I look around, and everything starts moving like time has thickened around us. The room feels detached from reality now. Blood streaks across the floor. Rain pours through the shattered window. Bodies lie motionless, still warm enough to be steaming in the cold air.
Then there’s Cassidy standing behind the trafficker with a knife in her hand, looking less like a survivor and more like vengeance in human form.
He detects it too because his expression changes into soul-deep dread. Not the kind that thinks he is going to die, but the kind that wonders how.
“Reaper.” My voice stays low, regulated.
She turns her focus onto me.
Blood plasters her jaw and throat.
Beneath the fury twisting through her expression, there’s still something achingly human left standing in the wreckage. Not softness or innocence. Someone hanging on by splinters while the brutality threatens to swallow the rest of her whole. I edge nearer with measured steps, careful not to push too hard against whatever fragile restraint she has left.
“He’s scared of someone,” I tell Cassidy. “More scared than he is of us.”
The trafficker shakes his head rapidly.
“No no no!”
“Who?” Cassidy asks, her voice edged with cold curiosity.
His breathing turns ragged again.
“I can’t, I can’t, I FUCKING CAN’T!”
Cassidy tilts her head somewhat.
“Why?”
His voice drops to scarcely a whisper.
“Because people evaporate when they talk about them.”
Rainwater drops repeatedly from the ceiling into a growing puddle near the kitchen.
I consider his words and toss them around in my head with what I do know before I ask,
“PrettyLittleDolls00isn’t one person, is it?”
His eyes inflate.
There it is, his reaction.
Cassidy sees it too.
The puzzle pieces connect for both of us at the same time.
Not a buyer, not one monster but an organization, a network, a name people hide behind.
“You don’t understand what you’re messing with,” he rasps, blood leaking onto the table. “They are everywhere.”
Cassidy steps closer until the blade rests lightly beneath his chin.
I watch her cautiously from across the poker table.
The blood on her skin doesn’t make me cringe.
The bloodlust in her eyes doesn’t scare me, I know none of this was born from cruelty.
