43. To own is to… Eradicate
Chapter forty-three
To own is to… Eradicate
W hen I wake, the first thing that hits me is the pain, every breath agonizing. I jerk upright, one of my hands not following the command as my eyes wrench open. The harsh lighting makes my tender eyes sear in pain. My free hand flies to my chest, prodding, testing.
“That vest saved your life.”
I groan, my throat scratchy and raw.
“Yeah, tear gas is a real bitch, I’ve heard.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, willing them to stop burning so I can find the source of the annoying voice. It doesn’t work, and as uncomfortable as that is, the steady beeping beside me, the rawness of my throat is worse. A tiny tendril of relief finds me when my shaky fingers find my silver, infinity-style collar still in place around my neck. “Water, please.”
I can’t see the man as he rises from wherever he is, telling someone else, a silent party in the room, to alert the nurses that I’m awake. It's when rough, warm hands find mine, thrusting a cup into them, that I flinch, something heavy and sickening feeling my belly. Still, I take the water, gulping it down each of the four times he refills it for me. Emotion clogs my throat as nurses flood in, bringing some kind of cold catch tray to me to hold while they flush my eyes. Being here, it’s all so… wrong .
Their touches are wrong, sickening.
Disgusting, and I feel dirtier for it.
My lip wobbles before I take a deep breath, swallowing past the sob caught in my throat. Finally, for the first time, I get a glimpse of the room, of the owner of that annoying voice. He’s a gruff older man, not very tall, but imposing all the same. The air of authority around him is suffocating. When my eyes land on the handcuff tethering me to the hospital bed, it's a struggle to find any amount of inner strength at all.
This isn’t Bloom. You’re safe. This is a hospital.
Breathe.
“Let’s start with your name, then we can find out how you know Adrian Roth.” It’s not a request, but he must see the confusion in my eyes at that name again.
“Perhaps you don’t know him by that. He’s gone by many through the years. We’ll get to that in time. Who are you?”
I stare at him, panic banding around my lungs like ropes. The handcuff, the lights, the fucking beeping—it all prods at my chest, making my breath come in rough spurts.
Warrick.
I would sob if I could breathe, and saltwater laps at my chin.
Again, I find myself waking up in a sterile room, police glaring at me after I’ve lost everything.
This time, I handle it even worse.
The next few hours seem to drag on like lifetimes. No matter my silence, the questions don’t stop, and the man I now know as Agent Benigno never seems to tire. He rounds my hospital bed, my tired eyes darting toward the armed guards outside the door.
“…I mean, we’re already scanning for your information. Being seen as cooperative can go a long way for someone in your position, or we can fucking sit here and wait until transport shows up and continue to waste everyone’s time. That’s who you want to stand by, huh? A monster who supplies weapons to fucking war criminals, to terrorists, a fucking woman killer? This isn’t some Bonnie and Clyde bullshit. These are the big games. I saw your body when they wheeled you in here. You gonna back that fucking bastard after what he did to you? Or maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe he let his friends have a go at you too.”
Indignation fills my chest, hating what it must look like to them. My state is an alarming one, made more so by the fluorescent lights. I want to tell them every mark, every bruise, I begged for, relished in it, but I don’t trust myself.
Don’t trust this fucking lump in my throat.
I don’t know what to do, what to say without him, so I say nothing at all.
It’s a silence I slip into like an old, comfortable pair of shoes. My mom asked a lot of questions toward the end, demanding answers I didn’t have, the same way Grandma had before her. You learn to make yourself small, quiet, just as well as you learn the sound of their footsteps in the hall. My fingers find the collar on my neck again, rooting myself with it, but it’s a mistake, one Agent Benigno notes as he hits the nurse's call button.
One quickly filters into the room, glaring at him. It seems his grating presence isn’t just offensive to me.
“Let’s see what we can do about that necklace. I think it’s making her uncomfortable.”
My lips part, my hand coming up to shield my neck. “No.”
He smirks. “It’s got a weird locking mechanism on it. You’re lucky you didn’t have to be shocked. It would’ve killed you. I’m sure the hospital-“
“Sorry to interrupt, Agent, but—”
He turns toward the nurse on his heel. “Another interference from any of you, and you’ll be arrested. ”
The tiny woman doesn’t back down. “She was abused! You cannot treat her like this! She needs to speak to—"
“Have her removed,” he sighs, and just like that, she is.
The next nurse who comes in is unfamiliar, keeping her head down, and I don’t blame her, nor do I see the brave, tiny woman again.
It takes an hour before they show up with whatever tool they plan to use to pry this off my neck. My response is shocking, even to me. I’m not a violent person by nature, never was. You wouldn’t know it by the way I scream. It feels like they’re stripping something vital from me, the only thing holding me together as I claw and scream and beg. I’m in a wretched state by the time their hands pin me to the bed. My heart stops, all the panic tunneling into a single point that makes bile rise in my throat, and I can smell Mistress, can smell the urine, the cigar smoke, the cigarettes. I can taste my teacher’s cock, feel the gripping, tugging, pushing hands. “Please don’t hurt me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I wail. “Please. I need it. I need it!” Agent Benigno looks downright pleased with himself, looming above my panic like a sword ready to deliver the final blow after they’ve hacked at my neck with a dull blade.
I’m raped .
Again and again, I’m raped, pinned and screaming while they take from me. The physical rapes aren’t the worst ones. It’s these that rewrite me, alter me, until I’m nothing but broken bits.
They took it.
My last piece of him.
Maybe the last of my sanity, too.
I don’t know how long I’m left alone to scream after that, once the hands leave and my throat is raw and bleeding. Agent Benigno is a silent and steadfast witness to it all. I retch, my stomach trying to rid itself of anything weighing it down as I jerk until my wrist is tender and bloody. Every member of staff turned away—not that they could help me.
“Fuck you, you fucking bastard! He’s going to fucking kill you! He’s going to kill you for touching me!” I scream, sobs wreaking my chest, my resolve gone. “ Give it back to me now! Give it back! Now!”
He holds my collar, bagged like evidence at a crime scene, but I suppose that makes sense. All of this a fucking disaster, my body the crime scene, made that way long before Warrick saved me. For the first time, I’m shown my own unraveling, the frayed tendrils of my mind. He raises it, showing the beautiful, broken thing to me. “You can hold it if you give me your name.”
“Renee,” I gasp, the only name that will come to mind. “My name is Renee Stinson.” My mother's maiden name. It’s stupid, but my brain isn’t working, and I need that back .
He shakes his head, pulling out his phone, dragging through something on the screen.
“Give it to me, please!”
“We’re off to a poor start, Chloe.”
My eyes struggle to focus on the phone screen when he all but shoves it in my face. It’s a video, the volume blaring suddenly. “…Twenty-one-year-old dental assistant Chloe Tyson was last seen inside of this bar with a group of friends on her birthday, November 17 th of last year. Her friends say she went outside alone to get some air and never returned. Unfortunately, the surveillance cameras around the bar weren’t in operation that night, a detail some say is suspicious.”
I watch as the female reporter gestures to my driver’s license picture on the screen, detailing my physical appearance. I watch what must be an old recording of the broadcast with the same silent reverence you’d use when you watch a car crash. The Sour Grape looks the same as it did that night, down to the icy rain dripping off the purple awning.
“…Her father, heir to the well-known Instrument manufacturing powerhouse, prefers to remain out of the public eye but has issued a statement urging for his daughter's safe return, as well as offering a one hundred thousand dollar reward to anyone with information that could lead to her return.”
One hundred thousand . My master paid far more than that for me.
“You already knew who I was so, why ? Why do all of this?” I whisper, the sound guttural and broken .
“I wanted to know if Chloe Tyson was a liar,” he comments casually before gesturing for someone else to enter. My eyes spill over with tears as he hands another man the bag holding my collar. “I want that logged and printed.”
I’m gutted, my only free hand clamped around my stomach, like it will stop the bleeding.
The world was looking.
They knew.
My dad cared .
Did Warrick know?
My bottom lip wobbles. He was watching them. Of course he knew.
He’d known about the reward, about the appeals and searches.
“Now, care to explain how a dental assistant from Chicago drops off the face of the Earth outside a shitty bar on her birthday and ends up across the world and arrested during an FBI raid of one of the world's most wanted man?” I stare at him, my chest heaving. The silence between us drags on for ages before he sighs, checking his watch. “Look at that. It’s officially five past midnight. Happy Birthday .”
I decide then that this is all some kind of fucked comeuppance. The whiplash I’ve experienced in the past year has forever changed me into someone unrecognizable. It's some kind of divine punishment dealt out by the world, just like my mom always said it would be. Punishment for letting her drown that night, punishment for going on with my life, for trying to live while she rotted. It’s my penance, and it's finally coming to its exquisite, violent end.
And I don’t mind.
I sit back, my body slumping against my skewed pillows on the hospital bed. My now nearly waist-long blonde hair is knotted in waves around my face. He stares back at me, and I recognize something in his eyes, a coldness I’ve become accustomed to. A brutality, a warning, but that look doesn’t scare me, not when I’ve bedded with monsters. Still, I sit, letting the lack of weight around my neck, the beeping from the machine, choke me, slithering through my veins like a snake. He opens his mouth, but before he has time to put substance to any of the vile things weighing him down, the door to the room flies open, our heads snapping toward the woman who bursts through.
“Hello, my name is Naomi Durian. I’m with social services.” She gives me a reassuring nod before turning a hard look at Agent Benigno. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, tormenting a victim?”
I don’t know what it is about that word that makes me feel faint, like all the heat rushes to my head, and my stomach cramps and curdles.
“You have no authority—"
“Actually, I have every authority, granted by the federal government to act in the best interests of—”
“You will not impede this investigation!” He snaps, making me flinch.
She doesn’t bat an eye. "Surely, we can have this conversation elsewhere."
He glares at me, before relenting, stalking out of the door before her.
The woman’s fiery red hair swishes, framing her round, heart-shaped face. “I’ll be right back, Chloe. Everything is going to be alright. I’ll get you back home, okay?”
I doubt that.