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“You think…”
“I don’t know,” I say quickly, trying to calm the panic in her voice. I don’t promise her I’ll find out either—although my mind is already calculating next steps.
Starting with Antoinette Rupetta.
I’ve spoken to her twice now, and she hasn’t been honest with me either time.
“The second time I saw it was just yesterday,” I carry on, leaving out my interviews with Toni.
Catherine turns big green eyes back to me. “Where?”
I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but I think I see a flicker of knowledge in her, as if she knows where this is going. “The Mousetrap. In Sascha Sokolov’s office.”
Catherine doesn’t deny what I’ve told her. She doesn’t spit or rage or call me a liar. She closes her eyes, completely defeated, wearing the look of someone whose worst suspicions have just been confirmed. Silent tears run down both her cheeks.
I don’t point out the obvious, that Lizzie and, by default, Toni, probably knew. I pull her closer and, when she nestles her face against my chest, hiding her grief from me, I stroke her bare thigh and let the silence wrap around us.
I have survived a lot without breaking. I survived the abuse from my father, the fisted beatings and cigarette burns. I survived seeing my mother crying on her bedroom floor, sitting in her own blood. I survived the jolt of my father’s service weapon in my hand when I was just twelve years old, using it like he taught me. I survived the nightmares years after.
It seems as if, up until I looked across the station at Catherine, I was just surviving.
So, it is remarkable, given all that I have survived, that I lose my first piece of humanity cradling her in my arms.Because as she unravels in pain and confusion and shame, I know that I will be the one to finish this.
The thought doesn’t scare me.
It sears my long-broken heart back together.
“What do you remember? About those days?”
Our bodies are connected everywhere, so I feel her tense even though she is careful to keep her expression calm. “I wasn’t there long.”
“You don’t have to tell me if it’s too hard.”
“No,” she meets my eyes with a cautious smile, “I genuinely only spent a few months there.” She touches her scar. “The place I got this.”
“Toni found you?”
“Toni and Lizzie. They found me at a party.”
“Do you remember where?”
“No. But the girls have told the story many times—it’s a family favorite because it’s where we all met. Toni and Lizzie and me. And Drakos. It was at the penthouse suite of the Mandarin Building. A party hosted by Cameron Rothschild.”
“And before then?” My voice doesn’t sound right. Too tense. Too angry. Thinking of her, holed up in some room, chained like an animal.
Catherine must sense it because she is quiet, completely still on my lap. I can see her downcast eyes, and I notice the indecision warring in them. “I wasn’t…A slave.”
“You worked willingly.”
“I worked because I was an addict,” she says finally. Her eyes just then are far away, lost in her own memories. “Looking back, I think it was their best-case scenario. I’d do anything for a fix, Aiden.” She looks up at me. “They didn’thaveto drug me to keep me compliant. I was compliantbecausethere were drugs. If Toni and Lizziehadn’t taken me that day, I would have kept going back to that room with them. And, eventually, I would have died there. Or at some stranger’s party.”
She says it so simply. As if it were just a fact. But the thought of Cat’s eyes with Lizzie’s blank stare is enough to have me tightening my grip on her. “Do you know how it worked?”
“I don’t.” Resting her head on my chest, she takes her time to think it through. “We—me and three other girls—were kept in a studio apartment. I don’t know where it was, but I remember what the outside looked like. It was two stories. The building was white, but there was faded green paint on the doors and black, iron railings that wrapped around the halls.”
I sear the details she’s giving me to memory. “Were there any noticeable markers outside the building? Maybe, a sign? Or a car wash? Anything that you remember…”
“There was a swimming pool off to the right, kinda like you’d imagine in an old-timey motel. But it was empty. At night I could hear the kids partying in it.”
