My stomach rolled the same way it did then, vision clouding with anger and grief as I remembered.
“They weren’t sending the students home. They were selling them.”
His fingers tightened in my shirt, breath catching hard enough that I felt it against my chest.
“They were—” he shook his head once, his brain refusing to process it. “You’re serious?”
His eyes snapped up to mine, wide and searching, like he was hoping I’d take it back.
“Theysold them?Trafficking?”
“They were using the exchange program at Ashford. Other schools, too.”
Archie’s brows pulled together.
“Other schools?”
“A network. Private academies. Same structure, same pipeline. You rotate students through, you stagger the disappearances, you keep the numbers low enough that no one piece ever looks like a pattern.
“Because if one kid went missing every year from Ashford, someone would’ve noticed?”
I nodded. “So they didn’t let it stack in one place. They moved it. Spread it out. Made it look like isolated incidents instead of what it was.”
Archie stared at me, something dark and furious settling behind his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed.
“I burned it down,” I said evenly. “The annex. The records. The men running it. I burnedeverything.”
“And then you—” Disbelief flickered across his face. “You wrote about it. You made yourself the victim so you could control how it looked.”
“Correct.”
His mouth parted, then closed again, like he didn’t know what to do with that. “And your parents?”
“I found out a few years later they were funding it. Not directly. Donations. Investments routed through enough hands to keep them clean on paper.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.” I cleared my throat. “So I killed them too. Carbon monoxide poisoning, which wasn’t simple to arrange."
Archie stared at me.
Reallystared.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Every muscle in his body jolted when he tossed his hands in the air. “Why didn’t you take what you found and hand it over? There had to be someone you could trust.”
“There were names in those records, Rabbit. Officials. Law enforcement. People with enough reach to bury it before it ever surfaced.”
He shoved his glasses in his hair and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So you just decided to handle it yourself?”
“I decided not to let it continue,” I corrected. “And I’ve spent the last seventeen years making sure it doesn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“I made connections. The FBI has a missing persons task force. I reached out to them after my parents died and donated the money I inherited to their unit. It funded their cases and helped families who lost their loved ones.”
Archie’s shoulders eased a fraction, then he pushed his glasses back down from where they’d been shoved into his hair, adjusting them carefully like he needed to see me clearly for this.
