Isaiah
She never brokeher resolve once, even when there were several people in the room, all waiting for her to cry or at least question everything being thrown at her. Anyone else in her situation would have covered their ears and winced at the things coming from Jacobi’s mouth, but Gemma was strong.
Stronger than me.
Stronger than anyone I’d ever met before.
The IV was finally taken out of her arm, and there was a slight pinkish hue covering her cheeks that made my stomach dip at the sight. She was beginning to look more like the Gemma I knew, and all I wanted to do was keep her to myself.
She pushed a piece of brown hair behind her ear, showing off how delicate her high cheekbone was. The bruises on her neck were mostly gone now, but they had taken a long time to heal. Every time I caught a glimpse of the fingerprint marks, my vision would turn crimson. I was sure Richard thought he was in a shitty place at the moment and probably couldn’t even fathom how a man with his power could end up behind bars, but if he were breathing outside of that metal box, I would take my hands and choke him like he’d choked her.
“So…” Gemma shifted uncomfortably, pushing herself up farther on the bed. It had been quite a few hours since she’d woken, and per the doctor’s orders, we were to give her some time before we overwhelmed her with information, but Gemma insisted, and me being me, I advocated for her. She deserved to know everything when she was ready, and if she was ready now, then she was fucking ready.
She had started off at St. Mary’s on wobbly feet, but she left on sturdier ones. She didn’t shy away from the past any longer. She welcomed it with open arms.
“So...my mom was sent to the group home because she had gotten in trouble with the law? And that was how she met Richard?” Gemma was repeating what Jacobi had told her because it was a clusterfuck.
My uncle—well, not technically my uncle, but it was hard not to think of him like that—shifted on the window ledge of the sterile-smelling room, glancing away from Gemma’s curious look. “Well, technically, she met Richard when she went for sentencing. He—”
Gemma nodded. “He sent girls to the group home instead of jail. I knew that…I just didn’t fully know my mom was one of them. I had suspected a time or two, but from what I remembered when I was little, my mom never really went over to the group home. We lived in the big house. Richard’s house.”
Uncle Tate’s vein was back again, throbbing right there in the middle of his forehead. I knew that, deep down, he felt that it was his fault that Emily had been there. It was a favor from Judge Stallard and the last tie between him and my grandfather. A deal. My grandfather would keep Emily from prison with the help of his ol’ pal Judge Stallard, and Uncle Tate would destroy the incriminating files he had regarding the family business and leave without a word.
It wasn’t his fault, though. Although, I knew why he felt that way. It was insignificant at this point. There was so much more that Gemma didn’t know.
“Right,” Jacobi answered. “From what we’ve gathered, your mother and Richard had some sort of an affair during her time there, and that would have gone against every ethic and moral that Judge Stallard stood for. So, he kept it a secret, along with you and your brother.”
“My mother didn’t want to be with him anymore. I remember her telling him no, and he got angry. He said she was mentally unstable and left her at the psych hospital, later saying she had killed herself.”
Jacobi nodded again, and I could sense that Gemma was feeling uncomfortable.
I whispered into her ear, “Do you want to take a break?”
Her head shook instantly, so I pulled back and kept a hold of her hand.
“From a psychological viewpoint, Richard seemed to have been obsessed with your mother and with the idea of creating a family with her. When she told him no, his obsession moved to you, and crossing that with an obvious personality disorder along with the different facets of his life...”
“What are you saying?” she asked.
I spoke for my brother. “Richard is fucking crazy.”
Gemma laughed. She actually laughed, and her cheeks looked pinker, too. “Um, yeah. I know. But what now?” She looked at Jacobi and suddenly grew serious. “You say you’re in the FBI.”
He nodded slowly. “We, speaking for the FBI, were working closely with ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and you seemed to come up on the radar.” Jacobi hummed, smiling slightly. “You kind of wrapped everything up for us in a nice and tidy bow, Gemma. We owe you. Not only did we take down one of the biggest illegal gun suppliers in the western hemisphere, we took down their biggest client: Judge Stallard and the Covens, which is wildly popular on the dark web. You were at the center of it all, as complicated as it was.”
My brother’s half-assed compliment didn’t seem to register with Gemma. Her fingers started de-threading the blanket covering our legs, and her nerves were evident. “How many people are on Richard’s payroll, though? On the FBI? He has power… I’ve seen him use it.”
I placed my hand on Gemma’s, and she stilled, looking up at me, appearing so fucking vulnerable, and I wanted to somehow force it into her head that no one was coming close to her now. “He will not be cut loose, Gemma.”
“How do you know that, though? What?” She panicked, looking back at my brother and my uncle—her father, which she had no idea about…yet. “Is it his word against mine? All the abuse? Who's to say he won’t just lie and say I’m crazy like my mother? He’s threatened that before! Who's to say I can trust you?”
“Not only do we have him on the abuse, but we have charges relating to the Covens, too. And it isn’t just his word against yours…”
Gemma was leery. “What do you mean? Do you have witnesses? Do you have proof of everything he did to me? And I don’t even know what really went on at the psych hospital...but I can tell you that it wasn’t good. The men that came into my room were… What did Richard even have to do with that place? I remember some things that were said and done from when I was younger, but...” She pulled into herself. “The men that I saw in that place were bad people. They…”
My heart thudded to the ground. My uncle visibly tensed, and Jacobi winced. “We know what went on at the psych hospital. Judge Stallard deemed men mentally ill and sent them to the hospital, but instead of treating them for mental illness in the true psych hospital, he…”
Jacobi slowly shifted his attention to me, and I nodded, allowing him to continue. Gemma would tell us when she wanted to stop, but I had a hunch she wouldn’t want to.
“He gave those men an option of lessening their sentences for something else in life.”
“Like what?”