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“Send them flowers, from me, personally,” I said. “Peonies, they were her favorite. Let them know that she had a friend during some of the worst days of her life…and I looked out for her as best as I could while I was there.” I choked back a sob.
“Of course. I’ll give them your work email, if you want. Do you need to come home?” he asked. His voice was still gentle, and my respect for the man somehow skyrocketed higher. He was willing to put my needs before the mission, and I loved him for it. It made me only want to work harder. I needed to find out if members from my agency were helping other monsters do the same thing that happened to my friend. It felt like a form of justice, and I was going to chase it.
“Yes, please give that to them, and my number.” I paused for a second, as if I was considering my options, even though my mind was made up. “No, I’m not coming home. I’m going to put another sick bastard in jail where he belongs, so that more women don’t end up like Lilith,” I said. The fiery anger was back; it suppressed the grief, for now. I didn’t dare bring up my private mission.
“That’s my girl. You call if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay.”
“How’s the mission going?” he asked.
“I’ve got to go,” I said and hung up. I had made the mistake of putting the call on speaker when I answered, and the looks I was getting from the group stirred up things I didn’t want to feel. I could see the pity in their eyes, along with looks of concern. I had to hope they would think he was checking in on their mission, not mine.
“Abby,” Christine said softly, and she reached for me.
“Don’t. I…I…I can’t do this right now,” I said and made a mad dash for the door.
“Abby, come back!” I heard Jasmine call.
Fat chance of that. I wouldn’t let anyone see me fall apart. I wasn’t like them; I wasn’t all in tune with my emotions and okay with others comforting me. That was never something that I could handle. When I got stressed out or emotional, I worked out until I couldn’t move, until I didn’t have any energy to dedicate to whatever caused my outburst in the first place. That was exactly what I was going to do now, and I hoped no one would follow me.
I made a mad dash to my room to grab my sneakers and slipped them on my feet. With my phone and earbuds in hand, I took the stairs all the way down to the lobby two at a time. I raced out the front door and received a lot of strange looks from other guests, but I didn’t care, not one bit. I didn’t even bother to warm up; I just took off at a sprint and focused on my breathing.
Lilith couldn’t be gone; she was a ray of sunshine on this shithole we called Earth. Her pleasant smile had been exactly what attracted the traffickers to her. She was taken from Central Park and brought to the high rise only days after I arrived. We spent our first days just trying to survive. She was terrified, and I felt protective of her. Sometimes there was nothing to do but talk about our lives and what we would miss about them. We spent days locked in a dark room with the other girls, and they clung on to our every word. The room we were held captive in stunk due to the buckets of shit and piss we were trapped with—sometimes it was so bad we couldn’t help but gag or puke. There wasn’t much for comfort, only a few blankets and pillows—but we had each other. We pretended the darkness was from a new moon, and we were basking in the darkness on a beach in paradise. She’d never get the real experience; she was gone.
I ached to punch something; I eyed a palm tree like it personally wronged me, but I didn’t go for it. I didn’t want to break my hand and set the mission back, even though physical pain was the only form of release I craved. Call me fucked up, I didn’t care. Pain was better than mental anguish; it was gone a lot sooner. Physical wounds always healed faster, with less scarring.
My mind flashed back to the high rise. I planned to sneak Lilith out in the middle of the night once I had the full trust of the leadership. I was going to drug the night-shift guards and get her out the back door, but the assholes sold her before I could. I barely had enough time to say goodbye to her; I had to fight to make sure she didn’t go to one of the bad clients. She clung to me, tears streaming down her face. Her body trembled, and she wouldn’t stop sniffling when I told her how brave she was and that I’d find her one day. I promised we’d have a drink on the beach and we’d make our captors pay. She put on a brave smile and had been ushered out the door with a bag over her head. It was the last time I saw her, and now I’d always remember it as the day I couldn’t fulfill my promise.
A bright ray of sunshine was snuffed out, and it just made me want to lash out, snap a neck, and fall to my knees. I wanted to scream, cry, and never speak again, all at the same time. There was nothing that would ever make this okay. I didn’t know her for very long, but that didn’t matter. She became my sister the night I held her while she cried herself to sleep.
I failed her.
The guilt felt like a giant anchor sitting in my gut. If only I had acted sooner, or if I was a little braver, maybe she’d be alive. I hadn’t even bothered to ask Bob how long they thought she’d been deceased for.
My feet pounded against the pavement to the beat of my music. It was something to distract me, something to help me push myself until I break, so that I could pull the pieces back together again. I concentrated on the rhythm of the drum and synched my breaths.
One thing was for sure, I wasn’t going to honor Lilith’s memory by crying or breaking my hand. I’d honor her memory by saving others like her, those who were currently scared out of their minds, wondering what would happen to them. I did my best to push Lilith from my mind to do just that; she’d understand. When I finished this mission, I would find the asshole she was sold to and kill him. I didn’t care if I could lose my job or go to prison. I’d go full Dexter on his ass and grin while I did it. I’d enjoy the way the coward begged for mercy, and he’d get none.
Bob would say, “That’s not the way we do things,” but I was sick of that shit. The way we did things was the reason Lilith was dead. We had to follow procedures and get warrants when we should have been busting down the door of every single person who was in the small records book that the trafficking ring had kept. If so, we might have caught her buyer sooner. We might have found her before it was too late. I held back a sob at the overwhelming amount of guilt I felt.
The predators needed to know that they weren’t safe, not by a long shot. Our policies and procedures gave them something to hide behind. It gave them time to dispose of evidence and move their victims around. Procedures shouldn’t have mattered when lives hung in the balance. Those predators were going to be mine to do what I pleased. I was a fucking savage, and I wouldn’t hold back. There was a world of illegal and shady dealings, cruelty and deceit, yet the bureau was only able to scratch the surface of it. There were so few agents like me that were ever able to dip their toes into this market, and I was going to have to work that much harder at it since I’d been exposed in newspapers.
I ran for miles and miles until I started to feel pain in my shins and my knees. My lungs felt heavy, and I was covered in so much sweat it looked like I had gone running into the ocean. I actually considered doing just that to cool off, but I didn’t trust myself to not hold my head under the water until I drowned in my guilt, so I refrained.
I felt the sensation that I was being watched. The hair on my arms raised, even though they were soaked in sweat. It made my skin tingle. I balled my fists in anticipation of a fight as I looked around.
Above me, there was a drone. I rolled my eyes. I should have figured that they wouldn’t let me go out alone, well, not completely. I pulled my headphones out and looked back up at the device. I wasn’t sure if it had a mic or not, but I took a chance on looking like a crazy person.
“You assholes don’t have to follow me. I can handle myself!” I called out to the camera. Its blinking red light continued its flashing.
“I know you can,” a voice said from behind me, and I jumped.Goddamn it.
I spun on my heels. “What the fuck?” My heart beat fast and hard from the scare. “Did you follow me all the way out here?”
Adam stood behind me. He was covered in just as much sweat as I was. He’d likely been following me the whole run.
“You are fast as hell, do you know that?” he asked. He was panting, and I took a little pride in how hard he had to work to keep up. I also felt bad that he was in this position because of me.
