Page 105 of Tormented
“You wanna search those drawers?” I shove a stack of boxes against the wardrobe doors aside with my boot. “I’ll look in here.”
“Sure.”
We work in silence for what has to be close to an hour, turning the house upside down before Tuck’s guys show up. The whole time I catch glimpses of her as she sorts through Cash’s piles of papers and junk, looking for what we need to identify those girls downstairs.
Not many people realize that although I’m one fucked-up son of a bitch at the best of times, I still have some standards. Not fucking with innocent lives is one of those.
Somebody’s daughter. A sister. Maybe even a wife.
God forbid any one of those women down there was some kid’s mother.
They had lives. And my money is on the chance that most, if not all of them, led clean and respectable ones before Cash took them.
For six years, Tuck has worked on this fucking ring of horrors. Two months he’s been knocking on the door of laying this issue to bed once and for all, and five weeks since I said I would help bring an end to the senseless sale, knowing it would give me something to keep my mind occupied, while I bided my time in Cali.
“There’s nothing here,” Abbey exclaims as she slams down a tattered box onto a haphazard pile in the corner. “It’s no use; he didn’t keep anything.”
“We haven’t checked everywhere yet.”
“No?” She turns to face me, frowning as she runs a hand over her hair to smooth it down.
“Didn’t do a thorough search of the downstairs yet.”
Her hand stills on her ponytail before she drops it slowly to her side. “Of course.”
“You wanna wait up here?” The hesitation in her gaze as her eyes dart around the room searching for anything and nothing worries me.
“No.” She squares her shoulders. “I’ll help you look. Although . . . .”
“What?” I stick a hand out, silently asking for hers.
She takes it, giving me a shy smile as we start toward the stairs. Progress. “I’m wondering why he’d keep their things with them, is all.”
“How do you mean?” I lead her down the staircase, the smell not quite so bad now that the doors have been open for a while.
“If you wanted to imprison people, wouldn’t you strip them of all their personal belongings? Remove their sense of identity?”
She has so much yet to learn . . . .
“Not always.” I shunt the leg I used to taunt Cash across the floor with my toe, adding it back in the pile. “Sometimes havin’ those familiar things in reach when a person is trapped against their will is the ultimate mind fuck. How hard do you think it’d be, knowin’ what you had, havin’ a constant reminder of who you were shoved under your nose when you know there ain’t a goddamn thing you can do to get back to that?”
“Never letting them forget it, like?”
“Yeah.” The room is worse than a fucking animal pen. The dirt floor is stained and littered with not only the women’s blood, but their piss and feces as well. “It’s actually a really effective way to break a person.”
“In what way?” Abbey steps over the remains of a torso and slaps a hand to her mouth when she catches sight of the heads stacked against the wall like bowling balls. “It’s so hard to imagine he couldn’t finish this off when he did so much already,” she whispers.
“A person’s conscience can hit at the most inconvenient of times.”
So true . . . .
“But back to the personal belongings and shit. Imagine, for example, you’re out with your friends, dancin’ it up at the local bar. What would you have on?”
“Boots, slim-fit jeans, and a shirt or something.”
Of course—this isn’t your average girly-girl I’m talking with. “I mean, if you were one of these women.” I gesture to the body parts between us.
Abbey shrugs. “I guess if I wanted to be all pretty and that I’d have a dress on. Probably some heels.”