“I didn’t,” he explains, now sweating profusely. “Piper seemed to.”
I swallow the painful lump in my throat, remembering the details on that picture. It showed one of those small nooks that I know branch out from the main assembly room. The one where we all gather for meetings and training. And also where the soldiers have the orgies I’ve never once attended.
But it suddenly occurs to me she must have found her way there during an orgy. Those little nooks are only ever open then, each with a single bed and for a single purpose.
“Did Piper… say anything else?” I question, remembering my reaction to her trying to open up.
She’s not here to confide in me now, but somehow, it feels like I’m paying penance by questioning Josh. Though, as I lick my dry lips, I wonder if I can handle knowing more about the rape.
“We-e-ll…” Josh hesitates, glancing up at me. “I guess, since we’re in this together, we shouldn’t keep secrets. Right?”
I’m too anxious and sick to my stomach to even care about the fact that Josh is talking like we’re third-grade besties on the playground. It’s all I can do to grit out, “Right.”
“I’m not sure Piper is aware of… what exactly she told me when she was having her panic attack.” He makes a grimace, like he’s worried about betraying her.
It’s not possible to betray her to me, since Iownher, body, soul and memories. But before I can say so, his full sentence registers. “She has panic attacks?”
He nods. “We were at the Devil soldiers headquarters when she had a panic attack after seeing your, uhm, friends. Liam and Dane. She was struggling to breathe, and crying and stuff. And mumbling your name. I felt so bad because I couldn’t do a thing to help.
My heart twists in my chest, as I realize everything she endured, and how she had to suffer through it all alone. I would do anything right now to have her back in my arms. To hold my baby to me and make it okay.
I manage to repress a small shiver. But my world feels very cold and desolate without her in it.
Josh must understand how I feel from my expression, because he doesn’t wait for me to ask more questions. Instead, he volunteers, “Apart from, uh, your name, she said something else repeatedly. It was clear after that she had no idea she’d said anything, so I never mentioned it to her. But it kind of freaked me out.”
“What?” I hiss between my teeth as he pauses.
“She, uh…” He swallows. “She kept saying, ‘They saw. They all saw. Everyone saw.’”
I’m seized by a sudden, violent gagging fit. I keel over, clutching my stomach and gasping. Luckily, I didn’t eat a thing today, or I’d be painting the floor of Josh’s car with my vomit. I press my head between my legs, doubled over, shuddering with my need for oxygen.
“You okay, bro? I mean… uhm…”
“I’m fine,” I wheeze at last, sitting back, furiously rubbing my eyes with a hand.
They saw. Everyone saw.
I know exactly what that means.
I had my doubts before, but it’s like my mind has been doing mental gymnastics to try to keep myself from accepting what is impossible to deny.
Every single fucking Devil soldier saw what happened to her that night.
I’ve never been to one of their stupid orgies, but I’ve spent enough time down there to know how it’s all set up. I’ve been down there the morning after, getting my contracts from Tragenwhile trying to keep my gaze turned away from the soldiers and the girls walking around in various states of undress.
The nooks are just that.Nooks, not rooms. Tragen once said they’d been set up to give some of the guys the illusion of privacy. But they don’t hide a fucking thing. You can still see it all from the main room.
Even if she didn’t make a sound—and I know my cricket enough to realize that as talkative as she usually is, in a traumatic moment like that, she probably wouldn’t—they would have seen her walk in. They would have seen her get drugged. They would have known she was incapable of consenting to whatever happened to her. And they would have seen her go back out, in what I can only assume to be a state of extreme shock.
They all knew. Every single one of those Devil soldiers. All eight-fucking-nine of them. None of them would stay away from an orgy.
In the best case scenario, they knew, and just didn’t care. In the worst… they were complicit.
And then there’s Tragen.
My heart twists anew. I can barely manage to wrap my head around this new level of betrayal. He must have known too. Even if he wasn’t there when it happened, he had the cameras set up. He saw the whole fucking thing.
And he captured a single, incriminating frame, to show me.
