Chapter 17 Carter
It had been a little over a week since Tiffany had attempted to infiltrate Sunshine Sanctuary and I had captured her.
For the first week, I fed her, washed her, took care of her, and I praised her at every chance, hoping that she could tell how much true beauty I saw in her.
She still resisted me, resisted herself and the happiness I knew she could find in this place.
She just needed to let herself enjoy it, accept it, and embrace it.
The last couple of days, however, Sunshine Sanctuary had demanded a lot of my attention.
I spent a lot of time running the facility and overseeing the final steps for our biggest deliveries of milk since we secured a contract with a very large mega store.
I instructed the farmhands to take good care of Tiffany while I was away, strictly stating that no one was to touch her unless it was strictly necessary.
I hoped they were obeying while I stood in the warehouse watching the last of nearly twenty trucks depart full of freshly extracted Milk, ready to fly off the shelves.
I used my tablet to run the expected profit of that month. The numbers. Always so important.
I first found out what the family business was by finding some strange polaroids on my father’s desk.
I’d tried to ignore them, but it was impossible.
Strange mutated women, with milk pumps attached to their breasts, with misshapen horns and hooves, and spots of fur had caught my attention.
It didn’t take much investigating to find the facility.
I confronted my father about it. He didn’t deny what he was doing,
In fact, he was shockingly open about keeping, enslaving, and torturing those women to harvest their milk.
I knew this was why my mother and sister had vanished.
He’d told me my mother had left and taken my sister without any reason, but that had been a lie.
She must’ve found out what he was doing and feared he’d eventually bring her or my sister to his twisted facility.
With cold-blooded calculation I pretended to accept it, only to come back later with the gun he had given me for my birthday and a plan.
I entered the facility and took one of his guards, without being noticed, until I had a chance to put a bullet between my old man’s head.
He said, ‘You don’t understand! I can explain!
’ I didn’t believe him. Just another lie.
Once I was done, I went to those horribly mutated women. One by one, I ended their misery. A merciful bullet to the brain.
Until I found Susan.
She wasn’t like the others. She was still human – fully human. I freed her, even though I knew she might report my family for what we had done and me for murder. I let her go, perhaps hoping to atone for the sins of my father.
As I led her to the exit, black vans showed up.
Men had filed out – military-like men – and tried their guns on Susan and me when we stepped out of the elevator.
I will never forget the strange military man with the scars on his lip and the deep, cold grey eyes.
He was older, like my father, but didn’t have the same manic glint to his eyes. He was cold and poised.
“You fucking moron,” he said, spitting on the floor near my feet. “You have no idea what you did, did you?”
I didn’t. He, of course, explained. My sister was not estranged.
She was a prisoner living under the watchful gaze of his goons.
He was my father’s silent partner. The man who paid for all of Sunshine Sanctuary’s infrastructure.
The man who had all the knowledge and the science to operate it.
My father would help him launder twenty billion dollars through the sales of milk from the farm, to legalize his fortune in the US.
It was done slowly, across years and decades.
In the middle of the process, it seemed, my old man had decided to grow a conscience.
He didn’t like kidnapping, mutating, or torture.
The Colonel – the man I’d later come to know as Komodo – kidnapped my sister when he saw my father losing his nerve.
My father fell back in line for another decade. Before I blew his brains out, at least.
“Now, you stupid young man, you have two choices. You can take up your father’s spot and uphold your family’s end of the deal and I claim the one billion I promised your father or you can grow a conscience after twenty years of enjoying the wealth of this business.
Though I doubt the latter will take you far,” he said, and after a pause added, “Not to mention your sister, and this pretty little calf you decided to rescue.”
I had no choice. My father had had no choice. We were trapped in this cycle of blood, gold, and milk until the deal was completed.
As I watched the last truck depart and run the numbers in my head, I calculated that it would just be another year (perhaps less if we were lucky) and we would be done. After nearly twenty years of running this business, I would be done. Susan would be done.
I would be free and walk away from this place forever with a billion dollars in my pocket. Just another year.
One more fucking year.