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Come on. Come on. Give me something.
Results flash across the screen and something inside of me shatters at the exact same moment that some other broken piece of me is being repaired.
Poker face, Zeke. Poker face.
Clearing my throat, I prepare to lie to my extremely deadly boss. Well, not lie exactly. More like omit. I prepare to omit the morsels of information that won’t matter to Travis anyway.
“More like what’s not on it. We’ve got so much here. Names, dates, addresses. Members. Transactions. Dude, it’s insane. No wonder they want this shit back. I’m downloading it all to a separate drive just in case, but maybe we can use this as a bargaining chip if it comes down to it.”
See? Not a lie.
It’s all true, I do need a shit ton more time to figure this all out. I just don’t tell him what I did find. The piece of the puzzle I discovered that doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme of the mission at hand. This is a piece of my puzzle. My past. My secrets. The shit that haunts me at night.
“Smart man,” Travis grins.
He keeps talking, but the words that surround me feel so far away as I close the lid to my laptop and shove both my laptop and the drive into my backpack. I’m only partially paying attention, because I’m thoroughly distracted with the one thing I’ve been seeking out for so long that I nearly gave up hope.
Just four words.
Four fucking words that prove she really existed.
Ellie King - 12 years
3 months ago
“No, please, please don’t. Not, not there.”
“Be a good girl and be real quiet for us.”
“No, I-I don’t like that. Stop, please.”
Curled up into a fetal position in the corner of my bedroom, I lean my head against the wall as tears stream down my face. Her whimpers aren’t quiet, so I know everyone else in the house must hear them too, but no one does anything about it. And I’m too much of a coward to go toe to toe with him. I’m just a boy.
At least that’s what I tell myself to ease the guilt.
Picking at the fraying ends of the bottom of my jeans, I flinch when a loud slap echoes through the house, followed by a piercing wail. Narrowing my eyes, I focus on the threads. Pulling one tight, I watch the bottom seam unravel slowly, loop by loop. As one thread pulls away, the rest begin to slowly separate from one another.
It’s weird the way it mirrors my insides. One thread is being tugged at, and it’s slowly pulling apart everything inside of me. I’ve taken everything this life has thrown my way up until this point and I’ve never faltered. I’ve never come undone. But she’s the thread that broke me, and now I’m a mess because I don’t know what to do. Because I can’t fix it. I can’t repair it.
It’s not just a seam, it’s a hole in the fabric.
He’s stealing things from her that she can never get back, and there’s nothing I can do. So I just keep fucking unraveling.
Ellie’s losing pieces of herself every day. Her bright amber eyes no longer shine, reduced to merely dull shades of brown. And she rarely smiles anymore. The life inside of her is being snuffed out slowly, and I have a front row view of her dying inside little by little.
We don’t even get to go to school to have a break from all this hell. Our foster mother, Lianna, homeschools us all. I’m the only one with a window to the outside world, because no one pays enough attention to us for them to pick up on my exceptional computer skills. And by exceptional, I mean borderline genius.
I keep it quiet. A secret for myself. A language just for me. One I use for cracking the accounts of large businesses and government agencies. Stealing untraceable amounts of money. Squirreling away funds for the day that I can get me and Ellie out of here.
It dawns on me that the voices have stopped, and I no longer hear Ellie’s sobs. Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I sit up straight. I move to stand so I can sneak to her room to check on her, and that’s when I hear it.
Another voice. One I don’t recognize.
“She will need training. Years of it. But you’ve done a fine job breaking her in, Jeremy. You’re positive there’s no family out there?”
“None. Parents died in an accident and the state found no living relatives. She’s been with us for years now.”
“It’s a done deal then. I need to prepare, but I’ll be back next week. I’ll wire the money in person before we escort her from the property.”
