Page 75 of Antihero

“I believe…” She faded out. Came back in. “I need to lie down. Just, please…” She waved a hand at them and then turned and walked unsteadily into her bedroom. The door closed softly behind her.

Evan looked down at the floor. Beside him, he could hear Candy’s breathing. It sounded ragged. For a time they just stood there.

“Know what was included in my training?” she asked.

She was not looking at him. She stared straight ahead and he stared ahead along with her. He waited.

“If I was fully overpowered, getting raped, how to relax my muscles to minimize physical damage. They didn’t make us practice. Not fully.” She punched the last word hard, a bit of fury leaking through. “But there were … simulations.” She made a kind of snicker that was drained of amusement. “Were you ever trained for anything like that?”

Evan said, “No.”

In his peripheral vision, he sensed Candy nod and then nod some more. “In the foster homes, it wasn’t a simulation. When I turned … when I turned thirteen, I became immensely palatable to men.” Her hands cupped her narrow waist, shoved resentfully down over the bulge of her hips as if sloughing off an outer skin. “My curves.” Her upper lip peeled back in a snarl, and the snarl was in her voice, too. “They ‘couldn’t help themselves.’ The first time, I was paralyzed, numb, terrified. I couldn’t talk, could barely move. I felt … I felt like I was six years old.”

Evan didn’t know where to look. Didn’t know what to say.

“My first year in the Program, a female instructor took my trauma history. Bitter old bitch with coffee breath and crumbly makeup. Know what she told me?”

Evan did not.

“‘You had power. To flirt or rebuff or draw lines. To not be undone by their wiles, their projections of power. You had the power to speak up. To say no. To scream and fight. But you didn’t. You stayed silent. Stuck in obedience. In compliance. Never relinquish control again.’” Candy breathed a bit more. “I was in a chair in an interrogation room. She was standing over me. She had a ballpoint pen in her shirt pocket. I wanted to rip it free and stab it through her fucking eye socket.” She wet her lips, swallowed, pulled her head back. “But I didn’t.”

“What did you do?”

“Took the lesson,” Candy said. “That’s what I fucking did.”

The distinctive ring of the RoamZone rescued him.

Caller ID showed Naomi Templeton.

Candy waved her hand: Take it.

Stepping into the hall, he answered. “Go.”

“We found Manny Llorente,” Templeton said. “He was in bad shape.”

“He should be thankful for the shape he was left in.”

Templeton muttered a few choice words away from the phone. She came back to the receiver. “He’s in custody. We’re processing what we found. There’s plenty. The primary porn operation is legal but there’s a lot of shit around the edges that looks to be illicit. Underage, kidnapping, assault.”

“Burn it to the ground.”

A text dinged in from Joey: ive got boot n nuke malware chewing thru the interwebs. itll be wiped everywhere by days end.

“A lot of the videos and victims will be hard to source,” Templeton said. “I assume the video file you sent us was your point of entry into the mission?”

“Yes.”

“The woman’s name?”

“I need to talk to her before I escalate the case.”

“Do.”

Templeton was interrupted again by Joey: redlite will still have it on their servers, tho. ull need 2 go there + do a physical wipe on site.

Evan texted her back: Where’s RedLite HQ?

“We need a victim testimony,” Templeton continued.