She was unconscious. Or at least I hoped unconscious and not something worse. She was completely limp, a ragdoll in human form.
Horror crashed over me like a wave, stealing my breath.
“What did you do?” My voice came out rough, scraped raw. “Tom, what did you do?”
He didn’t look at me. He was kneeling beside her, checking her pulse, his fingers pressed to the side of her neck. If I strained my eyes hard enough, I could see the barely-there rise and fall of her chest.
The relief was short-lived, however, swallowed immediately by dread.
“I need you to understand,” Tom said, his voice calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that comes before storms. “I need you to see what I see.”
“What are you talking about?” I was pulling against the chains now, panic rising in my throat like bile. The metal bit into my wrists, familiar pain grounding me even as everything else spiraled. “Who is she? What are you going to do to her?”
“Her name is Eliza Taylor.” He stood slowly, finally meetingmy eyes with an expression I couldn’t read.
He moved toward the stairs, and for a moment I thought he was leaving—abandoning us both down here—but instead he retrieved something from where he’d left it on the steps. A folder, thick with papers.
“Eliza Taylor has been trafficking children for the past eight years. She finds them on the streets, in shelters, in neglectful foster homes. She tells them she can give them a better life. She’s good at what she does. She knows exactly what to promise. Most are between the ages of ten and sixteen.”
I felt sick. I looked at the unconscious woman on the floor with new eyes.
“She sells them,” Tom continued, laying out photographs one by one like he was presenting evidence in court. “To the highest bidder. For purposes I don’t need to describe. We both know what happens to children who disappear into that network.”
The photos were damning. Eliza Taylor with various children—outside a shelter, at a bus station, in a park. Her hand on a small shoulder, a reassuring smile on her face. Exchanges of money captured from a distance, blurry but unmistakable. Everything documented and cataloged with the thoroughness of someone building a case.
“The police have known about her for years. But they can’t touch her. She’s too careful, too connected. Always has plausible deniability, an alibi, lawyers who can make the right evidence disappear. She’s untouchable through legal channels.”
“Do you know how many children she’s sold? Thirty-seven,” he said the number slowly, letting it sink in. “Thirty-seven lives destroyed. And she walks free. Gets to go home every night. Gets to sleep peacefully while thosechildren—” He stopped, jaw clenching.
“Tom—”
“I need you to understand,” he interrupted, his voice more intense now. “ You might look at me as nothing more than a killer. So I decided to show you up close what it is that I actually do. Not the sanitized version, not the aftermath you find at crime scenes. But this, right here, right this moment.”
He pulled out another photograph, holding it out toward me. “This is one of her victims.”
A little girl stared out from the image, no more than ten years old. She was smiling at the camera, gap-toothed and innocent, unaware of what waited in her future. Sunshine caught her hair, turning it gold. She reminded me a bit of Ella.
“Caroline Carter. Disappeared from a group home three years ago. Last seen with Eliza Taylor, who promised her a safe place to stay, a family who would love her. She was sold within forty-eight hours. Found dead six months later in a hotel room in Nevada. Medical examiner said she’d been—” Tom stopped himself. “Well, you can imagine the rest.”
I didn’t want to imagine. But I’d seen too much in my career not to. The images came to me unbidden, devastating in their clarity. All the cases I’d worked, all the crime scene photos I’d studied, all the autopsy reports I’d read. The reality of what happened to children like Caroline Carter.
“This is another one.” He showed me another photograph. A boy this time, maybe thirteen, with dark eyes that looked too old for his face, like he’d already seen too much.
“Alright, stop.” The word came out strangled, desperate. “What do you want from me?”
Tom set the folder down carefully, then looked at me with an expression that made my blood run cold—something betweenhope and determination, something fanatic and frightening.
The woman on the floor remained motionless. Her chest rose and fell in the slow, steady rhythm of drug-induced sleep. She had no idea what was about to happen. No idea these were her last hours of existence, that her life was being weighed and measured by a man who’d appointed himself judge and executioner.
“You’re going to kill her,” I said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, a fact as certain as gravity.
“No.” Tom knelt beside me, close enough that I could see the green flecks in his eyes, could smell the soap he’d used that morning. “I’m not going to kill her. You are.”
The words didn’t make sense at first. My brain rejected them, couldn’t process them into anything coherent. They bounced off the surface of my understanding, refusing to sink in.
“What?” I pulled away from him as much as the chains allowed, trying to put distance between us even though there was nowhere to go, the pipe holding me firm. “You’re fucking insane if you think I’m going to—”
“She’s dead either way, Shay.” Tom’s voice was gentle, almost tender. He said my name the way he’d always said it—warmly, intimately, like a caress. “Whether you do it or not, she dies today. This is not a choice about her fate—that’s already decided. This is a choice about you.”
