15. Remy
Chapter fifteen
Remy
I’ve kind of learned there’s no way to ease someone into the conversation, so I don’t bother. Once I’ve got the senator to myself, isolated from the others at the front of the plane, I shove the menu Elaine insisted I bring into his open lap.
I watch his brow furrow with confusion as he looks at the Dutch words stamped across the file. The confusion stays as he swings it open and gets a look at the first page of photos—they could be mugshots, except they’re not lined up so that their height can be recorded, though that information is provided under each of the photos in lieu of a name. Height, weight, and age, written as a continuous and unbroken number, using the metric system of course.
His eyes sharpen as they search for identifiers as to what he’s looking at—each girl looks to be made up, hair styled perfectly and makeup applied by a steady hand, but none of them are smiling. Some even have tear tracks cutting through the powder on their cheeks.
“What is this?” He demands, turning the page to take in more, looking for anyone or anything he recognizes to help explain what he’s seeing.
“A menu.” I tell him honestly. “You can choose which one suits you best.”
“A menu?” His eyes flicker up to mine, clouded by confusion. “I don’t understand. Like… an escort service?”
I laugh drily. “Something like that, although you won’t be escorting these women anywhere. Well, other than to freedom, if everything goes to plan.”
His eyes narrow on me, looking for more than what I’m saying. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, there are sixty men and women waiting in cages for us to come save them. They’re probably being tortured and raped as we speak.”
I’ve decided to stop dancing around the language, too. As horrific as it is to think in terms of such violent things, it’s the truth of what’s happening, and calling it something more flowery is a disservice to those living through it and those who have already lived through it. It’s a disservice to me, to Genevieve.
“You can’t be serious.” He laughs, but I don’t believe the senator finds anything about the situation funny. He looks rattled, and I have no doubts that whatever he thought he was getting me a plane for, it wasn’t this. “This is your idea of a joke?”
“No.” I shake my head. “My ideas of jokes are a bit more… violent.”
His brow furrows deeper as he tries to decode the meaning of that. “Okay.” He nods. “Look, I see you took the whole ‘women sold in cabinets’ online thing seriously. You need to stop drinking the Kool-Aid, kid.”
“I wish I was joking. Unfortunately, this is the reality for thousands of people all over the world... men and women, children. And I have reason to believe that you know someone this may have happened to.”
“Me?” The senator shakes his head. “No.”
He doesn’t say that he was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, that he doesn’t know the sort of people that this sort of horrible stuff happens to, that trafficking is a crime that isn’t sophisticated enough for someone of his caliber to have been involved in. His bias is written all over his face .
“Not all trafficking is the same. And not all victims are used for the same purpose. Some are sold to the highest bidder—Claire was.”
I notice the interest in his eye at the mention of Claire, telling me he certainly didn’t forget her. He’s opening his mouth to say something about it, but I don’t give him the chance. “Some are taken to be used for their bodies or their body parts… organs. Some are taken to be used as toys by people with demonic tastes in the bedroom… and the kitchen.”
His face is white as the meaning behind my words sinks in. Cannibalism. It’s probably not the fate that most people end up meeting, but Davos has given me plenty of assurance over the years that it happens. Nothing ever goes to waste for some people.
“I… What does…?”
“What does this have to do with you?” I guess. “You’re a human rights activist, aren’t you? Always trying to please the greatest amount of people with your progressive vision yet traditional values?”
I think he’d be offended if he wasn’t already so disgusted by the reality of what I’m suggesting. “What does this have to do with politics?”
“Nothing.” I shrug. “And also, everything. It’s a human rights issue. And I think it’s a personal issue for you. Or at least, it’s about to be.”
“You’re taking me to see it?” He sounds faint, like he isn’t up to the task. And I believe him. Either the senator is a great actor, or he is so horrified by the idea of what I’m telling him that he wants to run from it. I don’t blame him for that, either. I also wanted to run from it. I tried. But you can’t run from yourself, and I think Victor has realized as much already.
“I’m taking you to witness as part of the empire crumbles. And while I do it, I want to tell you a story.”
“A… a story? ”
“A story.” I confirm. “About someone you seemed very interested in when you met her.”
“Claire.” The senator whispers, his eyes searching me for answers to questions his brain hasn’t even come up with yet. “I don’t understand, though.”
“You will.” I promise him.
And he does. By the time I finish telling him about how my employee dropped my sister’s best friend into the lap of the devil’s minions, I can practically see the wheels turning in his mind.
“Did you buy her?” he asks, no doubt thinking back to the night he met Claire at my father’s wake.
“I tried.” I tell him honestly. “And she wouldn’t have been the first person I bought.”
The sound that comes from his chest is something like a wheeze, pushed through his lungs by disbelief looking to burrow deeper. “I couldn’t get into the auction; they’re encrypted. You need an invite link, and you need a password. He wouldn’t give them up to me, but they made sure that everyone knew Claire was involved with me. All of my enemies, and my father’s, had a little extra incentive with her. So, somebody else paid for her… a very good chunk of money, but not enough for a life. Not enough for her life.” I clear my throat, wondering if my voice is betraying the feelings I’ve been trying to deny from the first moment I saw her.
“Before they got her on the plane, I found them and killed them all. Well, I killed almost all of them.” I decide not to go into details about Wes right now, since that will probably only serve to confuse him more. “Anyway, a week later you show up to my house, and you start asking questions about her. You had a weird interest in her for a married man, senator.”
“She…” he shakes his head, runs his hand over his face like that will chase away the fog of shock and horror. “She reminded me of someone. ”
“Lauren?” I guess, watching the way his entire body goes rigid at the name. But though his body stiffens, his eyes melt, softening so much that they start to shine with tears.
His voice is guarded when he asks, “How do you know about Lauren?”
“This is Elaine’s story, but I’ll tell it anyway since she’s entertaining your wife.”
I do my best to recount the details as Elaine did, and when I mention the pregnancy test, I think Victor might just pass out. It’s a good thing he’s sitting, because he looks as though he’s stopped breathing for a while.
“There was something she wanted to tell me.” He says after a while of silence. “She told me that when I first saw her, but she never got a chance. I was only home for the burial, the service. We had one night together because of how it all worked out, and I forgot to even ask her what was on her mind. When I remembered, I sent her a letter, but I never got a response. None of my letters ever got a response.”
I stay quiet while I let him reflect on that memory, but I can’t give him forever. The flight may be a long one, but we don’t have time to get lost down memory lane. “Well, she likely wanted to tell you she was pregnant. Elaine didn’t see the results of the test. She left that night, and she never saw Lauren again.”
Victor blinks, thinking through whatever must have come after that. “She just disappeared. Ally said it was the strangest thing, that she just… was gone when she woke up.”
He’s not looking at the menu on his lap, having forgotten about it in between all of the information I’ve hit him with, but I slip it open and point to a word on the a la carte menu. “Pregnant.”
He only blinks at me, no dots connecting. “I don’t get it.”
“You won’t appreciate the insinuation, but Elaine thinks that your father somehow knew the people that run these kinds of programs. She thinks that maybe your father handed her over to someone. ”
“Handed her over?” Victor laughs. “My father? You can’t be serious.”
“Maybe that’s not what happened. We don’t know because Claire is an orphan. She never even knew her mother. She grew up in foster care until she emancipated herself and went to college, which is where she met my sister.”
“An orphan,” Victor says the word sadly, testing it on his tongue. “Lauren was an orphan. Her parents died when she was a kid, and after her aunt passed, she ended up in a state facility.” He shakes his head. “History has a really weird way of repeating itself.”
“Yes,” I agree, “it does.”
“My wife, Addison… she was Lauren’s guardian ad litem. I had pretty much just re-enlisted when my mother passed. I had two years on my service, and during that time, my sister and Addison did all the work of trying to find her, but they never figured it out. I assumed she started another life somewhere… but Claire is, what, twenty-one?”
I nod my confirmation, and Victor sighs. “And she is absolutely Lauren’s daughter. I’d bet my life on that.”
“She may be your daughter, too.” I say, hoping that doesn’t scare him into shutting down. We’ve been making progress since I brought up Lauren. I don’t want to lose it now.
“No,” Victor reaches for his phone, tapping around on it a minute. “See, when I first saw her, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that she was Lauren’s incarnation. It was like looking at a ghost, except I never got to see Lauren at that age. And it was irrational, but I had to see if she was mine. I don’t know why, but there was just a voice in my head screaming that she was. That’s stupid, I know, cause after Lauren left me, she could have been with any number of men, but I just felt this need to check. I… stole her toothbrush and some of the hair out of her brush while you were downstairs entertaining guests at the wake. ”
His face warms with what I assume is embarrassment or shame, and he glances up from his phone to see how harshly I’m judging him.
“And when you took her to the airport, I got onto the same flight she did. I spent the whole flight with her, looking for any similarities to the woman I loved, any similarities to me. I even told her about Lauren, about my high school sweetheart, but I never told her I suspected she was her daughter. I never told her I thought she could be mine.”
He turns his phone to face me, showing me a photo. “I had her DNA tested against mine on nothing other than a weird feeling, but the results were negative.” He shakes his head again as I take the phone and read over the results.
When I look at him, he actually looks sad. “Claire is definitely Lauren’s daughter, but she isn’t mine.”