“I’m not callingher,” I replied. “Don’t worry.”
“Why should I be worried?” Grace asked, laughing away the suggestion of competition, but the pinched expression on her face gave her away. Grace was jealous, a trait I’d never seen in her before. But then, our relationship existed almost entirely on this property. We didn’t have a lot of outside forces to contend with, and certainly none like Nikki, whose only goal seemed to be to destroy us. Aside from the quickies at my place, our love story floated around in a luxury bubble, behind a state-of-the-art security system meant to keep us safe. Leave it to Nikki to burst that bubble.
Leaning down, I whispered for Grace’s ears only, “I’m yours. Never forget that.”
Because of my slow exit, I jogged to the gate and let myself out. Jake wasn’t waiting in front. I pulled my phone out to text him when he flashed me with his high beams from up the street. I walked to his car with a detached acceptance. Jake unlocked the door, and I opened it and slid in.
Flipping his car around in the middle of the road, he drove in the opposite direction from the house, moving out of the immediate area. A couple of minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of an office building. There we sat looking straight ahead, the fear frothing up inside me.
“There’s no easy way to say this, Rory, so I’m just going to show you.” Jake passed his phone to me. “This came through in an email.”
I knew what it was going to be before I even looked at the photo. The thing I feared most: my dirty secret out in the open. I’d seen the image before. Hartman had used it for blackmail to get us back in his car over and over again. In it, little kid me stared hard into the camera, the horror of my situation nearly splitting the lens in two. It was that same flat glare I saw from the boy in the mirror.
The man in the picture had been blurred to protect his identity, but I knew who he was—I knew who they all were, and I could send every last one of them to the life in prison they deserved. I didn’t want to imagine what Jake thought of me. The image itself wasn’t explicitly graphic, but there was no doubt what it depicted. And this was just one of hundreds, maybe thousands more. They existed on the dark web, and despite Special Agent Dutch and people like him trying to stamp them out, they would never be totally eradicated as long as deviants searching for this content existed.
With bile rising from my gut, I passed the phone back to Jake. A moment ticked by before I opened the car door and let the nastiness spew out. I wiped the spittle away with the back of my hand and glanced his way. Jake had his head tipped back on his seat like my misery was also his. I swiveled around to the open door and threw up again. And again. Emptying my insides until there was nothing left to absolve me. I’d tried so hard to bury the memories deep inside, letting my jitters do their thing when the truth got too close, but there was no point now. Grace’s brother knew who I was. What I’d done. It didn’t matter whether I was to blame or not; no one wantedthathellish baggage attached to someone they loved.
I shut the door, righting myself. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing. I debated even showing you, but what else was I supposed to do?”
“How’d you even know this was me?”
“My social media manager deals with all incoming messages. She actually thought it was me.”
I flinched at the fucked-up world that put us both into the uncompromising position of having to defend our younger selves for things we had no control over. Not that her mix-up wasn’t understandable, given his background.
“Hell,Ieven thought it was me for a second there when she called me in a panic. Once I pulled up the image myself, I knew it was you. Could see it in your eyes.”
I shrank back, feeling sick. “What do they want?”
“150K.”
“You’re being blackmailed?”
I wasn’t sure why I was so shocked. They were the scum of the earth, abusing children. Blackmail was almost tame for them. But I had to hand it to them, they’d gone straight to the top. Jake McKallister. The one person who couldn’t afford to be messed up in this shit was now neck deep in it.
“Who else knows about this?” I asked.
“Just my social media manager, and she signed a confidentiality agreement to work for me. This isn’t leaking from my end.”
I took a moment to digest the information and then nodded.
“How old are you in this picture?” Jake asked.
“Ten.”
His grimace said it all. No need for him to vocalize his sympathy when I knew I had it.
“Is this how you ended up in foster care?”
“No. Foster care is how I ended up there. Group homes are hunting grounds for pervs preying on kids. We’re low-hanging fruit. Easy pickings. My sister was lured in first. Then me. And then”—I pointed at his phone—“that happened.”
“Fuck, Rory, I’m so sorry.”
I turned my head away, looking out the window into the darkness, wishing it would swallow me up into its nothingness.
“So, where do we go from here?” he asked.
