Chapter 7 #2
“Sloane and Sami for extraction. Sami, I’ll let you chop off his dick.
Fucker has been raping his wife for three years now.
It was only after Monica caught him touching their daughter inappropriately that she chose to speak up.
So you’ve got free rein. And then, I’ll be torturing the fucker.
He’s been giving cigarette burns to Monica and their daughter for years. See how he likes being burned.”
One side of Tara’s face—the one not hidden by the mask—turned up in a vengeful, ruthless smile.
As an acid attack survivor, half of her face had been burned off.
When I first met her, her left eye was missing, her nose and half an ear had melted, and third-degree burns covered her cheek and parts of her scalp and neck.
Even her left arm was burned by the splashes of acid that had hit her.
Once she joined us, and as the years passed, she started getting facial reconstruction surgeries.
With every surgery, her self-confidence grew.
Obviously, the surgeries didn’t make her burns and scars magically disappear, but they were more manageable and less painful.
As much as she tried to appear strong and unaffected in front of us, she still struggled some days.
While she always kept her scarred face covered in public, she had started letting go of the mask when it was just the five of us in the Den.
Tara was fucking beautiful. Her golden-brown skin, her hazel eyes, and her perfectly bow-shaped lips made it difficult for a lot of people to look away from her.
Losing her beauty, a part of her identity, to a monster of a man had broken her.
If I could kill the fucker who did that to her all over again, I would.
She still hadn’t reached that fuck the world mentality that some of us lived by.
But she was getting there. Slowly. I was waiting for the day she embraced every part of her, the day she would hold her head high and proudly and unashamedly look the world in the eye.
We next moved to Mary. Sloane jumped in since she was the lead on her case. Since I’d been the one to chop off her perpetrators’ dicks, she turned to me. “Mary doesn’t want them dead”—she rolled her eyes—“she just wants them to disappear from her life.”
That was more of a hassle than just eliminating the fuckers. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do much in this step except scare them for life. I’d probably done that already, but a little one-on-one session would do the trick.
Tara piped in, “I’ll create new identities for those guys and find a house for them in Florida where we have a few eyes and can keep track of them.”
Sloane nodded and took notes on her phone. “Sounds perfect. We can wrap this up in three days. I’ll make the transport arrangements. And feed them, I guess.”
They were currently locked in our perfectly soundproof interrogation room downstairs.
We moved down the list, and it was Sophie. I instantly opened her file. When the case was this new, and especially when the perpetrators were unknown, we all needed a brainstorming session.
I began to provide a brief overview of the file.
“Listen up, ladies. Sophie Park was invited to the Manhattan Center for Healing for Survivors’ charity gala.
Usually, many of these charity events were by invitation only.
However, the gala had also extended invitations to two additional guests.
So she’d taken her firm partner, Ashley, and her junior employee, Anna, with her.
Her parents were also invited and had arrived separately.
It was a crowded party with over three hundred guests.
Also, if that wasn’t enough, it was a masked event. ”
“Great,” Tara muttered.
I nodded and continued, “Sophie had an altercation with one of the masked men when she saw him spiking Anna’s drink. She slapped him and tried to claw off his mask. But he got away before she could succeed. She did get him thrown out of the party by security, though.”
Sloane chimed in, “Atta girl. I love a fighter.”
I grunted, knowing what came next. “Around midnight, she went outside the event space to see off Anna after the girl was spooked by the whole incident. She asked her driver to take Anna home in her car. She had just turned to go back inside when a man picked her up from behind and threw her in a big SUV. She was raped and assaulted by all three men in the car. None of them removed the masks at any point. She has no idea who the men were. It took over three months for all her physical injuries to heal.”
All four of them sat in silence. Hearing about these assaults never got easier.
They made me want to find every man on the street and blow their brains out.
Every single one of us had suffered at the hands of men.
We’d all lost something to their cruelty and inflated egos, and none of us had any mercy left in our hearts for monsters like them.
Tara cleared her throat, breaking the silence. “Any street camera recordings? It was a big event, so surely the event was recorded.”
“Very limited footage was released to the cops. According to the Manhattan Center and the gala's organizers, a glitch occurred, and most of their footage was destroyed. The police couldn’t verify any identities because all the people in the footage were wearing masks.”
Naomi picked up the medical reports and started reading through them. “It wasn’t just about sex for these men. Seems like she was punched and kicked a lot. Punched hard enough to crack her cheekbone. Guess the rapist didn’t like that she hit him and got him thrown out of the event.”
I shook my head, disgust roiling through my body.
“Anyway, we know that the rapists were among the three hundred people who came to the party. It’s also safe to assume that it’s someone more powerful than Dominic Park, which is saying something.
So it’s the process of elimination in figuring out who the perpetrators are. ”
I turned to Tara, and before I could say anything, she made a note in our database.
“I’ll hack into the servers of the Manhattan Center as well as of the Healing for Survivors’ database and find an invitation list. We would also need a list of all the people who actually came to the gala.
I just hope they collected the information about the guests at the entrance.
Otherwise, that’s a huge blind spot for us. ”
I nodded. “Agreed. I’ve asked Dominic to set up a meeting with Sophie as soon as he can. I’ll wait for him to send me a date and time, or else I’ll follow up tomorrow.”
Lena quickly nodded. “Sounds good,” and turned to Tara. “Moving on.”
However, Tara apparently had other ideas. She gave me a devilish smile as she typed in Dominic Park on the internet.
I had barely rolled my eyes before hundreds of pictures of Dominic appeared on the large monitor. Sloane gave a loud, teasing moan. “The man can wear a suit like a God.”
He did wear a suit like a God. I’d seen Sloane binge-watching the Korean dramas, and this man could give any of those actors a run for their money.
He had a razor-sharp jawline and not a hint of a beard.
His eyes were dangerous and lethal, and it just made me want to lick him up like an ice cream cone.
Not to mention the way his suit hugged his thick arms and stretched over that wide chest. Dominic was very indecently checking every single one of my boxes.
“Enough with the scrolling already.” I tried not to look at the screen like an obsessed fool while hating the girls’ greedy eyes on him.
Tara rolled her eyes and was about to close out the window when my eyes fell on a picture of him with a woman.
“Wait,” my mouth stupidly and very, very recklessly blurted out. I could’ve just as easily searched for the image later. But my eyes narrowed on a certain image.
A devious smile came over all their faces as Naomi said, “Yes, Tara. Wait a minute. Who’s this bombshell hanging off Dominic’s arm?”
Lena groaned. “Is it gonna be another milkshake situation? He’s not yours, Sami. Keep the crazy to a minimum. He’s our biggest client.”
The moment she clicked on the picture, a few hundred more images of him with other women opened. “And who are these women?” Sloane piped in, leaning forward on the table, fake trying to get a closer look.
I knew he wasn’t mine. I’d met him once . Yet a plethora of ugly emotions threatened to rise to the surface of my mind. I sat still as a statue, trying my damnedest not to let them see how it affected me. “What do I care about that? Clearly, he’s a player.”
Lena and Tara exchanged irritatingly amusing smiles, and Lena jumped in. “Were you expecting the young, hot billionaire to be a virgin, Sami?”
I started closing my files and, without looking at any of them, I grumbled, “Since when is thirty-eight young?”
Lena gasped. “Bitch, I’m thirty-eight.”
I gave her a wink and walked out of the meeting room, done with their antics.
Once I was back on the couch, I allowed myself to search for Dominic’s pictures with women. The more I scrolled through the search page, the more images I found of women in their gorgeous gowns, holding Dominic’s arm. They could just be his dates for the evening, but I did not like it one bit.
If these were the kind of women he preferred, he would definitely not be into me—brown, bulky, and badass.
I slammed the laptop screen shut, scolding myself for getting caught up in petty, jealous emotions. I stomped upstairs to go to our training area and jammed my hands into my boxing gloves.
With a light jog on the spot, I took my stance in front of the boxing bag, imagining the boxing ring to be Dominic’s pretty face. Then I slammed my fist into it.
I’d already decided he wasn’t for me. Jab, jab, cross. Kick.
I had no space in my life for a man. Especially someone so out in the public and so gorgeous. Double kick, five-punch combo.
I didn’t have the time or the need to fawn over a pretty man. Punch. Punch. Punch. Punch .
Sweat dripped down my back as my arms burned with the impact.
I breathed in the leather of the boxing bag, the sweat that dripped down my nose as I continued hitting the boxing bag for the next half an hour.
I only stopped when my hands started shaking with every punch, and my mind finally emptied of all thoughts except for the rhythm of my breathing. I took several deep breaths, centering myself, reminding myself of my purpose in life.
Hunt down the monsters of this world. Show them that there were even bigger monsters ready to eat them alive and spit them out. To remind them that no one could save them from the wrath of a woman wronged.