Chapter 32 Violet
VIOLET
Iwalked out of Francine’s office like I was in a daze. I barely saw the late afternoon sun sinking behind Psychos across the road. Barely felt its warmth.
All I felt was cold shock and sickness swirling inside me.
Travis’s name repeated over and over in my head.
Whip caught me on the sidewalk, his hands gripping both my arms. “Violet? What happened in there?”
I shook my head, burying it in his chest and inhaling his warm, masculine, familiar scent that always calmed my nervous system.
X answered for me, his tone grim. “It’s her foster brother. He’s been threatening her for weeks. I thought it was harmless, but Francine just told us he was the one who booked her for that job at Paul Jeddersen’s house.”
Levi swore under his breath. “Her own brother sent her to that creep? What the fuck?”
“He is NOT my brother,” I snapped at him. “Fang is my brother. Travis is a piece of shit. Always was. Always will be.” I shook my head. “He’s been threatening me, demanding I get money from Fang to give to him. Saying I owe him.”
“Why would he think that?” Whip asked.
I shook my head. “I always hated him. I would catch him watching me in the shower, through the crack in the door. He would always make sexual comments about me and the other girls in our home. I started barricading our door at night, scared he would try to get in while I was sleeping. And there were rumors. Toby told me one of the girls at school accused him of touching them, but rumors like that aren’t exactly uncommon at Saint View High, and nobody ever did anything about it.
It all just got swept under the rug, nobody gave a shit when a girl from a trailer park tried to say that someone had abused her.
” I breathed out a wobbly breath. “There was one night, when he was seventeen and I was sixteen, he and his friends had a party at our foster parents’ house when he knew they would be down at the bar getting drunk.
The party got wild. I had our two younger foster siblings locked in a room with me.
Travis and his friends were all drunk. There was so much noise.
Music and laughter and screaming and shouting.
It all mixed together. Them banging on the door, trying to get in.
Me pushing anything I could in front of it and assuring the kids they were just mucking around and they weren’t really going to hurt us.
I think I was trying to convince myself even more than them. ”
I remembered it all too clearly. Like it was playing out in front of me again, as crisp and clear as that night fifteen years ago when I’d been a terrified teenager with no power, no agency, no life skills to know how to help.
Screams in the night were all too common in my world.
“The next day, the police came to our house,” I practically whispered.
“Someone had made a report, saying Travis and his friends had indecently assaulted her. Our foster parents told them to get fucked, that they were here all night and nothing had happened. That the girl was a well-known slut and a liar. They didn’t even ask Travis about it.
They just knew if they admitted they’d both been off drinking at the pub and had allowed an underage party and rape to happen in their home, they would have lost their foster license.
That was the only income either of them had.
Neither of them could ever hold down a job long.
They lived solely off what they got paid for taking in kids. ”
X’s fingers clenched into fists. “I’m going to take a lot of pleasure in ending their pathetic lives.”
I wouldn’t stop him.
“I was so mad. I’d spent all night with two crying kids, terrified Travis or his friends would get into the room.
I was so sick of feeling helpless and small.
So I snuck out the back door and stopped the cops on their way out.
Told them our foster parents were lying.
Told them whatever that girl had said was true, even though I hadn’t actually seen it with my own eyes. I believed her.”
“Let me guess,” Whip ground out through gritted teeth. “They didn’t believe you.”
“Actually, they did. The girl was the daughter of a cop, so they really wanted to nail Travis and his friends to the wall. They were so close to eighteen, they tried them as adults. They got ten years each, but I don’t know how much of it they served.
” I swallowed thickly. “I don’t even know that he really did hurt that girl.
I was scared of him and just wanted him out of the house.
I didn’t know he even knew about my role in it, but obviously he did. ”
All three of them looked at me.
Levi gripped me tighter. “What he did to you was more than enough to warrant talking to the cops. If they put your complaint together with that other girl’s then he got what he deserved.”
“That explains why he’s on the list then,” Whip said. “Grayson must suspect him of reoffending since he’s been released.”
I should have felt good that my suspicions about Travis were being backed up by someone else.
But instead I just felt stupid and brainwashed.
My foster parents had spent the next two years bitching about him being put in jail.
He suddenly became the golden child who had never done any wrong, even though they’d beat the shit out of him as much as they had the rest of us when he’d actually been in the house.
But they swore to CPS that Travis had been wrongly accused.
That he was innocent, and because nobody gave a shit about poor kids in the foster system, we’d been left there with them.
Somewhere along the line, I think I’d started to believe Travis wasn’t that bad either. That he wasn’t dangerous.
Or maybe that was just what my brain had tried to convince me when he’d walked back into my life a few months ago.
I’d been numb. I’d convinced myself he was a pest but that he wasn’t the biggest danger in my life, so he wasn’t worth wasting thought on.
How wrong I’d been.
“He knows what I did,” I whispered to them. “I should have just gotten him the money when he asked for it. Maybe none of this would have happened.”
Whip shook his head. “This was happening before he wanted money, Vi. Paying him off wouldn’t have gotten rid of him.”
“Why didn’t he just kill me in that warehouse? He could have. Many times.”
Levi cleared his throat. “He’s getting off on tormenting you. It’s a game in his mind, pushing you just far enough that you’re close to breaking only to back off so he can do it all again. Sending us all letters. Heightening the panic of everyone around you so you never get a break from it.”
“It’s working. God, I feel so stupid!” Another long-forgotten memory rose to the surface, and I felt so sick I had to clutch my stomach.
“He used to make traps. I saw him and his friends one day out in the woods, digging a hole and sharpening sticks to make a pit for someone or something to fall into. I ran back home before they could see me, and they came back pretty soon after, so I think I convinced myself they lost interest and gave up. But I never went back into the woods to check. I was too scared I would accidentally fall into their trap myself.” I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I had nightmares for weeks after, of being forced into the woods and falling into a black hole of nothingness where I just fell and fell, the anticipation of landing on those sharpened sticks always there but never actually happening.” I stared at them in horror. “I’d forgotten so much of this.”
“You hadn’t forgotten,” Whip said quietly.
“You’d repressed it. Compartmentalized it, and who could blame you?
You were barely more than a child and not equipped to deal with anything like this.
You had no one to protect you.” He rubbed my arm.
“I’m no Grayson, but maybe it’s only now you feel safe enough to let it out. ”
Which seemed crazy because I was hardly safe with Travis out there, clearly still wanting my head on a spike. And yet there was truth in his words.
For the first time in my life, I had a family.
Not just one friend who served as my crutch, but a real support system.
Three men who loved me and proved it every single day in the way they touched me, cared for me, protected me.
A brother who had already proven once he would kill even his best friend for me if I asked him to.
A sister-in-law. Nieces and nephews. Friends in Bliss and Nyah.
I wasn’t the girl who sat scared in her apartment every night, living vicariously through doctors on a TV show. I wasn’t the woman clinging to her one and only friend, knowing that at some point, he was going to meet someone and leave her.
Toby had never held me back, but the way I’d clung to him had. I’d trauma bonded to him in high school and then spent ten years holding on to that, too scared to walk alone because I’d spent my childhood with no one and I didn’t want to go back.
I still didn’t. Nobody wanted to be alone.
I still had a long way to go, but where I was felt healthy.
Whip and Levi and X all clung to me in the same way I held on to them. I wasn’t dragging them down.
We were all holding each other afloat. Supporting each other.
“So, what now?” X asked. “Other than killing Violet’s foster parents, killing the CPS workers who left you with them, killing Travis…” He cracked his knuckles. “It’s a good thing I put my lucky killing socks on this morning!”
Levi glanced at him. “Do you really—” He shook his head. “You know what? Never mind.”
Whip ignored them and focused on me. “Do you have any idea where he’s staying?”
“No. None. Probably nowhere nice, if he truly is broke.”
“Maybe at a friend’s place?” Levi asked.
I shrugged. “If he still has any. I can’t even remember the names of the boys he was friends with in high school. They were older. One might have been Andrew or Andy or something.” I screwed up my face. “Sorry, that’s really not much to go on, is it?”
X squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”
I had no doubt he would. The only question in my mind was whether Nyah would still be alive when they did. Realization dawned on me, and I covered my mouth, bile rising up my throat. “Oh God.” I rushed back up the path without a word of explanation to the guys.
I didn’t need to. I knew they would follow.
I banged my way back inside Francine’s office.
She jumped a mile again then scowled at me. “Violet! Dammit, you have got to stop doing that! My heart can’t handle it. Just knock like a normal person!”
I ignored her reprimands. “The jobs Nyah was supposed to do the day she went missing, did Travis Brumley book any of those?”
Francine pressed her lips together. “I already gave the police a list—”
“Yeah, a list of the house addresses and the owners’ names. I got all that from the roster too. But who booked those jobs, Francine?”
She squinted at the screen again and her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
I wanted to reach across the desk and force her hands to move faster.
“Ain’t got all day, lady!” X shouted, straight back into his Dirty Harry role. “You type slower than my grandma!” He turned to me. “Which actually is not really an insult because she’s pretty fast. You know Silas has apparently been teaching her ‘digital skills?’”
Levi glanced at him. “Silas is that guy you went to school with who’s now banging your grandmother, right?”
X went pale. “Why remind me?”
Levi shrugged. “You sure when he said digital skills, he didn’t mean digit skills? You know a digit in some places is the term they use for fingers.”
X frowned, Francine’s slow-ass click-clacking on the keyboard the only sound in the room until X put together what Levi was getting at.
His mouth dropped open. “What are you saying? That Silas isn’t teaching my grandmother how to touch type but he’s using his fingers to…”
Levi shrugged one shoulder. “Get all up in her hot pocket?”
Whip grimaced. “For fuck’s sake, Levi. What is wrong with you? You’ve been hanging out with X too much.”
I couldn’t have agreed more. But I’d seen Silas and X’s grandmother together…and they’d definitely seemed like they were more into Silas’s ‘digit’ skills, rather than learning about emails and the World Wide Web.
X was positively green. He glared at Levi. “You are so lucky my digits are only interested in Violet’s hot pocket. Or I would so be tracking down your granny right now and offering her a little digital relief!”
“Please stop talking, both of you,” I said weakly. “Please never say the words hot pocket or digit ever again.”
Francine gave them both a stern look from behind the desk.
“I agree with Violet. Just because women get older, doesn’t mean they don’t have needs too.
We were all once twenty and thirty like all of you.
Our hot pockets don’t stop needing to be filled just because we hit our forties and fifties and beyond. ”
Christ. I did not want to have a conversation about who or what was filling my aging boss’s hot pocket. “Please, Francine,” I begged. “Just tell us if Travis booked any of Nyah’s jobs that day.”
She muttered something but must have finally found whatever she was looking for because she nodded slowly. “Yes. He booked her first job of the day. 1705 Fire Ridge Way.”
Any glimmer of hope that Nyah had just upped and left Saint View of her own accord vanished.
She’d gone to that house.
I knew it in my bones.
And now a madman had her.