Chapter 5 #2
Words he hadn't liked hearing falling from her pretty pink lips.
She was beautiful. Usually, he didn't allow himself to spend much time thinking about the women who passed through Azure’s training facility.
He saw them, but he never really saw them.
He didn't need to. He wasn't here to worry about them, he was here to end this trafficking ring so that more women didn't end up like them. It was up to Prey to get them out once they were sold and then ensure they got the appropriate treatment for the trauma they’d suffered.
Only it seemed impossible to ignore Makayla.
She was strong and determined, but she wasn't loud and over-the-top like some of the other women had been.
Some of them yelled and screamed, threatened to kill them, and cursed them out until they were blue in the face.
But then put them face to face with torture, and they buckled like a house of cards.
This wasn't buckling. This was enduring.
And for the first time in a long time, he was standing by someone who had probably lived through the same exact horrors as a child that he had.
She hadn't served in the military, and some self-defense training didn't equip someone to survive torture. The only way she could handle this the way she was now was to have already experienced it before, just like she’d said, and that only left the option of her having survived it in childhood.
After he’d had William and Adrian bind her to the chair and then come in her mouth—something that he actually had to try to will himself to do, because he wasn't at all turned on by seeing her like that—he’d picked up his tablet and gotten to work.
Scouring the internet for every scrap of information he could find on the pretty brunette, he’d found that she had indeed grown up in the foster care system.
Just like he had. Except their lives after seemed to have taken vastly differing paths.
Gaining access to her social media, he’d found she had dozens of friends.
Birthday posts from two months ago were filled with well wishes, and there were lots of photos posted of her on vacations and out having fun with friends.
There were even posts from the last couple of days asking anyone who might have knowledge of why and how Makayla disappeared to come forward.
People loved her. Cared about her. Saw value in her. Her life was like a dream, despite the horrors she had told him she lived through, which had prepared her for surviving this. It was everything he himself had been positive wasn't possible after living a childhood and adolescence like he had.
Maybe it wasn't what they’d lived through that was different.
Maybe it was just them. She had chosen light.
She’d found a way to use her personal trauma to help others.
He supposed in a way he also used his trauma to help others, but not in the same way she did.
Van saw people as chess pieces to be manipulated to mitigate losses and procure the best possible outcome.
It was cerebral to him, not emotional. But Makayla embraced her emotions while he shut his down.
The difference between them, combined with the similarities, made him want to do … something.
Which wasn't him at all. He never allowed himself to see these women as real human beings.
In a different way than the other men here, he didn't see them as toys to be used and abused, he just didn't allow himself to get distracted from his goals and purposes by worrying about what was happening to them.
Knowing that she’d been like him, suffered through a hellish childhood, it didn't seem right to have her stay here and continue suffering. It didn’t seem fair.
But fair wasn't supposed to matter right now.
It wasn't like he’d never intervened before.
When he’d caught on to the fact that Nathan Solace had fallen for one of Azure’s captives, Emma Beaumont, he’d kept quiet when the man had turned off one of the cameras.
Van had one of his own in the room, so he’d overheard everything, but he hadn't let on to anyone else, and he’d helped feed the rumors that Nathan wasn't a traitor to Azure, just a stupid man thinking with the wrong head.
He’d allowed the camera to stay off, too, giving Mateo Adler a place to have privacy with the woman he’d loved and ghosted when he went undercover with Azure.
Van hadn't known whether Mateo knew the camera was off in that room, but he must have because the two had spent a little time in there.
Once he knew that Mateo was waiting until Ally Thatcher was sold before working out a plan with Prey to get her out, he had even gone so far as to personally lead a potential buyer he believed would be minimally abusive to Ally to her profile as it was being uploaded.
That had paid off, and Mateo and a team had been able to rescue the woman, even if things had gone crazy after.
Going against everything he believed, Van had actually been the one to suggest to Azure’s second in command and day-to-day manager of the ring, Griffin Finch, that as punishment for Mateo going rogue, he should be switched to the underground fighting rings.
That way, Mateo had more freedom to move and a better ability to enact a plan to get his girl out.
Messing in other people’s love lives was stupid, reckless, and totally out of character for him.
He’d seen it as more of a favor for a colleague, but it meant that he was now one of only two Prey undercover operatives still here.
He couldn’t make any more emotional decisions, couldn’t allow himself to be swayed by anything else.
Not even the woman still sitting in the chair, spit and semen dribbling down her chin, staining her naked body. She didn't complain, and when one of the men wasn't thrusting into her mouth, she watched him.
Van didn't like it. Didn't like the way her soft blue eyes seemed to see more than they should.
It felt like those eyes were probing past the surface, deep into his soul.
Seeing things he didn't want others to know, ugly scars on his soul that had blackened it beyond repair.
Seeing things he had put a lot of work into pretending didn't exist. Although he pretended that didn't exist either.
“You taking another turn?” Hank asked as he strolled over to the woman bound to the chair and unzipped himself.
“Maybe later,” he said distractedly, keeping his eyes on the screen before him.
“Got to live more in the real world, my friend,” Hank said as he shoved himself into Makayla’s mouth.
Actually, if there was one thing that Van would love, it was to live in a different world than the one in which he existed.
A world that didn't abuse innocent children, that didn't snatch women off the street, torture them, and then sell them to men who would do even worse to them.
A world where he wouldn't be curling his fingers into fists because he fought an internal battle that he’d never experienced before.
Life had taught him to be selfish, to set his own goals and do whatever it took to achieve them, shutting out everything else. But Makayla didn't deserve to be here, and that bothered him. More than he thought he was capable of feeling, and that was a problem.