Chapter Thirty-Three #2
It happened after a late lunch, Brock running out, insisting everyone would stop biting one another’s heads off if they had something in their systems other than caffeine. He also came back with three extra folding chairs.
Tig pulled me down on his lap, picking at his food that he had propped on my lap because I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything; his other hand wrapped around my hip reassuringly.
I couldn’t help but wonder what was taking so long.
If he was desperate for the money, why wasn’t he glued to his computer, waiting for a response?
A nasty, dark, morbid little voice whispered that maybe it was because he was doing something awful to Cassie again, something that made my stomach lurch, and made me seriously consider making a run for the bathroom.
And then there was a bleep in the otherwise mostly silent room.
“We’re in business,” Sawyer declared from where he set up his chair beside his brother behind the desk. “Got a picture and instructions,” he added as we all went to stand.
I rushed forward as they hit the image, bringing up a picture of Cassie, looking even more busted up.
It was bad. Her entire eye socket was swollen; a long gash ran down her entire cheek; her lip had deep purple splotches that looked like teeth marks—like she or or someone had bitten into it hard enough to bruise the flesh.
My stomach rolled, and I was glad for the lack of food in it as my eyes moved over the paper in her hand.
“Alright,” Sawyer said, addressing the rest of the room. “We have proof of life. We need to get on transferring this money before the banks close.”
“What about the plans for the pickup?” Tig asked.
“Somewhere just outside of Newark. Seven AM. No cops. The usual shit,” Sawyer said, making me look at his profile hard.
The usual shit.
There was nothing ‘usual’ about it.
But, I realized as I looked around, that it was only unusual for me.
Everyone else in the room looked calm and collected and understanding.
It was maybe the first time I really got to see past the computers and the personas I had always known these people to be.
I saw what they really were—people who lived in a very gray area of life, who daily saw the kind of ugly that rarely touched normal people; they had all seen it enough almost to become hardened to it.
And yet, they never gave up; they still tried to fight for the right things.
“You’re not going to call the cops in on this?” Brock asked, trying to be a voice of reason.
“I trust Lloyd to let us take the lead here as much as possible, seeing as they haven’t turned up a motherfucking thing, but that partner he is strapped with now…”
There was a snicker from Alex that had Sawyer struggling to not smile.
And I remembered what Alex had said about Detective Jones and his choice porn involving male butt play, and the strapped comment almost made me crack a smile too.
“We could always call them when we are almost at the drop site,” Tig reasoned. “That way, if something goes south, we have them there to help.”
“Alright, now let’s try to get this moving,” Sawyer said, looking at his computer crew. “What do you need?”
“Space,” was Barrett’s very characteristic reply.
“Don’t you need my account…” I started, only to be met with four sets of eyes, all with at least one raised brow. “Right,” I said, shaking my head, and moving back toward the front of the office.
So we gave them space, and they worked.
“Alright, we’re at the hitting the button stage,” Alex declared when it was nearing five that evening.
“Then hit it.”
That was me, my voice a little rough, a little surly.
But I had, yet again, just been standing around doing nothing while these people did all kinds of crazy shit to try to fix my situation.
It wasn’t that I felt guilt per se. This was their job.
I had no such skill set. But I hated feeling useless.
I hated doing nothing. For an action-oriented person, that was the worst feeling.
Tig moved up behind me, his whole front pressing into my back, his hand sliding around my lower stomach, giving me a squeeze I didn’t realize I needed so badly.
Because this was the catalyst.
This was the beginning of the end.
I was so ready for it to be over.
Well, it wouldn’t be ‘done’ for a long, long while.
Because having Cass free of that psycho didn’t mean I would have my Cass back.
I wasn’t delusional, and I had paid just enough attention in my elective psych class in high school to know that she might never be my old Cassie again.
She was going to need a stay at the hospital.
And from there, well, I imagined there would be endless amounts of therapy.
I would need to be gentle with her at first, let her recover.
After that, I would need to learn how to be both gentle and firm, so I could try to bring her back out more, get her back to work, show her how to live again so that she didn’t sink into the misery.
Not that anyone would blame her if she did sink into it.
She went through hell, things I didn’t even want to think of because just the idea of them made me feel physically ill. She had the right to not get past that.
But she deserved more.
She deserved to have her old life back, her old happiness. Or, at least, as much of it as she could with the darkness inside she would now have to contend with.
Maybe it was that survivor’s guilt, revamped.
She was alive too, but I still, in a completely irrational way, felt guilty.
It could have been me. If it were me, she wouldn’t have had to go through it at all.
Which was a warped way to view it because neither of us deserved it, should have ever had to even worry about it.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling either.
Then Barrett clicked.
And everyone went nuts.
I didn’t know it was possible to type as fast as they all started typing. I was maybe a little surprised that the keyboards didn’t break or the laptops didn’t catch on fire.
“What are they trying to do?” My voice sounded odd, far away, like I was hearing it from a distance.
Sawyer gave me a blank look and shrugged. “Fuck if I know. I think they are trying to follow the Bitcoin from one ‘wallet’ to another. Yeah, I learned that there was such a thing as an online ‘wallet’ today. Fuck if I know what that means, though.”
I had no idea either.
I had the typical computer skills of my generation, meaning I could do everything from set up to pull apart and reconnect things that slipped or add more memory and all that.
I could also stalk like a champ on social media.
But I knew absolutely nothing about things like the dark web, aside from knowing it existed and was full of dark shit, and Bitcoin, which I knew was a way for people who no longer trusted banks and the economy to handle their money.
Watching them, it almost looked like something worth getting to know. Not because I wanted to hack anyone or because I wanted to get away with doing illegal things online, but because it seemed to lend them a power. While I stood there completely powerless.
“It’s done,” Barrett declared, moving away from his computer.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Sawyer asked as Barrett moved toward the front door with the pace and posture and skin tone of a zombie.
“Shower. Bed. Food.”
“No, we need you…” Sawyer started, but Barrett was gone.
“Brothers,” I agreed, giving him a sympathetic shrug.
It seemed that no one was worse off without him, all still tapping away.
“Barrett is better at the bank shit. The traceable shit. Alex, Jstorm, and L have a better handle on the dark web and things like C++ programming and all that crap,” Brock explained, waving toward Barrett’s abandoned and much more comfortable chair.
Given that I was still in heels, mainly because Barrett’s floor was in serious need of a scrub and I didn’t want to be barefoot on it, I needed to sit to ease the distinct sharp and pulsating sensation of blisters forming on the pads beneath my toes.
I had just slipped my feet out slightly, resting against the shoes but not going inside them, when my email, which was still open on the screen, refreshed.
It was purely habit.
I moved the cursor over, hit the email, and then my stomach pitched because, for a second, the screen went white, making me sure I had broken Barrett’s laptop, which could end me up in the doghouse for years to come with his mercurial, grudge-holding ass.
But then a webpage opened, spinning for a second as it loaded.
I didn’t even have to click anything else.
The video loaded itself automatically.
I was pretty sure my heart seized and then stopped beating right then and there.
Because it wasn’t the same video from the day before.
And there was no reason for a new video now that he had the money.
It was the same room as the day before, or so I thought, though there was more light, showing for the first time, a filthy mattress on the floor in the corner, cinderblock walls, cement floors, a fold-up chair where she had sat for the last video, and a bucket in the corner which, well, left little to the imagination really.
My mouth fell open slightly with a silent gasp when the frame moved and cleared, focusing on the makeshift bed where Cassie was situated, curled up on her side.
She had the same shirt on from the video the day before, wrinkled, blood-splattered, and half-wet from sweat, it looked like, clinging to her skin and leaving very little to the imagination.
But that wasn’t what had bile rising in my throat.
No, that was because she was completely naked from the waist down, with purple and blue bruises all up and down her pale thighs and ankles. She was lying on her side, clutching her very lower stomach, and sobbing.
“Tig,” my voice quivered, unable able to look up, sick as I could possibly be, but unable to look away. But I heard not only him moving toward me, but I was pretty sure the entire room because suddenly, there was no more clicking.
The screen was yanked back slightly, but left where it was, allowing everyone to look as they crammed in behind the desk near me.
“The fuck? Why is…” Sawyer started and then fell silent as the man came into view.
I was pretty sure there was a collective inaudible gasp.
Because everyone knew that as bad as it looked already, if he was coming into the picture, it could only mean it was going to get worse.
“Kenz, come on,” Tig said, reaching for my arm, trying to protect me. But I didn’t need to be protected. I didn’t need to be coddled.
I yanked my arm away. “No.”
The man, no longer shrouded in darkness, but wearing a freaking ski mask over his face, with nothing about his general body giving any clues to who he might be, moved toward the mattress. He dropped down on his knees at the end of it, his hand reaching out and touching Cassie’s knee.
You’d have thought he burned her.
She shrieked, her entire body violently jerking away, curling more tightly into itself.
And that, apparently, was the end of whatever civility he was approaching her with.
He curled forward, his hand reaching for her head, sifting into her short hair and yanking viciously as he moved to stand, dragging her up on her knees and across the floor by her hair as she screamed, tears streaming down her face, hands reaching up to try to move his hands away.
That was when you could see the bruises around her wrists as well.
From being held down.
My stomach lurched again, and I was almost freakishly aware of the waste bin under Barrett’s desk, my foot going out and dragging it slightly forward, the sound of it scratching across the floor almost deafening to me, but no one else was paying attention as Cass and her attacker were only a few feet in front of the camera.
He still had her by her hair, making her head arch back at an angle that must have been shooting pain up and down her neck and shoulders, revealing a perfect band of bruises across her neck that looked more like it came from a belt than a hand because the lines were too perfect.
A fucking belt around her throat.
The next sound, accompanying Cassie’s whimpers and sniffles as her entire body shook so violently she looked mid-seizure, was the man’s robotically manipulated voice.
“Thanks for the money.”
That was exactly when we all saw it at once.
The light caught and reflected off a very long, very shiny, very sharp blade just a second before it pressed into the left side of Cassie’s neck and sliced clear through to the right, Cassie’s screams piercing through my system.
“Fucking Christ,” Tig’s voice roared, his hand moving to cover my eyes.
But I curled forward, unable to do anything about it.
My stomach lost the battle.
I threw up violently into the waste bin, tears streaming down my cheeks, everything within me rebelling at what I had just witnessed.
A murder.
A murder.
I had watched my best friend lose her life right in front of me.
That was the last truly conscious, sane thought I had for a long time.