“No way in hell,” I avowed, closing the door behind me. “What’s going on?”
“Why does something have to be going on if I just want my space?” she challenged.
“Baby, you’ve been shutting me out for a week.”
“I’ve been on my period.”
“That has never stopped you from sleeping in my bed before.”
“It’s been a rough one.”
“So, I’ll rub your back, get you a heating pad, and Midol, but you don’t fuckin’ shut me out.”
She shrugged. “Maybe I don’t want you to rub my back, get me a heating pad, or Midol.”
“Bullshit.” I frowned. “But that’s not the real reason.”
“Why can’t it be the real reason?”
“Moonbeam, stop fuckin’ around. What’s got you freaked?”
She shook her head and stared at her bare feet.
I closed the distance between us and cupped her face. “Baby, what?”
“Remember when Raquel’s uncle took that sex video of her mother and blackmailed her with it?”
My blood ran cold. “Fuck, baby. Did he do it to you, too?”
She shook her head. “No, someone else did.”
“Who?”
Her body locked. “I need you not to touch me right now.”
I reluctantly lowered my hand and she stepped away from me.
“Remember how I told you Rabbit stepped in with the foster dad back in high school? The one who tried to…”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep my rage in check.
Rabbit had interrupted her foster dad pushing her up against a wall and beat the shit out of him. He’d been kicked out of the house and almost sent tojuvie, but being the genius kid that he was, he hacked into the system and wiped his records clean.
Rabbit was back on the street, but he had a chance meeting with Doom who let him prospect with the Dogs of Fire out of Savannah, despite only being sixteen. Sierra found herself under the club’s protection as well, and it’s where she met Raquel and the rest was history, as they say.
“Well, what Rabbit doesn’t know, and what I also didn’t tell you, was Cletus didn’t just try to rape me… he succeeded. More than once.”
“Jesus,” I hissed.
“And he taped it.” She let out a quiet sob. “I found it.”
“What do you mean, he taped it and you found it?”
“He must have had a hidden camera. And he uploaded it to porn sites. I found it on the web.”
“What do you mean, you found it on the web? Like Porn Hub?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s out on the dark web, hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for, but it’s something I’ve been working on with Taxi, as part of the crew. We’ve been looking for Tackle’s baby sister who was kidnapped about ten years ago now, and we found some child porn sites that she was on briefly, but they were dead ends. I was doing another search on Thursday…” she swallowed, “…and I saw me.” She burst into tears. “As a teenager. With his gross old man body on top of me.”