“Because I fell for you,” she says, and a jittery feeling rushes through me, goosebumps spreading over my arms. “I fell for you,not as Ella, but as the person I am. I did the one thing that could never happen, and that is falling for a target.”
“But why am I a target?” I get over my lips.
A weak, almost pitiful smile on her face. It enrages me.
She opens her laptop, enters a password, and presses play on a video. I hold my breath because I immediately know what it is. A video of me pushing a young girl by the hair onto Jared’s cock for a mouth fuck.
I am falling. Back to when it happened. Back to when?—
“He made me,” I say in a detached voice. It is something I tried to bury.
“And with what did he make you do it?” she asks. “Last time I looked, you were a very powerful and influential person.”
I close my eyes as my throat closes. But there is no way around it. There is no keeping it hidden anyway.
“He made me do it because he had photos, screenshots of a video, of how I performed…um…oral sex on a professor at university to get through his classes. I was about to fail my degree, and my father would have murdered me, so I did the desperate act.”
“Why hasn’t it been in the files?” she asks.
“Because I made a deal with him. I was supposed to join him and her for a bit of indulgence, and he’d get me the government contacts I needed…” my voice trails off, and I have to avert my eyes. I can’t look at it any longer.
“These are minors!” she suddenly shouts. “Minors! Young girls who were raped by him and his powerful friends. Tortured and used and…” Tears flood down her cheeks, and horror surges through me as I finally understand. What has happened with me and the girl hasn’t been an isolated incident. It was Jared’s business.
“You were one of them,” I say as a shudder of horror runs over my back. I lower the gun.
“Yes,” she says in a bitter voice. “I was one of the girls he took with the promise of papers. When I was fourteen. He drugged me and kept me for a year. Made gangrape parties with me. Impregnated me. He dumped me to die on the streets with a bullet in my chest, where I almost died from it.”
My free hand shoots in front of my mouth.
I am not an emotional person. I couldn’t care less about anything that happens to anyone. But I care about her.
I care about her.
And it goes directly into my chest.
I can’t care about her.
I shouldn’t.
“The bullet they put in my chest didn’t kill me,” she says, “I had no insurance, no papers, no nothing, so I couldn’t go anywhere to get help. I had to give birth to a child, and he took it. I was shot and left in the streets in a muddy corner behind a dumpster. I almost died twice. That’s what Sutton did,” she says, and with every word she speaks, my throat closes further.
I am spiralling.
“That’s why I went after him, to have proof it was him and make him pay. I know so many girls who died at his hands and in the aftermath of his actions. Do you know they had breeding parties? Rape parties to impregnate minors. For fun. And you…you empowered him. You kept his business going. You were part of it. You made it possible.”
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, and tears fill my eyes. “I—” whatever it is, I can’t find the words.
I have never cried in my life. Never. And now, I do.
Her disgust radiates over me before she looks away and wipes away angry tears. Seeing her, hearing all this—I can’t breathe.
“I always thought what Jared did with me was an isolated incident. I thought she was his girlfriend. He told me she was eighteen. We have been drinking, he promised the connections and deleting everything he had—” I say with my chest heaving up and down. “I never knew there was an entire network behind it.”
I am disgusted by the images I see of Jared keeping her in his mansion. Her. Being used, taken, raped by Jared, by his friends. I want to murder them all.
I look at her, and we’re both in tears now.
“Why are you giving me all of this?” I whisper, my voice thick with emotion.
