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Ri stiffened. “It’s Orion now.”
Maddox knew his sister. He knew her better than anyone, so he was impressed at the fact she could still smile through the pain he knew she felt at that dead tone and the empty stare. The coldness in Orion’s voice.
“You’ll always be Ri to me, babe,” she finally said, forcing cheer into the words. And she forced a smile. “The parents would love to see you sometime . . . when you’re ready.”
Ri—Orion, had a reaction to that. A small one, but Maddox guessed that even a small crack in her façade was something big. She nodded, accepted.
“I just need a little time,” Orion said meekly.
April nodded in understanding.
“April,” he snapped, remembering his job, his badge, and his responsibilities. “Move it!”
She walked casually toward the door and glared at him with glassy eyes. “I’m leaving, you fat cunt.”
The other girls in the room cracked up, and April looked back at them and winked.
“I’m not fat, so that doesn’t even work,” Maddox argued.
“Yeah, okay.” April opened the door and eyed the two detectives for a moment. “Ahem . . . what about you two pervs?” She gazed pointedly between Maddox and Eric. “There are women here who obviously need to change, get cleaned up—and don’t worry ladies, we’ll be going shopping to remedy the crimes of fashion the police have committed upon you as soon as humanly possible—and I’m sure they don’t need an audience.”
“We’re following you out,” Eric interjected smoothly before Maddox strangled his sister Homer Simpson style.
His gaze flickered to Orion, just to make sure she was still there, that she was real. She didn’t look away when he met her eyes. She held his gaze with determination and a little hostility, some stubbornness he recognized from her childhood that had matured a little.
“Yeah. Uh huh. Let’s go, Grandpa,” April said, motioning toward the open door.
He sneered at his sister. “I’m only two years older than you, so that doesn’t really work either.” He looked at Orion. “Okay, well, we’ll be right outside, ladies,” he said awkwardly.
April cackled.
Orion didn’t respond.
There were reporters.
Outside the hotel.
Outside the police department.
Orion figured there would be a private entrance for this kind of thing.
Apparently not.
Shelby’s parents had insisted on taking her in their car, even though it had been explained to them that they wouldn’t be able to be in the interview room with her.
They had been adamant their daughter was not going anywhere without them.
Somehow, they were unaware that their little girl had been drinking and getting stoned the night before. Though it did make sense, since it was likely the first night of real sleep they’d had since she was taken.
Shelby had been walking home from cheerleading practice when it happened. Like Orion, she just never came home. Unlike Orion, her parents loved her, cared for her, missed her. They had raised the alarm immediately. Mounted community searches. Gone on TV with rewards for their daughter’s safe return. They’d hired private investigators when the police gave up.
They never stopped.
Orion had seen it on them when she met them. The exhaustion that sank into their bones. The sorrow etched into their eyes.
She understood them clinging to Shelby like they did. She’d observed that kind of love. She reckoned that’s what April’s parents would’ve been like if their daughter had been taken.
She hated Shelby a little for a snatch of a second. Right until she met her eyes from the car window. There was panic in them. These people were strangers to her. Orion and Jaclyn were her pillars of safety, despite the fact they never really protected her from anything. But how could they have? Plus, they were familiar. Shelby didn’t do well with change. Fuck, she didn’t utter a word for most of her time in The Cell. Cried mostly, wept. It made sense, considering what they went through.
Shelby coming from a loving home, never knowing any violence beyond a tap on her behind when she had been in trouble in her youth. It was understandable that she had reacted the way she did. It made sense that she broke.
But no one really thought of the jarring trauma that came with being rescued. Everyone expected elation at being saved and tasting freedom again.
But they hadn’t been saved. And freedom was a thin façade.
The only way to save them would be to erase the captivity from their lives, to give them all those years back, to take away their agony. Impossible tasks, to be sure.
Orion did her best to cling to her mask. The one she’d perfected from years of torture and rape. Somehow, it was harder holding it in place with camera flashes and questions being yelled in her face—this feeling that came to her as the media fought to get those pictures and questions, that these people saw her as only a story, not a human being with real feelings and emotions. In that way, they were not that much different than her captors.
