Page 75 of Justice

“So here’s what’s about to happen.” I watched the road go by. “I’m gonna go home. I’m gonna find out how long this been going on, and who knew, and who helped. And every single person who had a hand in putting my fifteen-year-old in a room with that man is gonna answer for it. One at a time.”

“Justice.” Quest glanced over at me, and there wasn’t a joke anywhere on his face now. “You already know I’m with it. Whoever, whenever, however you want it done.” He looked back at the road. “Just tell me when.”

Two brothers. One car. No more jokes. That’s how you know it got real.

The house was empty when we pulled up, and empty was exactly what I needed.

Prime had already run the girls to school, because it was a school day and life doesn’t stop just because a father spent the night in a cage. Skye had taken Rita to the store. So there was nobody home to look at me with worry, nobody to soften anything, nobody to talk me back from the ledge I had already decided to walk off of.

Quest posted up in the kitchen to wait for Prime to circle back. I went upstairs.

I didn’t take my coat off. I went straight down the hall to Storie’s room and opened the door without knocking, because she’d lost the right to a closed door somewhere around the time she disrespected me and skipped school. In fact, I was taking that damn door off the hinges.

Then I started taking that room apart.

Drawers first. Pulled them all the way out and turned them over on the bed, one at a time. Went through the nightstand. Went through the closet, the shoes, the coat pockets, the little zip pouches a teenage girl thinks a grown man will never think to check.

I found it in the back of the closet, tucked down inside a boot.

A pink round case. Half the little pills gone, punched out in a neat row, the days marked off in somebody’s careful hand.

It was some damn birth control.

I stood there holding it and felt the bottom drop out of the last three weeks, because a girl doesn’t get on birth control for no reason. She gets on it because she’s planning to need it, or because she already has. I did not know which one of those was worse. I did not want to know either one.

Then I pulled out her phone.

I’d had it in my pocket since the night I put her on punishment, the night she called Skye out her name at that dinner table. Three months, I’d told her. No malls. No phone. No nothing. And she’d looked at me like the punishment was a joke, because apparently it was, because a locked-up phone and a grounded girl still found her way to a food court to meet a man.

I sat down on the edge of her stripped-apart bed and went through it.

Of course I knew the passcode. The only way she could have a phone is if I did have it.

It didn’t take long to find him. A saved contact under a name that wasn’t a name, just an emoji, three hearts. It’s what a naive child uses when she’s hiding someone. I opened the thread and read it. And I went so still, so cold, that the room seemed to drop ten degrees around me.

Because he knew.

That’s what dropped me where I stood. In that food court he’d looked me in my face with his hands up and his nose bleeding and swore to God he thought she was eighteen. And here it was in his own words, in writing, dated, time-stamped, undeniable. He knew she was fifteen. She had told him. He had typed her age right back to her, plain as day, and then he had told her exactly what he was counting the days to do to her once he got her alone.

: I can’t wait to feel your 15 year old pussy. I know it’s tight.

I set the phone down very gently, which is always the most dangerous thing I do.

He lied and I never planned on letting him get away with the lie. But now he was going to feel the brunt of my anger.

I heard the front door downstairs a little while later. Dream’s voice ringing up the stairwell, high and happy, then Prime’s low rumble answering her, then Quest. My brothers could handle the little one and keep her distracted. They would provide a warm wall between my youngest and what was about to happen at the top of these stairs.

Because Storie was home now too.

“Storie.” I said it once, from her doorway, down the length of the hall. “Come here.”

She came up the stairs slowly, and I watched the exact second she saw her room over my shoulder. The turned-out drawers. The bed. The closet standing open.

“Are you serious?” Her voice went up and sharp. “You went through my ROOM? You can’t just go through my stuff, that’s an invasion of privacy, that’s like actually illegal⁠—”

“Illegal.” I let that word sit in the air a second. “You wanna talk to me about illegal today. You.”

“It’s my room!”