Chapter 19 #2
“And you just—” he huffed, frustrated. “You let me sit there and talk about Abel like you didn’t know what that felt like? Like you didn’t know what it was like to love someone and not know what happened to them?”
“Oh, sweetheart.” I pressed my lips briefly to his temple. “I know what happened to him.”
His eyes were wild beneath his glasses, hair around his ears poking in directions as he sat up and braced both hands on my chest. “What?”
“I was one of Ashford's student aides. I worked early mornings in the annex of the library. I preferred quiet shifts, and no one really paid attention to me being there.”
“Idiots,” he muttered. “You’re brilliant and devastatingly handsome. I would’ve followed you around like a fucking pet.”
“I’ll file that idea away for later, Rabbit,” I mused, kissing his shocked lips. “But I was different back then.”
Before the need for revenge turned me into a killer.
“There was one morning I wasn’t supposed to be there,” I continued.
“I’d already clocked my hours for the week, but I didn’t want to be home.
My parents were… garbage humans. Fucking monstrosities.
My dad was a pretentious prick who beat the shit out of me when I came out as gay and then told me to walk it off.
My mom made our housekeeper help me cover it with makeup so I didn’t miss school. ”
Archie reared back like he’d been slapped. “If they weren’t already dead, I’d kill them.”
“Take it easy, baby. I already did.”
His jaw went slack. “You killed them?”
“Mm.” I confirmed. “But if you want a map of all the people I murdered and why, you’ve got to stop interrupting me.”
An incredulous noise burst from him, his mouth opening and closing, over and over like a little fish.
Cute as hell.
“My house was a fucking prison, even worse in the days after Philip left, so I went in early.”
The room narrowed around the memory.
“There was a meeting. A bunch of faculty who weren’t usually together were talking about students. Exchange students.”
“Philip?”
I nodded. “They kept mentioning shipments and rattling off eight digit numbers.”
It wasn’t a memory faded at the edges but one that had been waiting for me to look at it again.
Every detail was exactly where I left it—the light, the sound, the way the air felt in my lungs.
“There was this drawer in the bottom of an antique desk nobody ever used. I saw them lock their folders in there. Came back later that day and broke into it. Found the false bottom.”
“They just kept their files in a building that constantly had staff and students roaming around? Morons.”
“Nobody ever went that deep into the annex, and I only found it because I was looking for it.”
My stomach rolled the same way it did then, vision clouding with anger and grief as I remembered.
“They weren’t sending the students home. They were selling them.”
His fingers tightened in my shirt, breath catching hard enough that I felt it against my chest.
“They were—” he shook his head once, his brain refusing to process it. “You’re serious?”
His eyes snapped up to mine, wide and searching, like he was hoping I’d take it back.
“They sold them? Trafficking?”
“They were using the exchange program at Ashford. Other schools, too.”
Archie’s brows pulled together.
“Other schools?”
“A network. Private academies. Same structure, same pipeline. You rotate students through, you stagger the disappearances, you keep the numbers low enough that no one piece ever looks like a pattern.
“Because if one kid went missing every year from Ashford, someone would’ve noticed?”
I nodded. “So they didn’t let it stack in one place. They moved it. Spread it out. Made it look like isolated incidents instead of what it was.”
Archie stared at me, something dark and furious settling behind his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed.
“I burned it down,” I said evenly. “The annex. The records. The men running it. I burned everything.”
“And then you—” Disbelief flickered across his face. “You wrote about it. You made yourself the victim so you could control how it looked.”
“Correct.”
His mouth parted, then closed again, like he didn’t know what to do with that. “And your parents?”
“I found out a few years later they were funding it. Not directly. Donations. Investments routed through enough hands to keep them clean on paper.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.” I cleared my throat. “So I killed them too. Carbon monoxide poisoning, which wasn’t simple to arrange."
Archie stared at me.
Really stared.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Every muscle in his body jolted when he tossed his hands in the air. “Why didn’t you take what you found and hand it over? There had to be someone you could trust.”
“There were names in those records, Rabbit. Officials. Law enforcement. People with enough reach to bury it before it ever surfaced.”
He shoved his glasses in his hair and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So you just decided to handle it yourself?”
“I decided not to let it continue,” I corrected. “And I’ve spent the last seventeen years making sure it doesn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“I made connections. The FBI has a missing persons task force. I reached out to them after my parents died and donated the money I inherited to their unit. It funded their cases and helped families who lost their loved ones.”
Archie’s shoulders eased a fraction, then he pushed his glasses back down from where they’d been shoved into his hair, adjusting them carefully like he needed to see me clearly for this.
“Henry…” he murmured. “You…”
“Killed my parents and then handed over their money like that balanced it out?”
“Hey—no. Don’t do that.” He cupped my jaw with both hands and kissed me softly.
“You spent your entire adult life trying to stop what happened to Philip from happening to anyone else. You didn’t just walk away from it.
You didn’t bury it and pretend it didn’t happen.
You stayed. You fought it. You’re still fighting it. ”
A small breath left him. “You’re basically some terrifyingly competent, hyper-intelligent vigilante with a PhD and a moral compass that refuses to quit.”
Something warm cracked through the weight in my chest, and despite everything, I laughed.
God.
I loved him.
Harder than I knew what to do with.
“Careful,” I murmured, my hands wrapping around his waist, pulling him closer. “You’re starting to sound impressed.”
“I am impressed,” he shot back, not even pretending otherwise. “And a little concerned. But mostly impressed. You have… friends in the FBI? Do they know what you did?”
“I wouldn’t call them friends,” I said. “They’re connections.
SSA Selena Chen is who I maintain contact with.
I was already planning to write the memoir by the time I found her.
She read the truth of it before the rest of the world…
or as much as I could put on paper without compromising anything still in motion. ”
Archie blinked. “She knows?”
“She knows enough to understand why I didn’t let it go and why dumping money into the unit was so important to me. I told her enough about what I knew so she could launch an official investigation, but she doesn’t know I set the fire.”
I cocked my head. “She might suspect though.”
Archie was quiet for a second, studying me through the lenses of his glasses before something shifted across his face.
“Did they ever find Philip?”
The question settled heavily between us.
“No,” I said after a moment.
His throat moved hard.
“Chen told me once that only a fraction of trafficking victims are ever formally identified, and even fewer actually make it home. The numbers are worse once international networks get involved.” My jaw tightened.
“A lot of families never get answers at all. Just empty space where someone used to be.”
Archie looked down then, fingers curling tighter against my shirt. “But you still kept looking anyway.”
“I did.” I exhaled slowly. “For a while, I was obsessive about it, but eventually Chen sat me down and told me there was less than a one percent chance Philip was still alive.”
Archie’s expression twisted. “Henry—”
“After that, I stopped looking for him everywhere.” My thumb brushed absently against Archie’s waist. “I stayed in contact with Chen. I funded the task force. I buried myself in my work.”
A humorless smile pulled briefly at my mouth. “I spent years studying grief and trauma and violence, like if I understood pain well enough, I could make sense of what it turned me into after he disappeared.”
Archie stared at me for a second before huffing softly through his nose. “So basically your response to unresolved trauma was becoming a terrifyingly overeducated expert on human suffering.”
“More or less.”
He nodded once. “Love that for us.”
My brow lifted. “Us?”
“Henry, I cope by overanalyzing everything until I emotionally dissociate from it.” He gestured between us. “We’re the same kind of damaged.”
“Maybe,” I said quietly. My hand slid up into his hair, holding him there for a moment. “But I haven’t felt hollow in a while, Rabbit.”
His expression softened.
“Not since you.”
Archie stared at me for a second like he didn’t know what to do with that much honesty all at once. Then his face crumpled around the edges in the sweetest fucking way.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, voice rough. “You can’t just say things like that when I’m already in love with you.”
Something warm pulled through my chest.
I kissed him before I could ruin the moment by speaking.
When we finally pulled apart, Archie’s eyes dropped briefly before lifting back to mine again. “Do you think…” He swallowed once. “Do you think she could help me look for Abel?”
My heart turned over.
“Baby.” I cupped the back of his neck. “I already sent her his photo.”
“You—you did?”
“The day you told me about him. I passed along everything you gave me. If there’s even a chance he was pulled into that network, we’ll find out.”
Bottom lip wobbling, he let out a sob before throwing himself into me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. We tipped backward into the mess of papers and photographs.
Arms tight around his body, I squeezed him while he buried himself against my chest.
“I love you!” He wailed.
“I love you too, baby.”
“What about the note?” His voice was muffled in my shirt. “Are you going to kill them too?”
“Sweetheart, I don’t just go around killing people who piss me off. Besides, I’m fairly certain I know who sent it.”
Palms against my chest, he lifted himself just enough to look me in the eyes. “Who?”
“Dean Randolph.”