Chapter 21
Kylian
Six videos were recorded that night.
Grainy, poorly lit videos.
Videos meant to serve as trophies of their conquest.
Videos that now function as the guide map I’m using destroy them.
One hundred eighty-nine seconds of footage.
Six videos.
Five years for them to circulate, migrate, swell, and reproduce.
In those five years, technology has evolved. Access to pornographic content has improved. Circulation of said videos has dwindled significantly.
It’s an easier job than I expected it to be.
But it’s the most important job I’ll ever complete.
For her. For us.
For who she was, and who she deserves to be.
I’ll destroy them.
Not just the videos, but the perpetrators who thought they could put a fucking hand on my girl before I even knew she was mine.
I’ll plant a cancer in their systems; be the insidious disease that rots all the parts of life they cherish.
All the parts they tried to take from her.
Six videos.
One hundred eighty-nine seconds of footage.
When I’m not working for the team, jumping through the inane hoops required for classes, or spending time with Jo, I’m pursuing my personal vendetta passion project.
I’ve been working around the clock for weeks to issue DCMA and child endangerment complaints on dozens of sites.
Where the videos still exist, I take the time to go in and scramble servers.
I won’t stop until the scum who did this are personally and professionally reduced to ashes. My new purpose in life is to track them down and expose them to every social circle. To make sure their wives and neighbors, bosses and pastors, know who they are. What they did. How they tried to ruin her.
It’s tedious work. Slow, deliberate. But I’ve got a lifetime ahead of me to accomplish it.
A lifetime to avenge her.
Several seconds have passed in which no one has spoken. Even I can pick up on the thick, awkward energy humming around us as our friends process the unfathomable and Jo tries to push through the residual trauma intent on trapping her.
“Then what happened?” I prompt.
She’s lost in her head. She’s lost in the world.
She wanted space.
As a person who often needs space, I get it.
I get it, but I hate it.
I just want to hold her.
If she doesn’t want my embrace, that’s okay. For now. She has my loyalty. My devotion. My lifelong commitment to avenge her and make them pay.
She has me.