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The Mistress beamed at him, a bit sheepishly. “It worked out, then?”
“Luckily for you,” he replied, tilting the bottle toward her. “I was ready to read you the fucking riot act for that stunt.”
“She’s special. I wanted someone who would appreciate that quality in her, who would treat her kindly and be patient. You’ve performed a miracle with her, Saul.” Gray eyes shimmered with tears for a second before she blinked them away. “When I sent her to the cabin, I don’t think she had more than a few days left in her. I had to do something drastic to prevent a tragedy.”
“Well, it was unorthodox, I’ll give you that.”
“Is she submissive?” Jasper asked gruffly.
Saul’s attention shot over to the sadist, searching his friend’s face. If he looked hard enough, he thought he could see what he’d prayed against. “We haven’t gotten that far. I’m hoping so, because she’s growing on me faster than I believed possible.”
Thane waggled his fingers. “Why don’t we save the good talk for after whatever Saul wants to tell us? My gut is screaming that it isn’t going to be a walk in the park, so let’s get it out of the way before Caera wakes up.”
Saul laughed bitterly. “That would be a solid plan, if I knew where the fuck to start.”
“Go from the beginning. We don’t have anything else to do tonight.”
Jasper pinched his kitten’s thigh hard enough to make her yelp. “Some of us do.”
Ignoring him, Saul blew out a long breath. “Caera suffers night terrors. I don’t know if Connie has said anything to you,” he directed his comment toward Jasper, “so I’ll give you some of the details. Her memory before she was eight is almost non-existent. She suffers from night terrors where she wakes screaming, covered in sweat, clawing at herself. Because of them, she’s killing herself with caffeine and sleep deprivation. She hasn’t been eating, sleeping, or taking care of herself.”
“I’d say that’s obvious.”
“We’ve been making progress. She’s been exercising, eating a healthy diet, and sleeping a lot more than she has been, mainly because I monitor her and wake her if the nightmares start.” Saul took a mouthful of beer. “Last week, she began to hear voices. A man and a woman, although she seems to pay more attention to the female.”
Jasper’s eyebrows twitched.
“Her memories are surfacing, slowly. She was four the first time the man wanted to get rid of her. Apparently, she was behind the others of her age group, and he suggested throwing her to the boys as a treat before they threw her away. The woman told him that Caera needed to learn that sex was part of her training, that she had to use it like a weapon.”
On her Dom’s lap, Archie jerked upright, turning pale.
A glance at Connie told him she was picking up the clues.
“The first real snippet of memory came back to her most recently. The woman isn’t defending her this time, but handing her over to a blonde man with blue eyes. A man called Darius. He was given orders to kill Caera because she refused to put down a rabbit. It was part of his graduation process—kill Caera, dispose of her where she wouldn’t be found. That was what he was trained to do. If he didn’t, the woman was willing to sell a seven year old girl to pedophiles.”
“Jesus Christ,” Thane breathed.
Connie’s eyes were dark and shocked when she locked them on Saul’s. “The parents. You followed through.”
“Not me.” Saul stroked Caera’s arm. “I found her on the back porch this morning with her heart ripped out on the deck and her bitch of a mother berating her over the phone. She’d found the courage to chase the lead you gave her, but instead of waiting for support, she tried to deal with it herself.”
“The mother was hostile?”
“The mother,” he growled before he could stop himself, “is a bitter, twisted cunt who doesn’t deserve what she has.” Reining in his temper, he took a moment to calm himself. “She won’t be an issue anymore. The story she gave us is that she and her husband skipped the adoption process in Virginia because it was going to take too long—”
“Virginia?” Jasper interrupted.
Connie wasn’t the only one following the dots now. “Yes. An acquaintance of theirs put them in touch with a woman from Virginia who’d had a young girl dumped on her doorstep with a note stating she had to be protected. They met in North Carolina to avoid detection, adopted her, and brought her to Arizona. Made Caera’s life a living fucking hell if this morning’s conversation was anything to go by.”
Anarchy looked positively stricken.
“Caera asked her mother if she knew where her origins began, and…the woman who took Caera in first did some digging. She wasn’t reported as a missing child, but there were rumors of a facility in Clintwood—”
“Fuck!”
Jasper’s roar of fury made everyone jump, including Caera.
Saul felt her terror surge a second before she snapped from sleeping to wide awake, and barely managed to keep hold of her as she tried to bolt.
