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Cate’s eyes grew big and her breath stuck in her throat. Then the stress she’d lived under for the past week suddenly caught up with her. The terror she’d felt when the doorbell rang and she’d thought it was him took its toll. The blood drained away from her face when she recognized the woman. Light-headed, her muscles no longer able to support her, Cate quite simply fainted.
Angelina was the first to reach Caterina, but Alec was right behind her. He lifted Caterina’s slender body in his arms, noting as he did so that for all her height, her weight was relatively insubstantial, as if she’d eaten barely enough to keep alive for years. “Where should I put her?” he asked Dara Barron.
“Probably best if you take her up to her bedroom. Let me show you.”
Alec followed her, and Angelina followed him. When he laid Caterina on top of the bedspread, Angelina was right there. She stripped off her coat and dropped it heedlessly on the floor. She took her cousin’s hands in hers, chafing them gently, trying to bring Caterina back to consciousness. Then he heard a choked sound from Angelina. Not tears. Rage. A Zakharan curse he recognized issued from her lips, and then she whispered in Zakharan, “Animals. Animals! What did they do to her?”
Alec frowned, not following. “What do you mean?”
“Look,” she said in English. She held up Caterina’s wrists, first one, then the other. That’s when Alec saw the scars. Nearly identical scars almost an inch wide encircling both wrists. Old scars, from wounds long healed. But he knew how those wounds had been inflicted. Even worse, he knew why. And Angelina’s rage was transferred to him.
* * *
Not quite two hours later, Alec quietly excused himself and made his way into the bathroom. His whole body seesawed back and forth in alternating spasms of hot and cold, and there was a churning in his belly he tried desperately to control. Then his face broke out in a sweat and he knew he wasn’t going to make it.
He was vilely, miserably sick.
Afterward he felt much better. He ran cold water over his hands and wrists and splashed some on his face and the back of his neck after rinsing out his mouth. Still sickened by what he’d heard, he could barely stand to look at himself in the mirror. Could barely stand to know he belonged to that half of the human race who could do what had been done to Caterina.
Angelina found him there. “You are okay?” she asked gently.
“Yeah.” He wiped his face and hands on a towel and looked at her in bewilderment. He would have thought she’d be as upset as he was, but she was calm. Composed. And though there was a militant light in her eyes, by no other sign did she betray she’d heard the same despicable tale he’d just heard. “How can you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Remain unmoved.” He gestured toward the other room. “Hearing what happened to Caterina. How can you—”
“I am not unmoved. I want to kill him. I want to kill every man like him,” she said fiercely. “But the king is right. Killing him is easy. Bringing him to justice is not. He must be seen to face justice. Otherwise...” Her jaw set tightly. “He is not the only one, Alec. I have heard this kind of story before, when I first became a prosecutor. Not exactly like this, and not nearly as bad. But men have been doing things like this to women for thousands of years and will continue to do so until good men—men like you—stand up and say, ‘This stops here!’”
He put his arms around her and held her tight, feeling her heart beating in sync with his own. “This stops here,” he said, fighting the unexpected restriction in his throat. “I promise you, Angel, this stops here.” He vowed to do everything he could to stop not only Vishenko, but the trafficking of women everywhere. Thank God it’s included in my job description, he told himself fervently. Thank God fighting human trafficking is part of the DSS’s mandate. Even when I’m transferred, I’ll still be—
A sudden realization deluged him like a cold shower. If he resigned from the DSS, if he took a job in the private sector, fighting human trafficking would no longer be part of his job description. If he left the DSS, those women who were counting on him to help them—women like Caterina Mateja and thousands more just like her—would look in vain for help. Not just from men like him, but from him.
He’d joined the DSS for a reason. A damned good reason. He wanted to make a difference. How could he have forgotten? “‘I am only one, but I am one,’” he whispered to himself.
Angelina stirred in his arms. “What did you say?” she murmured.
