The voice of Katie’s father. Loud. Louder than when she crashed his Range Rover into the country club’s entrance. Louder than when she had announced her teenage pregnancy, only to lose the baby three weeks later. Katie McLaughlin blinks her eyes and tries to focus, but can only see white. White fuzz. She closes her eyes tightly. Tries again.
“We aren’t sure.” A strange voice. One she doesn’t recognize. Soothing. That’s a mistake. Her father doesn’t like to be soothed or coddled. Hugged or loved. He likes to be respected. A soothing individual doesn’t, in his mind, respect him. The soothing stranger continues. “She was brought in by a couple of girls; they found her on Sixty-sixth Street just after four this morning. Curled against the back door of Maloney’s.”
“What the fuck’s Maloney’s?”
“Mr. McLaughlin, she’s lucky to be alive. We pumped her stomach as soon as she arrived, which removed much of the drugs before they could take full effect. She’d been heavily drugged. Had we not gotten to her when we did, who knows the effect of that cocktail on her system, on her brain and memory receptors for that matter.”
“She takes drugs.”
No! Her brain screams the word. She doesn’t do drugs. Hasn’t for four years. He should know this, she has told him. He doesn’t believe her. She blinks, fire-hot liquid pooling, vision unchanging, her brain infuriated by the white cloud that won’t lift from her eyes. Tries to turn her head but can’t. There’s a brace of some sort keeping it in place. Swallows. Tries to speak. Her tongue is not cooperating, nothing is coming out.
“These weren’t recreational drugs. They were Rohypnol, GHB. We cleared them from her system, and—other than short-term memory loss—there shouldn’t be any lasting effect.”
“You don’t know my daughter. She’s a drug addict.”
The soothing voice starts sounding like someone with a backbone. Katie perks up, listening, while another part of her brain wonders where her mother is. “Mr. McLaughlin, focus. Your daughter has abrasions on her wrists and ankles indicative of being tied up. She has anal and vaginal tearing consistent with rape. Her right cheekbone and eye socket are fractured as if she was punched repeatedly by a strong fist. She has broken ribs and lash marks as if from a whip or belt. This is not from a party or her own doing. She is a victim.”
Katie stops breathing, her chest constricting as it struggles for air, her body suddenly chiming in with all of the places that ache, bleed, are broken. She stops trying to see past the white, stops trying to listen to her father, and only tries to think. To open up last night’s window and remember. Then memories pour in, and she reopens her mouth. Gasps in a breath while she wheezes out a scream. Her lips, her tongue, finally working, opening and shutting as sound actually comes out.
She can speak. This is good. She doesn’t hear her father’s response to the stranger’s voice. His thoughts, his words, no longer matter. She is too busy screaming for her broken soul.
She remembers, her memories going back to a dim bedroom, no clear understanding of how she got there. She remembers waking up in the room. The man before her. The smile on his face… the… oh my God…
She remembers.
She remembers.
She remembers.
And suddenly, she wants nothing but to forget.
PART 3
“Can you rip his head off for me? Start pushing at his forehead until it snaps the fuck off? Yank in and rip out tendril after tendril of veins and organs until he is a hot dripping mess of blood?”
CHAPTER 52
MARCUS SIGHS. THIS should be a joyous occasion. The literal unshackling of oppression. Trumpets should sound, friends should surround him, bitches should cheer. Instead, the removal of Marcus’s anklet is done without ceremony, his attorney looking on dourly at the rate of four hundred an hour. When the metal piece finally falls, the demon inside of him flexes itchy wings, and Marcus tries to keep a grin off his face. Finally, he’ll have a normal range of activity. To dine in his old restaurants. To visit his properties. To return to the life of the elite. His old self would be making plans, calling business associates, celebrating with champagne and filet tonight.
Instead, he has only one thought. Only one goal. The reward that has, over the last three months, grown into an obsession. And now, with the bitch’s address burning a hole in his pocket, it is the only thing he can think of. He shakes his attorney’s hand, gives him a grim smile, then turns to the redheaded houseboy. “Gas up my car and pack me a bag. I have work to take care of.”
CHAPTER 53
18 hours later