to Orion. Glassy. Tears ready to be shed. “I secretly hated her the entire time she was growing inside me,” she whispered, shame saturating the words. “I wanted an escape of my own. To see the world. To truly live. In my darkest moments, I stood at the top of the stairs, hovering my foot in the air, planning on falling.”
She stopped talking for a while. A long while.
Orion waited. She’d learned how to do that. It was all they did now. Waited for the next torture. The next horror. Waited to die.
“But I didn’t,” Mary Lou continued, puncturing the silence. She smiled sadly. “I had her two weeks early. She was perfect. But she cried all the time. She wouldn’t latch onto my nipple. I was sad. Missed my prom. I loved her with all my heart, but my heart was tired. I knew my parents saw that. I needed a break.” She paused again to cough.
“That’s when they took me. The Things. I had a fight with my parents. About finishing high school. I wanted to go back, my mother wanted me to be a housewife and mother. I lost it. Screamed. Then I packed a bag, walked out. I had only intended on going away for a few hours. Making a statement. But . . .” She trailed off.
Orion could fill in the blanks. She’d heard bits and pieces of the story before, all the ugly sides of Mary Lou’s seemingly perfect upbringing.
“They wouldn’t believe I just left,” she whispered, hope that was yet to die threading through the words. “They couldn’t. Maribelle didn’t have a mother. She doesn’t know me. I just want you to make sure she’s okay. I need you to make sure she’s okay, Ri.”
“You’ll do that,” Orion said with a sureness she didn’t fully believe. “You’ll do it when we all get the fuck out of here. You hear me?”
Mary Lou didn’t respond. Instead, she looked upon Orion lovingly, as a mother would her daughter, and stroked Orion’s hair behind her ear, smiled her brilliant smile.
They took Mary Lou later that evening.
And they never brought her back.
The interrogation room blinked back into focus, the fluorescent light overhead flooding Orion’s senses.
Orion didn’t know how long she’d been trapped in that memory. The shrink said flashbacks were a symptom of PTSD. But this hadn’t felt like a flashback. It was like someone had snatched her out of this room and hurled her back into the past. She could still smell the stench of The Cell. Her legs ached and her stomach protested with hunger.
It took her a while to get her bearings. To remind herself that her stomach was full, her ankle was empty, that she was free. Eric was staring at her with patience. Understanding.
Maddox showed concern. Was he waiting for her to break down? Fall apart?
Orion sipped her coffee. It was cold now. Tasted bad. But nothing tasted worse than her rancid memories, regret ripping the skin from her tongue.
“I can’t say for sure how many,” she said, taking care with the words, with her tone. She did not want that look of pity. To be treated like a grenade about to go off. “But there’s more than three.” She swallowed roughly, thinking of them all. Some had lasted years. Others mere days. Orion had come to understand life was kinder to those ones, gifting them with death. She had come to entertain the idea that it was her last name and the sins in her genes that kept her alive all these years.
She glared at Eric. “How is it that two men can bury bodies of countless women in a backyard without somebody noticing?” She structured the question like a weapon, jabbing at them. She wanted to point the blame in as many places as possible.
Orion couldn’t remember much after she ran out of the house. She remembered a man who was kind, gentle. But he still scared her. There were women. People who seemed reasonable, normal. That’s what had scared her the most, how normal the street had been. How many of these kind, reasonable people were so close.
“Honestly?” Eric replied. “We don’t know. We don’t understand how this could have gone on for as long as it did without someone noticing. From what we can understand, the neighborhood steered clear, and the two perps cleaned their tracks well. None of the neighbors had any idea. Didn’t like the guys, but didn’t think anything of them either.”
Orion snorted.
She had thought more and more about the quiet suburban street they had been living under. At the time of her escape, she was in too much shock to comprehend it. But she had time now. They’d all been so sure they were in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was a horrible thought to them, to be so isolated. But it was a more
horrible thought that life was going on all around them, and no one had noticed. They were invisible.
“I was there for ten years,” Orion said. “I saw at least six girls come and go. Some just disappeared. They couldn’t handle it and nature showed them mercy. The others . . . they aged out.” She swallowed. “Once you get too much like a woman, they don’t like you anymore. I should’ve aged out too. But . . .” She trailed off, thinking of that medical badge. That urge to find him, open his skin, hear him scream. “I had some regulars who liked me.”
Both men jerked. Apparently their cop masks weren’t welded in place. “Regulars?”
Orion observed them with interest, making sure to detach herself from the sorrow swimming in Maddox’s eyes. “You thought it was just two men?” She didn’t wait for them to answer. “They were just the gatekeepers. The ones who made sure we stayed alive, the ones who killed the girls who weren’t of use anymore, the ones who, obviously, fooled the fuck out of an entire neighborhood. But that place was a brothel. And our abuse went far beyond those two scumbags. It was hordes of them. Every day.”
Maddox went ashen. She thought for a second he might actually pass out.
Eric gained his composure. “We’re going to need you to tell us everything you can.”
So she did.
She told them everything except the doctor and the nametag.
That was hers.
He was hers.
Seven
The entire day was spent at the police station. It was hard to squeeze ten years of torture into one conversation and three terrible coffees, but Orion was well versed in hard things.
So, she did it. And she told them everything she knew—the names of the girls in those shallow graves, the ones she knew about, at least.
Even with Maddox’s presence taking up all the air in the room, it was interesting to her how easy it was to recount things after the initial memory surge about her last day with Mary Lou. She’d sank into her dark place. Her cold, unfeeling place. She remembered a lot. That was another cruel twist of fate, the way everything was carved into her mind in great detail. She remembered how many men took turns on her. The masks they wore. Their varying kinks. She knew they were trying to find any information to come up with a list of suspects. And she gave them all she had.
Which she discovered, hearing it all out loud, wasn’t much. She had enough details to make the men pale. But nothing to actually help them. As crude as she had thought the operation was—at the beginning at least—they had safeguards in place.
She understood now why they had two hick lowlifes as their jailers. Because if the worst happened, if someone investigated, if someone escaped, they would be the two casualties, written off as bad seeds too stupid to be the brains of any kind of sophisticated operation. Just lucky, that’s all.
But the other monsters, they wore masks. They never took them off. Never showed things like tattoos or scars. Never slipped—no one except Bob. So nothing Orion said was going to help catch them.
They had gathered all the girls back together in the waiting area. No one was wearing handcuffs or being read their rights, so Orion guessed they weren’t getting charged with the murder of Thing Two. That was probably not the kind of story Clark County wanted hitting the national news.
“Sooo, what now?” Jaclyn asked the second she sat down. Orion knew she had intended to sound carefree, flippant, but there was something in her voice. A crack.
Orion knew it because she felt that same crack rippling at her foundation.
They’d spent so many years plotting, dreaming of escape, that they never really understood how it was just a different kind of nightmare than captivity. There were the questions. The people who you used to know. The parents who were really strangers.
And then there was the reality for Jaclyn and Orion. The abyss.
No family to speak of.
No possessions other than their cheap hoodies and emotional scars.
Had they been declared dead?
Were they really even alive? Was she really a person or just another statistic?
Orion didn’t feel human.
Maddox cleared his throat, jerking his gaze from Orion. She’d been staring at the wall above his head.
“We have you in the hotel for the rest of the week,” he explained. “We will probably have to go over some more statements, and Mr. Del Rio is still evading capture, so we’ll have to keep a close eye on you guys until we catch him. And we’ll have plenty of uniforms looking out for you . . .” He trailed off.
“Then?” Jaclyn demanded. “We get another batch of Walmart clothes, a pat on the back, and it’s see you later, or until the fuck we let get away comes and finishes what he started?” There was anger in her tone. Fury. Hatred. Not at Maddox himself, but since life wasn’t a person, there was no one they could blame, not in this room anyway. So he was as good a target as any.
“There’s already a GoFundMe for you girls,” Eric interjected, his voice calm. He seemed to read the confusion on their faces, and continued, “It’s a new fundraiser thing on the internet where people come together to raise money for a cause,” he explained. “You already have a lot of people who want to help, send you what they can. You’ll be well taken care of. As I said, down the road, the county is going to work on a really nice settlement for you all.”
Orion rolled her eyes and didn’t try to swallow her scoff. “A cause . . .” She didn’t structure it as a question. Didn’t say anything to follow it. Just left the two words hanging there. An accusation. A warning, maybe.
“Your story has resonated with people,” Eric said, careful with his tone, his expression. This man had read what each woman needed. Gentle for Shelby. Not too much eye contact. Slightly submissive, placating to Jaclyn. Strong, sure with Orion.
“This is a new world you’re being thrust into,” he continued. “A world where news like this . . . it becomes a life in and of itself. We’re more connected than the two of you remember.” He nodded toward Orion and Jaclyn. “News travels like wildfire these days. People will be fascinated. They’ll want to help in any way they can. They will want to see you. Reporters like today will follow you.” He glanced to Shelby. “I’m not saying this to scare you, I just want you to know that you won’t be forgotten. And that you have so many people here to support you through this transition.”
Transition. Orion scoffed, but she bit her tongue. More like a nightmare.
“Ri—Orion, can I speak with you?” Maddox asked after it had been declared the interviews were over for the day.
Shelby had already left the room, her parents likely waiting at the door as they had been all day.
Jaclyn hung behind, not saying anything, but Orion sensed she was close to cracking. Or maybe it was Orion who was cracking. Maybe Jaclyn didn’t stray far from her because she needed someone else broken to hold her together. Or maybe it was just because neither of them had anyone waiting outside. No one to spoil them rotten and fawn over them. They only had each other.
Maddox’s eyes darted to Jaclyn. “In private.”
Jaclyn’s spine straightened and Orion knew she was getting ready to stand her ground, to square off. But there was something beyond that stubborn, aggressive glint in her eye. A shadow. A ghost of before. One that knew what happened when you stood up to men. Logic didn’t factor into this shadow. It didn’t chase it away with the knowledge that they were out, that this man wouldn’t hurt them, that they were safe.
Safe was nothing but a four-letter lie.
“It’s fine, Jac,” Orion said, holding her hand up to placate her.
Jaclyn narrowed her eyes. Orion wasn’t sure if she was doing it playfully—because this situation amused her—or aggressively because she didn’t trust any man and likely never would.
Maybe both.
Orion missed her tough, independent stance the second the door closed behind her, the two of them alone in a conference room.
If she thought the interrogation room
was stifling, it was nothing compared to the room they shared now. She jutted her chin upward to feign confidence. She had not been alone in a room with a man who didn’t intend on raping and torturing her for ten years. She was afraid.
Maddox cleared his throat, eyes meeting hers. He tried his best to soften himself, she saw that. Make himself small, unthreatening. But it was physically impossible for Maddox Novak to be unthreatening. Even if he didn’t have his gun and badge. Or even his height and muscles. All he needed was those eyes that carried ghosts.
“I . . .” he began, voice breaking, crumbling on that single letter. He cleared his throat, tried again, stumbled again.
Orion watched, didn’t try to help him, didn’t try to carry on the conversation to make it easier for him. She had no urge to help men, not for the rest of her days.
He rubbed at his eye, where a single tear had escaped. It hit her, that show of emotion. She didn’t know this man anymore, so he could be an emotional mess at the drop of a hat, but she figured otherwise. Cops didn’t last long if they cried at the horrors of the world.
This was bad, to be sure.
“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted, breaking her train of thought. He ran his hand through his hair. He didn’t sound much like the professional, capable officer that had conducted the interview. He sounded much more like the boy she’d kissed on a porch many years ago.
Orion shrugged, a vain attempt to let those memories wash from her like rain. “I suspect you have some kind of script that you’re meant to stick to for kidnap victims,” she said, voice cold. “Rape victims. Those held captive for years. I’m sure there isn’t a particular script for all three but I suspect you’re a smart man. You can improvise.” She was being cruel. Maybe just because she could. Maybe because she wanted to punish him, or maybe because she had no idea how else she was meant to behave in this situation.
“We looked for you,” he whispered, his voice hitched. His glassy eyes met hers. She ached to find a spot on the wall, but she maintained eye contact. Maintained her rigidity. He continued. “And Adam—”