A weapon.
I was a weapon.
And the mission was to cut down anyone who dared believe they could get away with their evil, who thought there was nothing to fear.
There was.
Me.
I wanted to show them all that they should be piss-themselves fucking scared of me.
That was the mission.
And I took it very, very seriously.
Nothing and no one would take it away from me.
Not even those who wore the faces of family and had the best of intentions.
—
Two weeks later, it happened.
Something I—and he—had previously thought impossible.
I beat him.
I bested my teacher.
We both sat there in strained silence, sweat soaking through our clothes, breathing ragged, bodies exhausted, aching, minds completely shocked.
"Now," he said, nodding at me.
"Now what?" I asked, sucking in a greedy breath.
"Now you go home."
If there was any emotion in him about me leaving, he showed none as he pushed up off the floor, swiping the blood from under his nose with the back of his arm, walking out of the building into the steadily falling rain.
Even as nerves swarmed my system, I knew he was right.
It was time.
I was going back to Navesink Bank.
I was going home.
To what, I had no idea.
But I was about to find out.
Two
- Eight Years Before -
What was she doing?
Girls like her—privileged, loved, happy girls—didn't run away from home.
That said, girls like her—raised under the watchful eye of an entire outlaw biker gang and having aunts that owned martial arts studios and ran a sort of paramilitary camp—didn't often find themselves kidnapped, tormented, left to save themselves, leaving them a raw, open wound.
Girls like her didn't get shown the ugliness of the world at such a young age, get thrown into a situation that forced them to use the self-defense they'd learned growing up in a real life-or-death situation, trying to save another sixteen-year-old girl so traumatized that she couldn't even fight back if she wanted to.
Girls like her weren't locked in basements by human traffickers. Girls like her weren't forced to live with the promise of rape and torture. Girls like her weren't made to watch the aftermath of other girls like her being tossed down on the floor, body and mind broken from such abuse.
And girls like her definitely didn't find out that it was all part of some twisted power play amongst a family that they had known and loved, and the woman who turned out to be her grandmother. A woman so wicked, so evil, so vile that she could even imagine kidnapping and traumatizing their only granddaughter. Someone with such a black soul that she could gleefully traffick other women just for profit.
Girls like her didn't fight grown men full of bad intentions with the tops of toilet tanks.
Girls like her didn't raise a gun, aim, and shoot.
Girls like her didn't take lives.
Girls like her didn't kill their own grandmothers.
But, well, Ferryn wasn't even sure what a girl like her was anymore.
All she knew as she made her way out of Navesink Bank was that she wasn't the girl she was when she had been thrown in a trunk and ripped away from the life she had always known.
Everything had changed.
Not just because of the days of fear and hunger and cold and uncertainty, but because of the things she had discovered about the world. About the ugliness to be found there. About how many girls and women were defenseless. About how many men—and women—decided to take advantage of that.
As she ran off, the only thing that seemed to permeate through the swirling thoughts in her head was that something had to be done. Someone had to help.
She knew, also, even as the brambles bit at her feet, ripping them open across the forest floor, that everyone says something should be done. And no one ever does anything.
The law had its limits.
The criminals knew that.
It just made them better at it.
It made it harder to find them, to stop them.
So many news stories that had been background noise to the seemingly pressing concerns of teenage life suddenly came rushing back to her, the memory of them blocking out the wind through the trees, the sounds of her loved ones calling her name.
News stories about how rape victims end up in jail for killing their attackers. About how rapists get a few months in jail or simply probation and a stern, "Bad boy, don't do that again!" from the judge. About girls—especially girls from inner cities, children of illegal immigrants, or ones from foster care—going missing, never to be heard from again. Likely thrown on ships, taken overseas, drugged, used by men for money over and over and over again for years. Because these traffickers knew they would get away with it, that the news would let the stories die, that the families couldn't afford to fight, that some had no families at all.
And those were just the ones that were reported.
Who knew how many runaways ended up in the grips of traffickers.
Who knew how many women and children were simply never missed?
The numbers, when she made herself think about it, were staggering.
She'd been informed of most of this before, of course. Her aunts—most especially her Aunt Lo who was the badass leader of a paramilitary camp known as Hailstorm who, on occasion, carried out some good, old-fashioned vigilante justice simply because it was the right thing to do—had often tried to start that conversation with her. Discussions full of statistics that had gone in one ear and out the other.
Or so she thought.
Because as she got on the bus and watched her hometown slip away from her, they came rushing back.
An estimated four million people were victims of sex trafficking in the world.
Ninety percent were women and girls.
It was a hundred-and-fifty billion-dollar business worldwide.
And it was on the rise.
While prosecutions in all regions—including the US—were on the decline.
Someone was dropping the ball.
And no one was stooping down to pick it up again.
Somehow, while she had been able to feel horror at that fact before yet still move on with her life, now, the knowledge, the firsthand knowledge, was too horrific to avoid. She felt crippled by it. It was all she could think about. All those people stuck in places like she had been stuck in, scared of the things she had been scared of, hoping someone would come to save them. And then no one did.
It was unconscionable.
She couldn't let it stand.
Ferryn might have been young, but she wasn't naive. She knew that a sixteen-year-old girl knew nothing about working on such a huge issue. Even if she did have over a decade of mixed martial arts in her back pocket. She also knew that if she had done what any normal, well-adjusted girl would have done and gone home, that she wouldn't have been able to help, that no one would have let her, that they would coddle her and reminded her she was safe. Even if millions of others weren't.
Eventually, she knew she would have fallen back into herself, would have let the knowledge, let the statistics, the ugly realities of the world once again become background noise.
Which was why she had to go.
She had to.
She had to become someone who could do something about it.
She had to help.
In her mind, she could hear her loved ones trying to remind her that she was just one person, that she could only do so much, that there were experts in the world to help. Or even that, if she wanted to help, she could turn to her Aunt Lo and her team at Hailstorm to help her do something.
From afar.
See, she knew that was the only part they would ever let her have.
A face behind a desk.
Som
eone chasing down virtual leads.
Again, after some time, it would be enough for her.
Life would come rushing in, stealing her focus, smoothing the edges of her trauma.
She didn't want smooth edges.
She wanted to be sharp enough to cut anyone who got near.
She wanted to rip men like the men who had sneered at her in a basement to shreds. She wanted to bathe in their blood. She wanted to make it so that other girls could go home, could be embraced, could get their edges smoothed, could recover.
She knew that—given enough time, given enough guidance, given enough hard work—she could be the one to make that happen.
And that the only way she could accomplish any of that was to leave.
Leave Navesink Bank.
Her friends.
Her heart-swelling crush.
And her family.
That's not to say it was an easy choice.
What sixteen-year-old girl wants to leave everything good and warm and safe behind to pursue a life of hard and ugly and dangerous?
She cried through several of her bus stops.
She ignored the curious eyes of strangers, the occasional question if she needed help.
She did. Of course she did. But not in the way they were offering.
Something deep inside Ferryn understood that the only way she could truly help herself was to help others who weren't as fortunate as she was, who didn't get away before it was too late.
She didn't want to do it.
Yet she had to do it.
Given enough time, she hoped to hell she could find a way to explain all of it to her family.
She hated the idea of leaving them behind, of them worrying about her, or them moving on without her.
But she knew it was the only way.
They had all been good teachers to her. Each and every one of her aunts and uncles who had taught her their specific form of martial arts. Krav Maga. Systema. Taekwondo. Street. Sambo. Kendo. LINE. MCMAP.
They hadn't gone light on her.
They had pushed her to her limits. Even over them at times. Just so they knew she could handle herself in a sticky situation.
And it had worked.
But only just barely.
Ferryn knew that she was one extra man or one bad move away from failing, that she didn't have what it would take, that she was still at a disadvantage.
Because while her loved ones would push her, they wouldn't break her.
She needed to be broken.
She needed to know she could live through that, could keep fighting, could become the victor.
It wouldn't be easy.
Or fast.
But she knew that was the plan.
And she even knew where she was going.
See, her Aunt Lo—well, she collected people. People with skills. People who could offer her team something. Hailstorm did a lot of things. A lot of illegal things. And they got paid well for it. But as the years went on, Aunt Lo seemed to take even more pride in finding the damaged people, bringing them in, helping them adjust. She especially did so with many battle-scarred ex-military men and women. The ones who couldn't seem to acclimate to normal life again. The ones who ran away from their families. The ones who could barely function. She found them, brought them in, gave them a safe space. And they, in turn, helped out when they could; they used their special skills.
It was rare that her aunt found someone that she couldn't help.
But there were some.
Men and women like Case File: 34691.
Ones that were so damaged, so fucked up—they were bent in such a way—that they were nearly unrecognizable as humans anymore. The kind of people whom women and children and grown men alike shrank away from on the street, crossed the road to avoid.
They could never be brought in, retrained, reprogrammed.
There was no way to reprogram men like 34691.
Their entire source code was corrupted.
Ferryn remembered hearing her aunt talk to her next-in-command about 34691. About what had happened when the small team she sent out tracked him down, got close to him.
Apparently, what had happened was complete and utter decimation.
As in, they were lucky to leave with their lives.
Their pride? Yeah, that had to stay behind.
Along with a lot of their blood.
And maybe a tooth or two.
This was a team of three large men and a woman.
And they'd all been taken down by this one man.
At one time.
Well, we are going to leave him alone from now on, her Aunt Lo had declared, shaking her head before handing Ferryn the file to go put in the cabinet.
Ferryn, well, she'd always been a bit nosy. She liked to say she was a sponge for any and all information. And that was true to a point. But she was also nosy. You could ask her mother who had learned years before to hide any and all presents in a storage unit two towns over, then had to bury the key for said storage unit because her daughter was too damn nosy for her own good.
So Ferryn had brought the file to the file room, to the file cabinet. Where she had promptly propped it open on an open file drawer and read through it.
34691.
Also known as Holden Ryker. The most badass of names, if you asked her. And she was always a big fan of unique names.
The file itself had little tidbits of information from back in Holden's military days. He hit the service the week of his eighteenth birthday, went in, and seemingly disappeared.
Black Ops was scribbled next to that.
Ferryn was pretty sure at that point that she knew enough about the military to understand some of the very unsavory things that went down in those types of operations. And the kind of people it took to be able to make a living carrying out those orders.
There were various articles pinned in the file, work of the hackers or researchers at Hailstorm, people who had seemed to trace Holden's footsteps all around the globe, pinning certain events on him. Educated guesses, surely, because there was no way one man could do as much damage as the articles suggested.
Of course, she had been very, very naive then.
In those days back before she met him.
She remembered seeing his address as some place in upstate New York, only cataloging that to memory because she thought it was such an odd place for a man like him. Then she had put the file away. And had promptly forgotten all about him.
Until she was on the bus ride away from her old life, heading to a new, uncertain one, knowing she would need a teacher for it.
The best one she could find.
The hardest one she could find.
Then there his file was in her mind, clear as the day at least a year before.
34691.
Holden Ryker.
Suddenly, she was certain there had been no guesswork associated with his file, that every single one of those stories and news articles pinned there were there for a reason, that this man actually was that impressive.
And if he was, well, then he would make a pretty great teacher, wouldn't he?
Adrenaline skittered across each nerve ending when she finally made the trek up the hill in the deepest part of a small forest, sure someone in town had been screwing with her because there seemed to be no actual sign of human life in this area at all.
The rain had soaked through her clothes, making them hang heavy, each step feeling more arduous than it should have. Her newly buzzed head felt a lot colder than she could have anticipated, making her momentarily regret the decision to make her best friend buzz it all off before she headed out of town with only a couple possessions and a few hundred dollars to her name.
She'd all but given up hope, half ready to turn around and start the long trip back home, when she'd seen a puff of smoke about half a mile off in the distance.
Smoke could mean a chimney or a grill.
Oh, God, a grill.
She was so hungry.
/> And tired.
And in pain.
She just needed to get somewhere, eat, and pass out for ten or twelve hours.
At that point, she didn't even care if it wasn't Holden. Anyone with a spare corner she could sleep in and some old porridge she could eat would do. She wasn't even entirely sure what porridge was, but she was hungry enough to find out firsthand.
"Leave."
The voice was more animal than human, she was sure.
As she started to turn, a part of her was maybe even worried she was so exhausted that she was starting to hallucinate a bit.
But then she found her nerve, turned, and there he was.
34691.
Holden Ryker.
The only picture she'd seen of him—the only one that had been in the file—had been of him in full uniform at eighteen years old. Still a strong-looking guy, but nothing like the man in front of her.
This man was a giant. The kind of big that dwarfed all the men she'd grown up around. And not one of them could be called anything less than huge. But this man was a behemoth. They'd likely used him to model the Hulk after.
He was easily six and a half feet, nearly as wide as he was tall with tree limbs for thighs and linebacker shoulders. His head was shaved. His tanned skin deeply scarred up and down his arms and across the backs of his hands. If she wasn't mistaken, there was a nasty one across the front of his throat. But maybe that was just a trick of the light.
This was a man a full-grown grizzly bear would shy away from. A moose would shy away from. A Chihuahua would shy away from. And everyone knew the latter thought they were the most fearsome creatures on the planet Earth.
"H... Hi," she said, choking a bit on her own spit to get the word out as he stood there, towering over her, everything about him seeming just barely able to contain some otherworldly rage.
"You're lost," he declared, cutting off anything she had maybe been about to say. You know, if she could find a way to make her mouth and brain and vocal cords work in unison with those deep eyes of his staring her down much like prey.
"I'm not," she insisted, finding her voice, even if it did sound croaking and awkward even to her own ears.
The Rise of Ferryn Page 2