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There was a moment several months after Leon captured me when I realized that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t be able to get away from him. I’d tried everything. He’d caught me and beat me so many times that pain and defeat became my entire world. I didn’t know much about God, but I prayed to Him. Not for help. I was past that. I prayed for death.
I had given up.
I stopped looking for opportunities to escape. I stopped dreaming of a life outside of the hell Leon created for me. Why bother dreaming when I’d lost everyone I’d ever known and loved?
If someone had shown up to rescue me, I would have told them not to bother. It wasn’t like I was worth anything, after the things Leon did to me. No one would ever want me. No one would ever love me. I didn’t even love myself anymore.
Since God wasn’t answering my prayer for death, I began to think about handling the matter myself. I would get through Leon’s abuse by fantasizing about ways to do it. One day, I might have actually worked up the courage to go through with it, but, thankfully, I never got the opportunity. Because of my brother.
One night, while I was curled into a ball on the cold linoleum floor of an abandoned mobile home. I saw him. Justin.
He wasn’t really there, of course, but in my mind, he was very real. Transparent, but real. He looked like the last selfie I’d seen of him, but with longer hair, and for some reason, he had a beard, which was strange, because I’d never seen my brother anything but clean shaven. He had on his usual Tulane hoodie and jeans, and he smiled like he was delighted to see me over a video call. Love for him filled my broken soul.
In that moment, he was my salvation. I thought he was coming to answer my prayer and take me where he was, where the rest of my family was. Heaven.
But that’s not what he did.
What he did was give me some tough love.
“You’re going to die here, Cora.” His voice was thready and faint, but I could make out his words. “It’s going to be you or it’s going to be him.” I thought he was talking about Leon, who had left to gather supplies, but beneath shaggy bangs, Justin’s eyes darted to Matthew. Gentle, developmentally-delayed Matthew, who never really hurt me, but who obeyed his brother and was, in that way, an accessory to my abuse.
I had never considered hurting Matthew to get away. He was simple-minded, and he had a capacity for compassion. Hurting him would be like hurting a young child or an animal. I just wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t that kind of person.
“Mom and Dad are gone,” Justin said. “Casey’s gone. I’m…gone. But you’re still here. You’re still part of this world, and even though it’s not a nice world, you need to be in it. You need to fight for it. There are others out there who need a positive, kind person like you to be part of the world. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for them.”
I never considered there might be good people out there, suffering like me. Besides Leon and Matthew, I hadn’t met anyone else who had survived.
“Do what?” I asked, heavy on the snark as I shook my chained fist at him. Couldn’t he see my bruises? The burns all over my back? The red marks where Leon liked to poke me with electrified wires? Any time I tried to escape, my regular beatings became more vicious. By taking any steps to escape, I was certain to buy myself more pain. “What can I possibly do that I haven’t already tried?”
“Whatever you have to,” Justin said, darkly. He glanced at Matthew again. Then he was gone.
Whatever I had to turned out to be something I hate myself for. After digesting Justin’s words, I came up with a plan. I decided the plan had to work or I had to have a way off this planet. I was done being beaten by Leon. When the time came and Matthew and I were left alone again, I seduced him. And then I—I killed him with a kitchen knife. It wasn’t my first choice. First, I tried pleading with him to let me go. He thought about it. I saw him think about it. But ultimately, he was loyal to Leon.
I, too, could be loyal to my brother. I listened to Justin over my conscience, and I traded Matthew’s life for my freedom. Jud told me one night at Eagle Peak—in a rare moment of intimacy that went far beyond the physical—that Matthew had known right from wrong. When he chose to be loyal to his brother, he was choosing to do wrong, not right. Even though he was a victim of abuse, too, that didn’t assuage him of his guilt in helping Leon keep me captive. That reassurance from Jud did more to heal me than anything else. It had been exactly what I’d needed to hear.
I’m not sure what it says about me, but what I did to Matthew, I would do it again. I would do it for my freedom, and I would sure as heck do it for Jud’s. But there are no hapless accomplices to slay here in this hospital. What needs slaying is whatever wall Jud has built around his soul to protect what was left of it after the men here so horribly abused him.
But how will I get through a wall built by the most stubborn man on Earth?
“Jud? Jud, you have to get up and come with me.”
He nods heavily, head lolling to thud against the padded wall.
“We’re going home, to Eagle Peak.”
“Uhmready,” he slurs, but he makes no effort to get up, and I’m not strong enough to hoist him off the floor.
“Come on,” I insist, grabbing his hands and trying to get him to grab me back. If we can lock hands, I can at least lift his upper body away from the wall. It’ll be a start.
“Just takemuhsoul,” he says. “Leavemuhbody here.”
I sigh. He still thinks I’m an angel or a figment of his imagination. Where are Doc and Stealth? They’re going to have to lug him out of here.
But what if Justin had been alive when he appeared to me? What if he had unchained me and rescued me when I was still in the grips of hopelessness? Would I have ever been able to recover from what I went through? Something deep inside me suspects that if someone had rescued me when I was in that state, a part of me would always remain chained to the pipe in that mobile home.
Somehow, I have to get through to Jud, and I have to do it quickly. Because outside this hospital, my guys are in danger. Inside this hospital, Jud is on the brink of death. We don’t have a second to lose.
Justin got through to me with tough love, but something tells me Jud won’t respond to reminders that his light is needed in this dark world. What does tough love look like to a man who’s as tough as they come on the outside and as guarded as they come on the inside?
