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ChapterTwenty
Hunter
Dropping my keys and phone on the desk, I sit in my chair and start looking through the few pieces of company mail Katie left for me. Most of it is the usual shit. However, it’s the small padded envelope that catches my eye. Flipping it over, I see my name typed on the front. It doesn’t have a return address, which gives me pause. It’s never pleasant when you get a mysterious piece of mail with no return address. It means the sender is concealing their identity for some reason.
When I open the envelope, I find a thumb drive inside. A sense of foreboding has the hair on the back of my neck standing up. A thumb drive sent anonymously through the mail is notorious for holding information. In most cases, that information isn’t good. Instinct tells me I’m not going to like what’s on this one.
I tip the envelope, letting the thumb drive fall to my desk, and then grab my laptop. Once it’s booted up, I insert the drive into the USB port. Sitting stiffly in my chair, I prepare myself for whatever I’m about to see.
The name of the file that pops up doesn’t help the uneasy feeling forming in my gut.
FunWithKitty.
The file is a video. After I double-click the icon, a black screen pops up. Once the screen changes, I immediately recognize where the video was taken.
It’s my fucking house.
I tense, preparing to spring up from my chair, at first thinking the video was recently recorded. That means the person who sent this could be inside my house right now. As soon as I see the picture on the wall, I stop in my tracks. It hasn’t been there for years. Five years, to be precise. It’s a family photo of Cat, Eliana, Ryder, and me. All of our family photos have been hidden away. The paint behind the picture had also been changed a couple of years ago, so the person taking the video couldn’t have found the picture and rehung it.
I hear heavy breathing at first, like the person holding the camera has just finished a marathon. They move from the hallway into the living room. A bookshelf filled with Cat’s published books comes into view, and the person heads straight for it. The camera is turned and placed on a shelf facing the room. From this new angle, it looks like it sits on the second one from the top. It gives the camera a clear view of the rest of the room.
A person wearing a black plastic mask with electric blue X’s on its eyes and mouth appears. Immediately, I recognize who it is. Rather, he’s one of the three teens who broke into my house years ago.
Ice shards form in my blood. My temples pound so hard that I can barely hear the faint noises coming from the speakers. Screams of terror and muffled cries. My vision clouds and my teeth nearly snap in two from clenching them so hard.
The masked teen walks away, back across the room, and meets another teen with a mask—the same design, except the X’s are neon green—who is struggling to bring Cat into the room. No matter how much she fights, her attempts are weak. Probably from one of the many hits to the head she received. Her eyes are wide with terror, and a piece of tape covers her mouth, but it doesn’t muffle her screams much.
Following the boy holding my wife is another, this time with purple X’s. As he holds my two-year-old son like a football, he drags a screaming and kicking Eliana by her hair with the other hand.
The full force of unrestrained rage consumes every fucking fiber of my being. My body vibrates and my nails leave little crescent marks on my palms.
Not fucking once did Henry, Terry, or Howard mention there was a video of the night they attacked my family. I’ve only lived that night through Cat’s words. It was difficult to hear what she and our kids went through.
I watch them each being tied to a chair. Seeing this firsthand is going to destroy a part of me that I’ll never get back.
I want to close my computer and burn the thumb drive. I want to forget I ever got it and pretend I haven’t watched what I have so far, because I know this is only the beginning. I know it gets much fucking worse.
This is my punishment. Cat had no choice but to endure this nightmare. She had no choice but to watch the destruction of our family. Because of that, I force myself to continue.
I watch as they start on my wife. My eyes are glued to the scene as each one of them takes turns brutally raping her in front of our children. Not just with their bodies, but with random objects they find in the room. Then they take her all at once.
Cat’s muffled screams fill my ears, the same as those she makes in her nightmares as she relives this night over and over again. I want to jam screwdrivers in my ears until they puncture my eardrums. The sounds that leave her throat will haunt me forever.
What seems like hours later, they leave Cat on the floor, naked and covered in her own blood. She’s deathly still, and I’m not sure if it’s because she’s passed out or is in too much pain to move. However, when they turn to Eliana and my twelve-year-old daughter starts to scream, Cat stirs.
My jaw locks, the muscle cramping, when Cat struggles to get to her hands and knees. Blood coats her bare thighs, the color too fucking bright, and her tangled hair falls around her shoulders. Her face is nearly unrecognizable from the damage the bastards inflicted on her while they were raping her. With a hoarse voice, she begs the boys to leave our daughter alone as she crawls toward them. She offers herself, her strangled pleas blistering my ears.
One of the boys leaves the others and walks to Cat, picking her up and throwing her into a chair. She’s bound to it by her arms and legs and has another piece of tape slapped over her mouth. After that, he rejoins his friends.
What they do to Eliana is no better than what they did to Cat. In fact, it appears that they’re enjoying it more. Whether it’s her young age or the rise they’re getting out of Cat as she watches our daughter being used in such a horrible way, I don’t know.
They laugh and jeer as they savagely defile my precious daughter in ways that will brand my brain for the rest of my life. No wonder Cat’s nightmares are so intense, and she tries to forget what she saw and experienced.
A sane person would be driven mad if he or she remembered this.
As they leave Eliana lying on the floor, barely alive, her small body shivering, I feel bile rise in my throat. They move to Ryder next.
It’s when they strip my sobbing toddler of his clothes and one man strokes his soiled dick that I can’t watch any longer. I slam the laptop closed so forcefully that I hear the screen crack.
