Chapter 18 Shay
Shay
Tom leaving the knife behind had been a test, then.
One that I had very obviously failed.
What had even been the point of it? To see if I’d try to escape? To see how far he’d broken me? Why give me hope only to snatch it away at the last second, like a cat playing with a mouse before the kill?
I didn’t know anymore. Couldn’t think clearly enough to parse his motivations, to untangle the intricate web of manipulation he’d woven around me.
I’d woken up chained to the wall, as if my hours of desperate work had never happened.
As if I’d dreamed up the whole thing. The knife and plate of food were gone, vanished like they’d never existed.
Everything was exactly as it had been before, reset like a stage between acts, props removed and replaced for the next performance.
A few hours passed in that timeless gray space.
But then, I started to feel like something was wrong.
It took me a moment to realize what it was.
Tom never brought me dinner.
That had never happened before. The meals had been the one constant, the one thing I could count on even when I refused to eat, even when I threw them at his head. Three times a day, regular as clockwork. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. A routine that made this nightmare feel almost mundane.
Not this time, however.
Had I made him angry?
The thought sparked something close to fear. I’d seen Tom frustrated before—had seen him hurt and desperate and pleading. But angry? That was new territory.
I wondered if I’d finally crossed some invisible line.
If the escape attempt had been the last straw, the thing that pushed past his seemingly infinite patience into something more dangerous, more volatile.
Maybe he’d decided I wasn’t worth the effort anymore.
Maybe he’d realized I would never give him what he wanted—my understanding, my acceptance, my complicity in his madness.
Was he going to kill me now?
I didn’t know how I felt about that. Angry, probably. Terrified, certainly. But all I actually felt was hollowness—a vast empty space where emotions should have lived, numbness spreading like frost.
At least no one could say that I’d gone down without a fight.
Time continued its distorted crawl. My stomach cramped with hunger. My mouth was dry, tongue thick and cottony. The single bulb overhead flickered occasionally, threatening to plunge me into complete darkness but never quite committing.
Then I heard it.
Footsteps.
But there was something different about them—the rhythm was off, the weight distributed strangely.
The basement door opened, the hinges groaning their familiar protest.
I looked up, my heart suddenly racing, adrenaline flooding through me in a cold rush.
Tom appeared at the top of the stairs, and he was carrying something over his shoulder.
No. Not something—someone.
A woman. I saw it once he laid her on the concrete floor a few feet from where I was chained. The body hit the ground with a dull thump that echoed in the confined space, the sound reverberating in my head like a struck bell.
She was unconscious. Or at least I hoped unconscious and not something worse. She was completely limp, a ragdoll in human form.
Horror crashed over me like a wave, stealing my breath.
“What did you do?” My voice came out rough, scraped raw. “Tom, what did you do?”
He didn’t look at me. He was kneeling beside her, checking her pulse, his fingers pressed to the side of her neck. If I strained my eyes hard enough, I could see the barely-there rise and fall of her chest.
The relief was short-lived, however, swallowed immediately by dread.
“I need you to understand,” Tom said, his voice calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that comes before storms. “I need you to see what I see.”
“What are you talking about?” I was pulling against the chains now, panic rising in my throat like bile. The metal bit into my wrists, familiar pain grounding me even as everything else spiraled. “Who is she? What are you going to do to her?”
“Her name is Eliza Taylor.” He stood slowly, finally meeting my eyes with an expression I couldn’t read.
He moved toward the stairs, and for a moment I thought he was leaving—abandoning us both down here—but instead he retrieved something from where he’d left it on the steps. A folder, thick with papers.
“Eliza Taylor has been trafficking children for the past eight years. She finds them on the streets, in shelters, in neglectful foster homes. She tells them she can give them a better life. She’s good at what she does.
She knows exactly what to promise. Most are between the ages of ten and sixteen. ”
I felt sick. I looked at the unconscious woman on the floor with new eyes.
“She sells them,” Tom continued, laying out photographs one by one like he was presenting evidence in court. “To the highest bidder. For purposes I don’t need to describe. We both know what happens to children who disappear into that network.”
The photos were damning. Eliza Taylor with various children—outside a shelter, at a bus station, in a park.
Her hand on a small shoulder, a reassuring smile on her face.
Exchanges of money captured from a distance, blurry but unmistakable.
Everything documented and cataloged with the thoroughness of someone building a case.
“The police have known about her for years. But they can’t touch her. She’s too careful, too connected. Always has plausible deniability, an alibi, lawyers who can make the right evidence disappear. She’s untouchable through legal channels.”
“Do you know how many children she’s sold? Thirty-seven,” he said the number slowly, letting it sink in. “Thirty-seven lives destroyed. And she walks free. Gets to go home every night. Gets to sleep peacefully while those children—” He stopped, jaw clenching.
“Tom—”
“I need you to understand,” he interrupted, his voice more intense now.
“ You might look at me as nothing more than a killer. So I decided to show you up close what it is that I actually do. Not the sanitized version, not the aftermath you find at crime scenes. But this, right here, right this moment.”
He pulled out another photograph, holding it out toward me. “This is one of her victims.”
A little girl stared out from the image, no more than ten years old. She was smiling at the camera, gap-toothed and innocent, unaware of what waited in her future. Sunshine caught her hair, turning it gold. She reminded me a bit of Ella.
“Caroline Carter. Disappeared from a group home three years ago. Last seen with Eliza Taylor, who promised her a safe place to stay, a family who would love her. She was sold within forty-eight hours. Found dead six months later in a hotel room in Nevada. Medical examiner said she’d been—” Tom stopped himself. “Well, you can imagine the rest.”
I didn’t want to imagine. But I’d seen too much in my career not to. The images came to me unbidden, devastating in their clarity. All the cases I’d worked, all the crime scene photos I’d studied, all the autopsy reports I’d read. The reality of what happened to children like Caroline Carter.
“This is another one.” He showed me another photograph. A boy this time, maybe thirteen, with dark eyes that looked too old for his face, like he’d already seen too much.
“Alright, stop.” The word came out strangled, desperate. “What do you want from me?”
Tom set the folder down carefully, then looked at me with an expression that made my blood run cold—something between hope and determination, something fanatic and frightening.
The woman on the floor remained motionless.
Her chest rose and fell in the slow, steady rhythm of drug-induced sleep.
She had no idea what was about to happen.
No idea these were her last hours of existence, that her life was being weighed and measured by a man who’d appointed himself judge and executioner.
“You’re going to kill her,” I said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, a fact as certain as gravity.
“No.” Tom knelt beside me, close enough that I could see the green flecks in his eyes, could smell the soap he’d used that morning. “I’m not going to kill her. You are.”
The words didn’t make sense at first. My brain rejected them, couldn’t process them into anything coherent. They bounced off the surface of my understanding, refusing to sink in.
“What?” I pulled away from him as much as the chains allowed, trying to put distance between us even though there was nowhere to go, the pipe holding me firm. “You’re fucking insane if you think I’m going to—”
“She’s dead either way, Shay.” Tom’s voice was gentle, almost tender. He said my name the way he’d always said it—warmly, intimately, like a caress. “Whether you do it or not, she dies today. This is not a choice about her fate—that’s already decided. This is a choice about you.”
“No.” I continued to shake my head, not knowing what else to do.
“And why not? You’ve seen what people like her do. You’ve investigated the aftermath, collected the evidence, interviewed the survivors—when there are survivors. You know what happens to those children.”
He was right. I did know.
I’d worked trafficking cases before. I’d looked into the empty eyes of children who’d been bought and sold like commodities, used and discarded like trash.
Had read the reports that made me physically ill, detailed documentation of unspeakable acts.
Seen the photographs that invaded my dreams and never really left.
Attended the autopsies of the ones who didn’t survive, standing in sterile rooms while pathologists cataloged what had been done to their small bodies.
“She deserves to die. You know she does. You’ve always known that some people are beyond redemption. Beyond rehabilitation. That some crimes are too monstrous to forgive, too terrible to allow second chances.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a syringe. He held it up to the light, the liquid inside catching the glow from the overhead bulb.