Chapter Sixteen – Royal #2
“Listen,” Abby says, “I get it. You guys are curious, just like I’m curious about you.
I figured you have some trauma llamas following you around, and I already learned what Hawthorne’s is.
I get the picture, and because I get the picture, you guys should also get that same picture. We don’t need to talk about it.”
“Trauma llamas,” Ezra mutters. “That’s not what I’d call it.”
“Plain trauma doesn’t sound nearly as fun,” she says softly, shrugging her shoulders once.
“You said Brock didn’t hurt you,” I reference the man Ezra and I took out the night she fell out of the closet.
“Did someone else? Is that why you were doing what you were doing?” Honestly, the thought of anyone hurting her fills me with a righteous, ungodly type of anger, the kind of fury I’ve only felt once in my life before, when my sister was taken from me.
Don’t get me wrong, I get pissed on behalf of all women and girls out there, all those vulnerable in society who can’t lift a hand and defend themselves, but what I’m feeling right now is ten times more intense.
I don’t want anyone to hurt Abby, not in the past, and certainly not in the fucking future. I’d do anything to stop something like that from happening, and I think Ezra would, too, even if he won’t admit it.
Abby folds her arms over her chest, and for a moment, it appears as if she’s not going to say a word, like she’s just going to sit there and stew in opposition to this intervention.
But, after a good thirty seconds, she sighs and mutters, “No, no one hurt me like that. It’s not…
it’s not like that for me, just as I’m assuming it isn’t like that for you guys. ”
A vengeful vendetta. Revenge. A kind of cold, hard justice the law could not possibly dole out. Who wants to wait for a trial, pray that everything goes right, and then wait while whoever it is sits in prison for a few years?
You don’t get executed if you forced yourself on a woman. Hell, most murderers out there don’t ever get what they deserve. Those who raped and then killed? The old, crusty judges can still feel bad for them. It’s a losing game, and that’s why there are people like us out there, ready to rig it.
When Ezra, Hawthorne, and I are in the picture? People like that can only lose.
Sensing she doesn’t want to talk about it, I decide it’s time to share my own truth, the one that got me here to begin with. “I had a younger sister. Her name was Reign.”
Abby gives a sad, sorrowful smile. “Royal and Reign. I like that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “She was… I always tried to protect her growing up. She’d always get into trouble.
She was only twelve when I had to go off to college.
I told her to be good, to be smart.” I breathe in slowly, filling my lungs with an achingly large amount of air.
“It was the last thing I ever said to her. Two weeks after I moved into the dorm, she went missing.”
Even though I’m not finished with the story, she must sense where it’s going, because she whispers, “I’m sorry.”
“There was some evidence she got tangled up with the wrong people. She went to meet someone she met online—turned out he was a thirty-five-year-old man who had connections to previous crimes. Kidnapping, sex trafficking. That sort of thing. There was a video of him meeting with her, but… she was never seen again. I don’t know if the bastard had a cop on his payroll or what, but it never went to trial. ”
My chest is tight. I haven’t spoken this story aloud in years, ever since I told Ezra and Hawthorne.
It’s a crazy thing how, even now, over a decade later, it can still feel so new and raw.
Like a fucking knife in my back, six inches deep, lodged where I can’t reach to pull it out. A permanent injury.
“He thought he’d get off, just like he got off for everything else.
The law couldn’t nail him.” I pause. “But I did. I planned for months. Dropped out of school, moved back home, and planned to kill him. I wasn’t thinking about the future.
I was only thinking about making sure that asshole got exactly what he deserved. ”
I sigh. “The day I finally took that jump, the day I finally got him, I tried to get him to tell me where her body is. I figured if I was going to get caught and go to prison for murder, the least I could do is bring Reign home—but he wouldn’t say.
The only thing he told me was that she was dead and that I should move on. ”
But people like that, they don’t ever seem to understand that sometimes you can’t move on. Sometimes the pain of losing someone is just too fucking great that it swallows you whole, and you spend the rest of your life trying to find your way out.
“I killed him, and I took his body out in the middle of nowhere and dug him a deep, deep fucking hole.” A moment passes before I add, “As far as I know, no one’s ever found him. Maybe they won’t. Maybe he’ll be worm food for the rest of eternity. Either way, I had to do it. For my sister.”
Abby can’t look at me. She’s busy staring down into her lap, as if her lap holds the answers to every important question in the universe. The arms she had folded over her chest are now loose, her hands resting in said lap.