The initials next to it are RH.
"RH," I say. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Who's RH?"
Imani doesn't want to tell me.
She doesn't want to tell me. But she's not going to be one more person who decides what I can handle.
She looks at the deposition.
"Roy Hoyt," she reads, low. "Ironwood. Trask's second cousin. He was a captain." She stops, and her jaw works before she makes herself go on. "Ollie's got a whole section on him. He's on the list of men Ollie puts at your parents' house. The night they died."
I don't hear whatever comes after that.
The floor of me drops out and everything goes through it at once.
The man who choked me until the room went gray.
The one whose face I opened in four lines with my nails.
The one they hauled me above the ground to whip, which put me outside a bunker for the first time in months and handed me the single night I could run.
Ironwood.
Trask's own blood, and he stood in my mother's kitchen.
He was there when they killed my parents. And years later, when they had me in a hole on their own property, he knew.
He knew exactly who I was.
I was never a random body to Roy Hoyt.
He'd stood in my mother's kitchen.
He knew my face, knew whose girl I was, knew what the Kincaids had cost his people and what his people had spent hunting me—and then one day the girl they never found turned up as merchandise on Trask's own ranch, and he recognized me, and he paid four hundred dollars for a night to finish what the kitchen started.
That's what the whipping was. That's what his hand on my throat was. It was never a client losing control. It was a man closing the oldest open account his organization had.
And I got away from him anyway.
I was never anything to them but a body in a room.
Even that, they took.
For years I told myself the two halves of my life were separate, that what Finn did and what happened to me were two tragedies that only happened to land on the same woman.
I said it to his face in the sunroom.
I looked at him and told him it wasn't them, nobody was sending him a message, I was just a woman with groceries.
I was wrong.
It was them. It was always them, the whole time, both halves, one organization, some of them the same actual men—and there isn't one inch of my life these last ten years that Ironwood didn't put its hands on.
And I stood in a cold sunroom and gave Finn absolution for it. I told him it wasn't his fault because it wasn't them.
Itwasthem.
Now I have to go tell him that too.
