by Riley Moreno
Pete’s laughter kept crashing into her ears, and somehow Julie found the strength to return to her feet. Pete kept laughing as she wiped the tears and most of the makeup from her most apparent bruise.
“Look at that,” Pete said. “Guess you’re not so pretty anymore.”
Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was destined to be a figure for scorn and disgust. But she was here for information that would save other girls from the same fate.
“Guess not,” Julie said.
Pete tried to touch her, but Julie backed away and resolved to get her answers.
“So why us?” Julie demanded.
Even crippled, Pete still smiled. Julie was ready to cry out when she caught something in his eyes that told her that there was another part of the story that she should have seized hold of, but it was still far beyond her grasp.
“You’re here for names, right?”
As much as she hated to give him anything else, she nodded in the face of his query, and Pete smiled as he landed his final, fatal blow.
“Here’s one you’ll recognize. Greg Heller.”
Julie had to clasp the bed rails as the name washed over her. No. Greg? No. This was just one more trick meant to scare her to a point where she’d never be able to comprehend life as she knew it, but as she backed away from the bed and turned her head from side to side, Pete kept talking.
“How did you think he made all that money for your little family?”
Julie knew. Or at least she thought that she knew. Greg made deals, he traded properties, right? He had gravitated towards Sharon because he wanted to bring her back to life. Julie was just collateral en route to a happy marriage. So he had encouraged the road trip. So what? He wouldn’t, he couldn’t traffic in unwilling girls. That would mean that she had been targeted from the moment he had darkened her door, and Julie’s eye went wide at the thought that she had been pegged for torture from the moment that she had first seen him.
“You’re lying,” Julie hissed.
“Am I?”
Even if it was true, even if Greg was the real monster in her midst, why would he lead Julie and Kim to the table of destruction? He liked Kim. He had played at loving Julie like his own. He couldn’t… he wouldn’t make them the toys of these brutal men.
Would he?
“It’s not true. It… it can’t be true.”
Pete shifted up. In her mind she knew that there was no way he could lay hands on her, but she still let out a sharp cry of fear as he leered at her and touched a figurative knife to her throat.
“Are you really as dumb as you look, Jules? Right. Like we just happened upon two fine fillies begging to be broken. And you? Fucking virgin to boot? Either we were luckiest guys ever or we were on your tail from the second you and Kimmy hit the highway.”
Julie trembled as he drove the imaginary blade deeper.
“And you got no one to blame for it but good old Daddy Dearest. Hell of a thing, huh, Jules?”
The room was spinning, and Julie grasped a nearby chair to keep from falling. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she struggled to catch her breath. How could this be true? How could Greg be the one? Julie felt as if she would faint when the sound of Pete’s laughter flooded her mind. Glaring, she twisted her face to his.
“Why?” Julie asked, her voice thick. “There… aren’t there… other girls?”
It made her sick to even suggest that someone else deserved her fate, but wasn’t it suicide for Greg to select slaves from his own backyard?
“Sure are, Jules. A lot prettier than you, too. Far better lays from what I’ve been told.”
“So---?”
“Here’s the thing, Jules. We were out some merchandise.”
Other bodies. More unmarked graves. More grieving mothers.
How could Greg do this to her mother?
“We had to recast quick. And that’s when your daddy had the idea.”
“No.”
“We told him he was shitting where he ate, but we had high rollers to service. And you were gonna be outta commission for a few weeks anyway. So we’d chalk it up an isolated incident and send you home, shall we say, more worthy?”
Julie was nothing but completely destroyed by Greg’s scheme.
“But then it made more sense to keep you. You girls were real popular. When we explained that to Daddy…”
Please say that he objected, that he was forced, threatened, blackmailed, anything.
“He wanted you to stay away. Because if anyone would talk, it’d be you, Jules. Pull one thread, whole fucking thing unravels. And look. Matt’s dead. Look!”
Lifting the blanket, he revealed the bandaged stump where his leg used to live, while she was glad that he would never truly walk again, it was cold comfort in the face of what she had just learned.
“It should’ve been you, Jules. Bet Kim would have had enough sense to stop running in the woods.”
And maybe he was right. Maybe Kim would have resigned herself to a life, however short, of prolonged torment even if Ethan was there, encouraging her to keep moving until they hit the light at the end of the tunnel. But Julie was the one left standing, and she had one last question to ask.
“Tell me, Pete,” she started as she moved back to the bed. “How come you never fucked me?”
He seemed taken aback by her question, but then he laughed and rubbed his hands through his sandy hair.
“I said you weren’t really me type. Remember that? Or did I knock that bit of intel from your puny---”
“But you said you might want a taste after they were done. You never… you never sampled the wears. So what is it, Pete? You not like to shit where you eat?”
He laughed off her attempt at an insult, but Julie kept going.
“You know what I think? I think you can’t. I think you like to watch. You kind of wish that you could, but you weren’t man enough to play the game. And underneath…”
Julie lifted his hospital gown and revealed his flaccid cock. If this were Matt or Carter McCord or any number of her nameless rapists, there would be evidence of a vicarious thrill by way of the lurid details and Julie’s teary eyes. But Pete couldn’t get it up with a memory let alone with a real, live, helpless girl.
“Don’t flatter yourself. You weren’t that pretty to begin with, and now, shit. You’re a turned out slut, and you’re gonna need the pain to get wet. I see a lot of rough nights in your future, Jules.”
And she saw one agonizing moment in his immediate future.
She grasped his cock and twisted the limp noodle, trying to tear it from his broken body. Pete cried out in pain and struggled to remove her fingers from his piece, but Julie just kept tugging. If nothing else, instinct should make him hard, but he never rose to attention.
“You don’t even know how to use it. You pathetic eunuch!”
Pete managed to grab hold of her hair, and as he tried to match her desire to rip something from a body, the door burst open.
“She’s crazy! Get her off of me.”
Julie felt Morales wait a few seconds, and she kept torturing Pete’s flesh until she was finally pulled from the bed and dragged from the room. Pete threatened to press assault charges, but then Leo Barber’s voice filled the air.
“Save it, slime.”
And he closed the door behind him.
“Julie?”
She could barely comprehend her own name on Morales’ tongue, and she fell to her knees as another set of hands surrounded her shoulders.
“Juliet?”
Looking up, returning to reality, she saw Ethan kneeling before her, his eyes full of worry. If he hadn’t come, she’d still be suffering. No one was ever going to look for her because one of the people that were supposed to be leading the charge was the man who had seen to her slavery. She tried to speak, and when no words came, she clung to Ethan and cried into his chest.
“Shhh. It’s okay. You don’t have to see him anymore.”
But it wasn’t oka
y. The real monster was still so close to home. In her home, and she was seized with fear at what might happen to her mother as she unknowingly climbed into Greg’s bed when he was pure evil.
“No,” Julie sputtered. “You don’t understand. You don’t… you don’t know.”
Ethan tried to still her shaking, but Julie was back on her feet, and she took his hands.
“It’s Greg,” she said.
Ethan shock was everywhere.
“Greg? Your… what are you talking---?”
“He did this. He set us up. Ethan?”
He shook his head, not wanting to believe what she was saying, but before he could ask her to explain further, Leo Barber reappeared and turned her away from Ethan’s arms and stared at her hard.
“Your stepfather?”
Julie could do nothing but nod. Leo looked at Morales skeptically, and even Morales didn’t know what to make of the situation.
“Julie,” Morales finally said as she rubbed her hand across the girl’s trembling face. “He’s playing with you. Trying to hurt you more.”
Morales left her side and pulled Leo a few feet away.
“I told you that we never should have agreed to this…”
She argued with Leo in hushed tones and sighed as Ethan eased Julie back to his line of vision.
“Maybe… maybe she’s right?” Ethan asked. “It could be a con. It…”
“But what if it’s not, Ethan. What if it’s true?”
He had no way to answer that, and Julie saw his lip quiver at the idea that the man who was supposed to protect her had engineered the hell from which he had saved her. Believing it was too much to bear, but Julie needed to know.
“Come with me,” she said.
Leo and Morales were still arguing as Julie led Ethan down the hallway.
“Juliet? What are you---?”
“I’m getting answers, Ethan. I need them.”
21
“Just drive.”
Ethan obeyed and pulled the car out of the hospital’s lot. Julie stared through the windshield. She didn’t want it to be true, but then she remembered what Greg had told her at the graduation party.
When it’s all said and done, I think it’s going to be the best thing for all of us.
He wanted her gone. Julie was never his daughter. She was a collateral piece of damage that could be disposed of and leave him with money rolling in and a needy wife clinging to him at every turn. But how was he going to explain Julie’s absence? He would probably fill Sharon’s head with lies that the girl was always ungrateful, troubled, and maybe he hoped that in time, Sharon would resign herself to another loss and lunch with the Beths and the Daves, the Maxs and the Amys. It would be a whole new life with no reminder of the real man that she had loved and lost and the child who rebelled at just the right moment.
Ethan’s phone buzzed, and he plucked it from his pocket.
“It’s Morales,” Ethan said. “Do you---?”
“Leave it,” Julie said. “She’ll figure it out.”
He ignored the call and took her hand as he continued to steer.
“Juliet---”
“Don’t tell me that it’s not true!” Julie screamed as she pulled away from him. Ethan turned his head back to the road, and when Julie shifted her gaze back to his face, she saw him scared and angry and wanting to help her. Julie hated hurting him, and she laid a soft hand on his shoulder.
“Ethan?”
When he looked at her, Julie’s rage lessened, and she took his free hand again. He returned his focus to the road even as he relaxed in the space of their locked hands.
“I… I need you to help me. I need you to be there with me. I don’t know if I can face him alone.”
Ethan clenched her had tighter.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He gave her a warm glance and turned off the highway. Before she knew it, they back in her neck of the woods, but now every shadow behind every tree seemed to threaten harm. The danger was Greg, and Julie had to get him out of her life, out of her mother’s life.
“If… if it is true…”
Ethan’s voice trailed off, and he stopped at a crossroads, turning his face to hers.
“Then he needs to suffer. I don’t know what else to say. It… it can’t make sense.”
Nothing made sense. Julie had been the golden girl, loved and cherished, a friend and her future at her side. But now she was a scarred, ravished shell, and the world that she had counted on ceased to be a place of reason. Everywhere was a nightmare, and Julie wondered if even Greg’s confession could stop the pain.
Nothing made sense.
Except…
“I know,” Julie finally said as the car idled at the intersection. She touched Ethan’s face.
“You make sense. I…”
And she lost it.
She cried harder than she ever had, and Ethan shifted the car into park and held her sobbing body as other cars honked and bikes whizzed by. The sounds meant nothing as she contemplated what she was about to uncover, but Ethan shushed her and whispered into her ear.
“Just let him try to hurt you again. I… I won’t have it.”
Julie lifted her tear stained face to Ethan’s kind eyes, and she resolved to be strong as the car winded towards their home. He put the thing back into park and hurried out to see to Julie’s doors. He held her close as they ascended the steps, and Julie’s mind searched for the best way to play this. Coming right out with the accusation would lead to a quick denial and a claim that she was indeed crazy. But Greg had obviously been terrified when Julie emerged from the dungeons. She had to move slowly, carefully, if Greg was going to give up the ghost.
Julie rang the bell, and the sounds of footsteps soon followed. Julie couldn’t help but tense, and Ethan’s arm grew firmer around her shoulders.
“I’m right here,” he assured her.
“I know.”
She looked up at him with wet eyes.
“Thank you.”
Before Ethan could speak again, the door opened. Sharon gasped at the sight of her daughter in the arms of a man even if he was her savior, and she sighed heavily as she beckoned them to enter.
“Glad…. glad you’re back,” Sharon mumbled.
They followed her voice inside, and instantly, Julie looked about for Greg. When he was nowhere to be found, she stretched away from Ethan and took her mother’s hands.
“Mom?”
Julie could feel Sharon’s skin crawl under her daughter’s touch, but Julie refused to budge. Her mother needed to know, however much it would hurt, that she had linked their lives to a horror show.
“Where’s Greg?” Julie asked.
“He’s… he’s in the garden. Why are you asking about---?”
Julie led her mother out back while Ethan stayed close behind. She heard his phone buzz again and knew that Morales was already en route. But she would have enough time to get the bastard talking.
Greg clipped wilted roses with a pair of sharp shears, and Julie tensed at the thought that he might turn the simple tool into a weapon if he felt threatened.
But she had to take the chance.
“Greg!”
He turned to her with nervous eyes and wielded the shears just as she thought he would. When Julie kept her gaze fixed on his face, Julie stepped forward, and he relaxed his hold on the shears as Julie took a deep breath.
“You wanted to know what happened, right?”
He tried to laugh as Sharon pressed her hands to her ears. She didn’t want to know more specifics, and she tried to move back into the house. But Ethan grabbed her arm and forced her to listen. He nodded his head to Julie, and she steeled herself to continue.
“I… was tied down. Beaten. Raped. I can’t tell you how many times. I lost count.”
Greg made a show of looking horrified at her confession, but there was another kind of nervousness that caused his hands to shake around the shears, and Julie continued.
; “I wished that it would end. Or that I would just die. But every morning I woke up. Why did I wake up, Greg? Just so they could keep hurting me? But that wasn’t the worst part.”
Julie had lived through enough worst moments to know. She had seen her real father snatched from her life without warning and tried to carry on without his protection. Greg pretended to assume that role, but he was wearing a disguise. He needed to make her a slave to keep the cash rolling in. Any kind glance or expensive birthday gift was simply in service of making her vulnerable until the precise moment when he could snatch her from her life and create a new world where the only word with any meaning was pain.
“The worst part was that you arranged it.”
She was taking a risk. Sharon’s screams that Julie was just confused said as much, but Julie kept talking as Ethan stepped between mother and daughter.
“You knew we would be alone. You sent those creeps after us. You knew…”
She struggled to continue. As her body was wracked with fresh sobs, Ethan held her, and as she wanted nothing but to rest against him and feel his kind arms, but she continued.
Julie charged towards Greg, and he pointed the shears in her face.
“Greg! Stop!”
Sharon’s voice did nothing, and Greg wrapped his arms around his stepdaughter as he looked to his wife.
“She’s been corrupted, Sharon. She’s all mixed up.”
It was the last cry of the condemned, the found out, and Julie scoffed at the point of the shears against her already injured cheek. Julie’s fear of a deeper scar was eradicated when Sharon slapped Ethan hard.
“Leave him alone!”
Ethan fell back and clutched his wounded face. Julie knew what he was feeling, and she started towards him. She was nearly on the grass, at his side, when Sharon pulled her up by her hair and slapped her daughter.
“Don’t you drag Greg into this! We all know what happened. I never thought you were that kind of girl, Julie. But here you are.”
Sharon spit in Ethan’s eye. He was too dazed to wipe her insult away.
“Enthrall to one of your johns. Greg said---”