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“Of course, I want to help.” He looks torn. “You have to understand what a tenuous position I’m in. I’m not judging you, baby, never, but I’m bound by the law to take down anyone who breaks it. Which includesyou.”
I get it. Underneath the numbness and the occasional douchebaggery, he’s a good and decent cop. He’s not shady like some of the others, and once upon a time, he was wholly a force for good. He helped people before his own demons got too loud to ignore anymore.
“I’m not sure where to start in this, and no matter how great my skills, there are things I can’t do alone.” I take a chance, a huge risk in my mind, to reach across and touch the tips of my fingers to his knuckles. “You’re meticulous. You're the only one I trust to get to the bottom of this and rip open the scab. We’ve got to stop him before he hurts these kids. I’ll tell you everything, and if, at the end, you want to arrest me, then fine. I’ll go. But not before I stop him.”
“It’s important to you.”
“No shit it’s important to me...” My throat goes dry, and I trail off on a laugh. “It’s my entire life, Devan.”
“Then talk to me. Really tell me, Aria,” he replies, and his baritone seeps into my entire being, although it has no business being there, and I have no right to let it. “This place is going to freak me out if you don’t say anything. There are no sounds out here, nothing substantial or concrete. It’s about time we come clean with each other and have a conversation, don’t you think? Whatever you share, there will be no judgment.”
I want to believe him.
What else is there to do, anyway? I’d come this far. I’d gone over the pros and cons and gotten here, to this moment.
“Do you want me to go first?” It’s a mechanism, on his part, to coax me into telling him what he wants to know about me and about Broderick Stevens..
“I left home at twelve,” I say. “A small little two-bedroom house in Pennsylvania surrounded by cows and the stench of shit and religion. I actually prefer the shit over the religion any day. My sister is still out there, and my brother. Half brother, or so we always suspected, because he doesn’t look a thing like Dad, and there’s only so much narcissism a woman can take before she gets out on her own and finds god knows what kind of strange out there. I don’t blame her, either. Mom.”
I stall on the rest of the story by taking a deep breath and prying my eyes open, forcing myself to look at Devan directly.
“I came to Empire Bay with nothing but a fifty in my pocket, stolen from Dad’s wallet, and dreams to escape the insular life they laid out for me, made soft and pretty and suffocating with baptism and purity pledges. Except I knew the best way to make a go at a living was on my back.”
I feel his attention on every inch of my skin. My nose twitches the longer he looks at me, but there is no judgment in his eyes, only understanding.
I rock up and shift my position so that my feet are flat on the chair and my arms wrapped around my knees. “If my parents sent anyone out looking for me, they never found me. I didn’t want them to. Even the cold nights on the street and the strange men who prefer girls with no breasts to grown-ass women were better than what I escaped. I thought. But it got hard, Devan. At fourteen, I’d been used so many times and thrown away like trash. The nights were colder, longer, uncaring, and my dreams of escape had dwindled into a feverish hope of simple survival.”
Devan says nothing. I watch him watching me, and although it stings a little, stopping now will be impossible. He doesn't move his hand away from mine.
“Broderick found me on the street after I tweaked out one night. The regulars…started leaving me drugs as well as money on the nightstand, and it helped to keep the worst of the shame away. I was rotting alive from the inside out, and the longer I spent on the streets without friends, without food, without hope, the more it made me realize I was never going to be anything. Just a walking corpse better off dead. Broderick found me.”
I suck on my teeth.
No crying, though. I’d moved past my crying days at what happened, seeing the images so many times in my head through nightmares and daydreams. Relived countless times the pills I’d taken, hoping they would be enough to get me a one-way ticket out of this life, only to wake up the next morning to the sunrise.
Devan has no choice but to see the reality of me instead of the confidence I’ve let him believe is the whole of me. Exposed, raw, and bloodied, and he still sees me and holds his tongue. I don’t care what he says. Once he sees it all, his opinions will inevitably change.
“Aria, stop. Hey, stop.” His voice is soft and soothing. “It’s okay. I don’t need to hear this right now.”
Except he does have to hear it now. I know he does, no matter how much it scares me.
He turns my hand over and presses his against mine, linking our fingers together. His are so much larger than mine and calloused in all the right ways. His warmth seeps into mine but does nothing against the frost in my veins.
“He found me and asked for nothing in return, although I tried to give it to him.Everything. I offered payment for the warm bed and the food in my stomach the only way I knew how. He was my savior,” I say.
“Was.” Devan closes his eyes but latches on the word. His lips are thinned into a severe line. “You say he was your savior.”
“How could I know any better? It was my fault I ended up on the streets and got low enough to think about ending it. Broderick wasn’t a young man then, by any means, but he acted as a father figure toward me. Assuring me I did have merit and worth. He’s the one who encouraged me to get on the computer for the first time. He mentored me.”
It’s harder to look at when I say it out loud this way. When I tell the story less as some kind of tale that’s already passed and more the story of my own survival.
“He groomed you.” Devan holds on to his control by a thin sliver.
“Yes.” I can admit it now. “He waited until I turned sixteen before the relationship became sexual. I never felt as though he abused me sexually. Not until recently. He always made sure I got mine, and because he offered a particular dark brand of pain intermingled with pleasure, he made me believe I needed what he offered to get off. Like I’m so fucked up in the head I need to be punished in order to feel anything.”
My knees will not stop bobbing, and I squeeze my own eyes shut. The feeling of Broderick’s hands wrapped around my neck returns with a fury.
“I begged him not to go through with the human trafficking. I’ve been working tirelessly to grow and expand the Syndicate in my own way. He doesn’t need money. None of them need money, or power, or anything. I had other ways to accomplish his goals if he wanted them. He refused to listen to me.” My head falls onto the top of the table. “Ibeggedhim, Devan, and he knows my past. He knows just how close I came on too many occasions to being kidnapped off the streets and sold. He’s doing it anyway.”
