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Which means she’s smarter than I realized.
If she were truly trained, she never would have gotten into this mess with Rooney, so her little stunt gives me a chance to calibrate what, exactly, the masters have been training her for. That’s the thing about cults: they silo everything.
People are taught to stay in their lane.
People are taught that there are no other lanes.
People like Paigelynn aren’t just on a “need to know” basis. They are treated as if they don’t need to know anything that isn’t information that can be used to manipulate them.
No one has taught this woman how to fight. To hide. To disguise herself.
To use sex as a weapon.
At that last thought, bile rises in my throat, a rush of anger so extreme I want to take it out on Rooney. The guy’s in front of me, bleeding and swelling up, looking like an abstract kids’ book version of a human-bull hybrid. Underneath all that perfect hair, big white teeth, and god crap, he’s just a scared coward, like the rest of them.
Like the rest of the people who are taking women like Paigelynn and turning them into meat.
Roughing him up gives him the tiniest taste of what he’s helping the three families put these women through. And yet…
I can’t go too far.
Because he knowswaaaaaytoo much about who I really am.
“You know they’re going to be pissed when they realize she got away from you,” Rooney says to me, his sniffle interrupted by the massive level of puffiness making his nose turn into a pink marshmallow.
“How does anyone know that? No one put out the call.” I cross my arms over my chest and glare at him. We go back a long way. I’m ten years younger, and he’s a thousand times less moral.
Plus, he was my “Unit Concierge” in the Gaia cult.
This is a grudge match.
“Paigelynn told me that Jason and Malcolm are dead. Is that true?”
She’s watching us both as she finishes dressing, shrinking back from us, her stomach curled in and shoulders hunched in a terror stance.
A frozen terror stance.
“Yes.”
“You killed them?”
“Did you send The Basher?”
Genuine shock fills his eyes, replaced instantly by stark fear. “The Basher? Hell, no. Who sent – someone sent The Basher for her?” His voice lifts at the end, like an adolescent going through puberty.
Crack.
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t do rescues.” Rescue is a cute term for kidnapping.
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Who would want her dead?”
Paigelynn’s neck cranes forward at the question.
“No one should want her dead,” I explain. “For obvious reasons.”
