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A minute later, one of the men came inside and handed me the remote. He explained which button to use, how far we would need to be, and then he left.
Josh came down the stairs, a full bag with him, and he placed it on the dining room table. “I think I got everything. I’ll do a sweep of the main level and the basement.” He disappeared to the back rooms, and I moved to the far wall, which extended down the farthest hallway.
I was looking at the pictures when Josh finished, coming up to me. “Done.”
I didn’t speak. I kept looking.
He transferred his gaze, taking in the image. “Is that Victoria?”
“It’s her and her father.”
Josh looked at me. “Her father’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yeah.” That was a sad fact that I never stopped to consider until now. “My grandfather killed him.”
Josh didn’t react, but I felt his attention sharpen.
“I overlooked it. That was around when Victoria and I met for the first time, and looking back, there were rumors. I never questioned why. I never questioned the reason for it. If I had, then what? Would I have stepped in sooner? That’s probably the time when he decided to use Victoria to get to me.”
“That’s what Griogos was talking about, that Victoria was supposed to marry you.”
“Victoria was supposed to control me. That’s how my grandfather thought. He wanted me tied to him. It was just one more way he was trying to control me.”
“You and herdiddate.”
I nodded, moving to the next picture.
They were smiling in it. I pointed at it. “This is Maragos and his daughter.”
“The daughter who Calhoun was controlling, too?”
“He owned her. Griogos sold her to Calhoun.”
But that wasn’t the point of my trip down memory lane.
I was remembering the first time I saw Victoria.
The first flirt. The first kiss. The first date.
I came to the last picture, and Josh said under his breath, “Damn.”
It was me, Victoria, Matt, and Tony.
I forgot that, too. The four of us were friends. We were the beginning of everything.
“You’re so young in there.”
I nodded, lingering on Victoria’s face. Fuck. The bitterness was strong.
I had missed this.
I had missed it completely.
“This was another family he destroyed.” I touched Victoria’s face in the picture. She was thirteen. It would be the next year when Tony and Matt began drinking. It would be a few years years after that when Victoria and I started sleeping together. And in the midst of it all, I never thought about how Calhoun took her father first, then indebted her grandfather to him, and through all of that, began to own Victoria and her mother.
“Why am I getting the feeling you’re changing your mind on her?”
“She was a friend first. She was an innocent at one point.”
