46. Utah

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

utah

I was a child when my father murdered my mother in front of me.

I was a child when I decided to kill my father because of that.

Those things put me on a rollercoaster from hell for a good chunk of my younger years.

But nothing in the fucking world even came close to the kind of burning pain I felt for Memphis in this moment.

Indy was right. I didn’t normally react emotionally without thinking it through first.

To anything.

I could keep myself together in the most fucked up situations, but I was not in control here. The urge to remove everyone from this planet who’d been involved in wronging her this way was intense and hard to push aside. I had to remind myself every twelve fucking seconds that the woman crying in front of me was where my attention was most needed for the time being. Even if I left here this very moment and drove my angry ass straight to Philadelphia to our President’s front door to remove his spine, it wouldn’t even come close to absolving the depth of emotional wreckage that Memphis carried with her.

“What do you need from me, angel?” I asked, trying to remind myself out loud that she was more important than my rage. Her hands latched onto my wrists, and she leaned forward until her head was against my chest.

“Help me.”

I let go of her face to squeeze the rest of her into me.

“But help me without feeling sorry for me,” she said even quieter that time. “Don’t stop touching me because I’m disgusting and ruined. Don’t start looking at me like I’m broken and fragile and can’t handle this shit. I’m not a different person just because you know what happened now.”

Ouch.

Again, with the depth of that emotional wreckage.

Her incessant need to overthink everything made so much sense. The constant desire to remain three steps ahead of the rest of the world and to understand every possible outcome to a situation before it ever happened was a desperate attempt to never find herself in a place where someone else decided everything for her again. The way she reacted to being touched, what sex meant to her, fucking New Jersey being her only “safe” relationship with a man.

What a shit show.

She deserved the chance to become karma’s vigilante.

“There’s nothing in this world that could make me stop touching you now, angel. There’s even less of a chance of me ever thinking you’re disgusting or ruined.” I raised her face back to mine so I could kiss her. “I don’t want you to think I expect you to sit out here and tell me every awful detail right now, Memphis. But if we’re really dealing with the same trafficking ring that picked up you and your sister, there’s a good chance that a hell of a lot of useful information about it all is trapped inside your pretty little head with those memories.”

“I know.”

“You don’t even have to tell me if talking to me about it is what makes you uncomfortable. Indy loves you. He’d listen. Triss too.”

“And Jersey, Utah,” she added and laughed. “Does it hurt you just to say his name?”

“I’ll keep being an ass about him if it’ll keep making you smile when I do it.”

She didn’t want to tell just me about it.

Or just Indy. Or just any single one of us.

Memphis planted herself right in the middle of the couch in the living room with all of us spread throughout the room to hear the nightmare that she’d lived. She was certain that allowing everyone in on the story would be more helpful than just explaining it all to one of us, in case someone managed to pick up on an important detail that another might have missed.

Their parents dropped them off at a mall in Memphis; something that they’d done on several occasions before because there was a movie theater attached to it. The girls would go see a movie while their parents went to a restaurant across the road for dinner. Back then, Memphis thought it was a rite of passage. It was something she and her sister both looked forward to, because they’d made a deal with their parents that it was something they could start doing once Memphis turned thirteen. She had no memory of men watching them on their previous movie days, but she was only thirteen, and probably hadn’t ever stopped to think about the dangers of their surroundings until it was much too late.

They didn’t live in an upscale area of Memphis, and the mall reflected that. She said it was never a busy place. There weren’t swarms of people everywhere. It was mostly employees and the other moviegoers. The three men who picked up Memphis and her sister were waiting for them right outside the theater entrance, where it opened up to the rest of the mall. They introduced themselves. They smiled. She said they just looked like regular people. They weren’t threatening. They didn’t carry weapons that were readily visible. These men offered to walk the girls back to the parking lot since it would be dark outside, but they guided the girls to an exit on the opposite side of the building from the one they usually used to meet their parents. They ushered Memphis and her sister through an employee exit at the back of an abandoned store. By the time Memphis started to panic, it was already over. They gave up calmly walking the girls the rest of the way, drugged both of them with cloths over their noses and mouths, and they woke up in hell.

They were kept in a house in the woods somewhere. Woods that were dense enough that she couldn’t see a road in any direction from any of the windows. Even the driveway seemed to lead to nowhere. She never saw the outside of the house in the daylight to be able to tell us what it looked like, but she had every inch of the inside of the house memorized to this day. She could find her way around the building without any light on. She said she could probably still do it with her eyes closed. She knew which floorboards to avoid because they creaked with too much weight. She knew which ones left splinters because the house was apparently mostly in shambles and very poorly kept.

The kids were all kept in rooms on the second floor to prevent escape attempts. The room that Memphis shared with her sister and four other girls had three broken windows and she was very much under the impression that several before her had simply chosen to fall to their deaths rather than be kept alive in those conditions. They were all given their own blanket, but nothing more. The windows were never repaired so the colder months left the girls sleeping huddled in a corner together furthest from the windows.

Memphis said she knew their names, but they weren’t friends. She never attempted to get close to any of the other kids because they were constantly changing roommates. They were always adding new children just as quickly as the others disappeared. They didn’t have time to become friendly during the day because they were kept busy. They were put to work cleaning a house that couldn’t be cleaned, learning to do chores that never really improved the state of the building. When they weren’t cleaning, they were in lessons . They were given clear instruction about how they were supposed to behave for the people who would eventually buy them. They went through drills where the men in the house would role play as the buyers so the kids could see it happen, could experience it, and practice . The purchasing process was explained to them. They’d be put on display or put through trial runs so buyers could make informed decisions.

They couldn’t become friends during the day under strict supervision, and no one wanted to talk to each other by the end of the day. They weren’t allowed to cry or show emotion during the day unless it was part of the practice . So the night was when everyone cried. But they were fed twice a day and able to bathe once a day. They had strict sleeping hours and waking hours. These kids were an investment and their bodies were cared for to be sure the payout on the other end was worth it. They even kept a doctor in the house with them at all times to treat injuries from the practice runs, to keep everyone clean , to deal with birth control issues for the older kids.

Memphis didn’t cry until she talked about the basement. It was where she spent most of her time for those nine months, from the sound of it. The basement, all cinderblock and concrete, was reserved for punishment. Misbehavior was handled in the basement. Misunderstanding a lesson, intentionally sabotaging a lesson, acting out, showing emotion, speaking during the day without having been spoken to first, skipping meals, and disobeying a buyer or any of the adults in the house were all punishable offenses.

No one in that living room had the nerve to ask for specifics about the basement. I was under the impression, from the way that Memphis spoke, that it wasn’t even necessarily punishment in a sexual sense. Isolation and solitude in a concrete basement that flooded when it rained; that didn’t have heat, air conditioning, or even light. She talked about chains, about a crate, about the rats. She talked about being cold and alone. She talked about a darkness that was so dark, even the slightest hint of light felt blinding the next time she saw it.

At some point, Trista had shifted to sit right beside Memphis on the couch. They held hands for most of that discussion. Indy sat on the floor with his laptop open. He originally thought he might use it to research locations or people if Memphis had been able to offer specific details, but he ended up just sitting with his elbows on his knees and his fingers applying pressure at his temples while he stared at the floor. I paced around my half of the living room while New Jersey stomped around his side.

I kept waiting for Indy to break the heavy air in the room with something inappropriate, with something funny, with anything to give us all just a hint of relief.

It never happened.

“How’d you get out of Satan’s boarding school, Memphis?” New Jersey asked on one of his trips around his side of the room.

She’d known exactly what Tennessee meant when he was talking about the operation moving from place to place to stay undetected. She didn’t realize it until after the fact that she was as well-acquainted with it as she was. The women who ran the lessons spent weeks preparing the kids for a move that would be coming. They weren’t told exactly when it would happen; just that one day soon they’d be loaded into vans and moved to a new house. The rules applied to the move as they would any regular day in the house. The only difference was that it would take place at night. Something in Memphis’ mind suggested that that would be the only chance they’d ever have at escaping.

“That night when I heard them loading up the kids from the other rooms,” she started to say before she had to stop and put herself back together. “I—” She stopped again when the tears started flowing. I took her from Trista’s grasp and pulled her to her feet so I could squeeze her against me. She’d talked about being raped, abused, neglected, and mistreated in all the worst ways like it was just any regular conversation. If she was going to cry over whatever this was, it was because it was truly fucking awful. Even New Jersey was able to acknowledge that, and I noticed he’d given up pacing to put both his hands on the back of the couch and stand there, braced for whatever she might say next.

“Nobody had ever tried to escape in the time that Em and me were there. I convinced one of the other girls in our room that it was the only chance we’d ever have. I talked her into jumping out the window. Explained to her how it wouldn’t kill her. That if she landed right, she could just get up and run. That I’d be right behind her. They wouldn’t be ready for it because no one had even attempted it in the months that we’d been there. It wasn’t even hard to do—convincing her to jump. We were all just hoping for a way out. For someone to tell us how to make it happen. I think if I’d told her she could fly, she might’ve believed it just because it meant getting out.”

She stopped again while she choked on those words. Her arms wrapped around my waist so she could dig her fingers into my back.

“You’re okay, angel,” I whispered to the top of her head. “You’re safe here.”

“I was right,” she said quietly. “They weren’t ready for it. I had her wait until they were unlocking our door. She jumped as soon as the door was open. Her screams were the perfect distraction. They went right back out of the room to get downstairs. The noise had all of them running toward her, not paying any attention to anything else. They didn’t notice that they left all those doors unlocked or that Em followed me right out the side door from the kitchen and into the woods.”

I looked at the other faces in that room, hoping one of them would have something helpful to say because I sure as shit didn’t have any words available.

“They probably killed her, Colt. The girl I sacrificed as a distraction. The girl who had to have broken several bones from that fall. They probably killed her. She probably died alone. Terrified and in horrible pain.”

I flinched hard hearing her use my real name in this setting, but nobody else seemed to notice through the weight of her other words.

I couldn’t even begin to suggest that she was wrong. I couldn’t tell her that it might not have gone that way, or that she had no way to know what really happened because she wasn’t there for it. Because everything inside me knew that was exactly what happened.

New Jersey came around the couch to stare at me until I loosened my hold enough for Memphis to look up at me and wonder why I was releasing her. I used my thumbs to wipe the newest set of tears from her cheeks before I stepped back to let the King of Assholes try his hand at fixing this. I watched him grab her face to make sure he directed all her attention right to him.

“Nobody here blames you, Memphis. This girl who was being tortured was willing to risk dying from a jump out of a second story window, or from the elements, or from starvation and dehydration, rather than continue living through what was being done to all of you. You didn’t throw her out of that window.”

“My words pushed her, Jersey,” she squeaked and grabbed his wrists.

“ You made it out, honey,” he said and wrapped her in a bear hug. “And you managed to get another life out with you.”