“What happened?” I ask because it feels like the thing to say.
Maybe we have more in common than I thought; both losing someone we loved right in front of our faces. I don’t wish her heartache, but my need to have some connection to this woman increases if she suffered the way I did watching my own mother die because of me.
“Choked on some toy.” His fingers continue to click for a long moment before he speaks again. “Her father was already running for office, but he switched campaign strategies from industrial revitalization to child safety and education. It propelled him into the spotlight, and he was elected mayor by a huge margin.”
“Did she give him the toy?”
His eyes snap up to mine. “Why does that even matter?”
I glare at him until his eyes narrow and refocus on his computer.
“It says a friend of the family gave the toy, but it doesn’t go into further detail.”
Could she have killed him because he was pulling her from the limelight and she demanded that attention, or is it just the guilt of being responsible for him when he died that is driving her self-destruction?
“Jesus Christ.”
“Did she kill him?”
“What?” Confused, Virus looks back up at me, but he only holds my eyes for a split second before he looks down again. “You’re not going to believe this shit. Who is this damn girl to you?”
His words are enough to get me out of the chair and back around behind his desk.
“What the fuck?”
Virus clicks on the screen, enlarging the article, but I can’t stop looking at the dirty, bruised, and emaciated image of Kaci-fucking-Stewart on the screen. The only semi-clean parts on her body are the lines washed away on her face from her tears. This is the broken girl I’ve become familiar with over the last several weeks.
“Tell me what happened,” I demand past suddenly dry lips.
Virus does some clicking on the laptop before turning slightly. A desktop screen to his right flashes to life, and he’s smart enough to realize I can’t stop looking at her, so he turns and focuses on the other screen for details.
“Abducted at eighteen during a family vacation in Honduras. This article doesn’t go into much detail about what happened to her, but it hints at sexual slavery. She was gone for nearly ten months before she was rescued by—” My eyes snap to him when he pauses. “Fucking Cerberus.”
That information is almost enough to make me pull my eyes from her haunting image, but not quite.
“During a rescue mission,” he begins to read from the article, “for Colby Davis, the twenty-year-old daughter of actress Gwen Davis who was abducted from a beach in Costa Rica two weeks prior, six other girls were also recovered from a compound in Venezuela. She was one of them.”
“Ten months?” I swallow back the bile rising in my throat. That’s too much for any one person and a complete contradiction to what she’s been putting herself through lately. My palm stings with the urge to spank her ass.
“One girl they rescued had been there for over two years,” he mumbles quietly as he reads more of the article. My eyes stay fixed on the image of the broken girl. “She killed herself.”
“What!” My throat is on fire, heart slamming against my chest as my hands reach for my phone. When I’d left her this morning, she was fine. If it was internal injur—
“Colby Davis.” Virus points to his desktop screen at an image of a beautiful, smiling brunette. “A week after she was rescued, they found her dead in her apartment. She overdosed on pain pills.”
“Fuck.” I’m both sickened that they got to her like that and for the relief washing over me that he wasn’t talking about Kaci.
“I can’t even imagine what those girls went through,” Virus says as if he’s inside my head and speaking for me. “I knew a girl in high school once that got hooked on drugs and ended up a hooker.”
“It’s not the same fucking thing,” I spit as I step out from behind his desk and reach for the office doorknob. “Keep looking. I want to know everything there is to know.”
“This about sums it up.” He’s pointing at the screen when I spin around to glare at him. “I’ll keep looking.”
My first instinct when I walk out of the office is to jump on my bike and head straight back to Kaci’s place, but I know that seeing her right now while I’m feeling murderous would only have negative results.
I don’t understand her behavior at all. She doesn’t act the way you’d expect a victim of sex trafficking to act, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? Trauma takes on all sorts of disguises. I should know. Pointing that play pistol at the police when I was a kid made me realize guns would never be my thing, but it didn’t prevent me from transforming into the man I am today. Guns are impersonal. Knives require a certain kind of finesse, and when confronted by a man with a knife, his intentions are very fucking clear.