Chapter 53
My heart thudded in my chest, and I felt sick to my stomach.
Part of me couldn't believe I was doing this.
I never, in a million years, thought that I would ever have the power to do this kind of thing.
I thought that I would have to spend the rest of my life suffering from the knowledge of what that piece of shit did to me, what he likely did to others, and the only thing I could do about it was pretend it never happened.
Legally, I had no proof, so I couldn't try to have the system take care of him, even if it was a system that cared much about sexual violence.
Even if I did, he would only get a few years if I was lucky. More likely, he would end up with a slap on the wrist and a couple of months of probation.
If I tried to vigilante it myself, I would be the one who ended up in jail.
I had no delusions about my own skills or capabilities when it came to batmanning that shit and trying to take him out myself.
So I had swallowed it down like a poison pill.
I had let it taint my life for years. I had thrown myself into working in the strip club, searching for some kind of redemption in the worst of the lot, working off of some ideal of taking control of my own sexuality and finding instead more hatred and disgust.
I had avoided talking to Arnina about it in full, seeing her as an enemy who would choose him over me when she should have been able to see what was hurting me without me saying the full truth of it out loud.
None of what I did was healthy.
And it was because there was a rot in my heart that I didn't know how to heal.
I didn't know if this was going to heal it, but it was going to make sure he could never do to another woman what he did to me.
I lengthened my stride, moving faster as I tried to get to where they were keeping the prisoner.
I still felt a little bad about implying to Silvia that I would attack the ship where her kids were. I needed to apologize to her for that.
It had been a dirty dig, and I knew it.
There was no way in hell that I was going to attack them. The other human women who had undergone the whole capture and cryo bullshit that I had were too precious to me. Plus, the whole kid' thing put violence completely off the table.
That didn't mean I couldn't fake being a psycho, though.
I was great at faking being a psycho.
It was one of my favorite methods to get a guy to back off.
Whenever I had that late-night, early-morning customer who would wait for me in the parking lot and ask me on a 'date' while I was trying to get to my car, I would turn and go full crazy in the head on him.
Screaming at the top of my lungs, barking, yowling, snarling - most guys, even if they had bad intent towards me, weren't ready to deal with that kind of reaction.
They wanted the women who would hunch over and hope they would just go away on their own.
Or the women they could get while they were unconscious.
Wow, I really had a bad opinion about human men.
That was the unfortunate thing about bad experiences with a type of person. You have enough repeated bad experiences with the same type of person, and you start assuming every person of that type will be a similar level of shit bag.
The door slid open, and I walked into the room.
Speaking of shit bags.
Four cat elf badass space marines stood there, and in between them, Bryan knelt, his hands secured behind him and tied to his ankles. The panic on his face morphed into a confused relief as he saw me.
"You!" he gasped.
Damn right, it was me.
But there was someone else in the room.
Standing at the edge of the room, far away from the cat elf soldiers, was a brown-haired woman who was trying to shrink into invisibility against the wall.
She had dark circles under her eyes from raccoon eye makeup that hadn't been removed before sleeping.
She was wearing a T-shirt and underwear, and had no pants on at all.
Her underwear was on inside out.
My heart sank as I knew exactly what I was looking at.
That little bit was either absent-mindedness or the fact that she hadn't prepared to spend the night somewhere… and given that she had been with Bryan…
"What is she doing here?" I demanded of the soldiers, pointing at her, hoping that the answer was something entirely different than what I knew it would be.
"You told us to bring evidence," one of the cat elves said.
"I meant, like, any substances lying out in the open or weird pictures or things like that," I said. "That is a person. Not evidence."
"Health scan shows the drug in her system that you told us to look for," the same cat elf replied.
"Shit," I said.
"Lorelei! Tell me what is going on!" Bryan demanded, his voice rising in pitch.
"Gag him or something." I waved my hand at him as I walked over towards the frightened woman.
He could wait.
"Hey," I said as I approached her slowly. "I'm Lorelei. You're safe here. I'm betting you don't remember much of last night?"
She leaned towards me like I was a fire on a cold night as she nodded.
"No, I have no idea what happened last night. I must have drunk too much. Why are there elves?" she whispered. "Why do they have tails? And why are they singing?"
Oh, this was a lot.
A wave of guilt washed over me, and I let it roll through me and let go of it.
Yes, I felt guilty I hadn't done more to shine the spotlight on this douchebag so that he couldn't get to other girls.
Yes, I felt guilty that I hadn't tried harder to pry Arnina away from him.
Who knew what kind of relationship that even was, if she even remembered all of it.
This woman here was standing in inside-out underwear and a tank top without a bra.
She looked disheveled, confused, uncomfortable, and she was standing in a slightly hunched position like her body hurt.
She didn't have a translator chip and couldn't understand what the cat boys were singing.
So she was rationalizing the utter blank that I knew her memory of last night was.
Of course, she would assume it was something that had been in her own control, like drinking to an extreme excess.
If it was that, then it was partially her fault, right?
It was something she could have stopped, right?
Fucking wrong.
I had never wanted to do this.
But here I was, the woman with the power to stop it.
First, I had to break the horrible news.
For the first time in a long time, I wished I was a gentle, warm, loving pile of womanly smoosh who knew how to be there for others with something more than crude jokes and humorous distraction techniques.
"Okay, so this sucks, and I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but I'm pretty sure you already know," I said, pausing for a long moment.
Should I hug her?
She needed a cup of tea and a soft blanket for this, and all she had was me.
I was it.
So I pushed it all out as fast as possible, my words tripping over themselves in my urgency to get them out.
"This douchebag Bryan drugged you last night.
It wasn't your fault. He is the one responsible for his actions.
You are not responsible for him preying on you.
What he did to you, he did to me, and since he is a serial… "
I took a deep breath, stopping on the word.
I had to say it.
It was real. I had to say it.
"Since he is a serial rapist, I'm going to make sure he gets some proper justice, so you can rest easy that he won't do it to anyone ever again.
You don't need to be around for this. You can go back down to Earth if you want, or you can stay here and let our medical team take care of you," I finished.
"I don't… I can't…" She took a deep breath and looked down at her bare feet. Then she looked back up at me with her heavy with a level of confusion and exhaustion. "What do you mean go back down to Earth?"
"Oh, you're on a spaceship," I said. "Do you need a hug? I'm not good at that stuff, but I can give you a hug if it will help."
She blinked at me.
"Please don't touch me," she said.
Right then. I nodded, acknowledging her clearly defined need to not be touched.
Ugh, I didn't want to be doing this.
That thought popped into my head, followed by a wave of relief.
I didn't want to be this person because I hadn't needed this person.
I had wondered, for years, if I would have been able to speak up, to go through it all, to put an end to it if I had that person, the one who gave you hugs and helped you through it all - but I would have done the same thing this woman did.
I would have pushed that away.
I didn't want the hugs and the sympathy.
What I needed was a friend who had shovels in the trunk of her car and a ride or die attitude. I hadn't needed someone to hold my hand. I needed someone willing to hold the flashlight.
"I'm about to kill him," I said.
She stood there, silent, looking at me.
She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
Bryan made a muffled groan in the background, but we both ignored him.
"Are you really?" she asked softly. "Won't you go to jail for that?"
I grinned at her.
"Hey guys," I turned my head to look at the four soldiers. "If I kill this male human in front of you - is that going to be a problem?" Then I looked over to the doorway where my mate lurked. "Hey, Emperor - you going to imprison me?"
The soldiers laughed in response.
"You are the ruler of Earth, my love," the Emperor replied to me, serious despite my joking tone. His translator probably didn't handle jokes. "You are the law here."
I turned back to the woman to find her looking confused.
"I have a translator chip, and they have a translator on their wristbands, so they can all understand you, by the way," I explained. "As for what he said, the Emperor said, I'm the law and I can do what I want."
Her eyes widened even further, something I didn't realize was possible.
I was really freaking this chick out.
"Why?" she said, her tone strained.