J. Huss - PANIC

I wait for him to finish it, but the seconds tick off and he keeps silent, so I have to ask. “What do you mean by that?”

He lets out another long breath. “We could all end up in prison or dead, Rook. Those are the facts we’re dealing with now.”

I stretch my legs out on the sleeping bags and close my eyes. “I’m not gonna think about that, Spencer. Ronin’s in jail because of me and I told him I’d fight for us. So that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m done running, these people are all guilty, there are dozens of women I know of personally who are wrapped up in this trafficking stuff. And I talked myself into leaving without them the first time. I rationalized it. I’m just one single tragic girl, what can I do? And that was probably the right decision back then because I was all alone.”

I stop for a moment and Ford turns to look at me.

“But now I’m on the team, so I’m out of excuses.” 

Ford and Spence take turns driving through the night and by mid-morning the next day we’re at Lake McConaughy in Nebraska pulling into a campground.

“The safe house is in a campground?” I ask Spencer as I strain to see out the window. It’s pretty boring sitting in the makeshift back of a van on the floor, not even able to gaze out at the passing countryside.

“Not just any campground, Rook. My campground.” He swings the van around a circular driveway that allows him to pull up next to the main office and parks the van. “Wait here.”

I jump up into Spencer’s seat so I can at least sit in a real chair for a few minutes. “Spencer sure does own a lot of businesses.”

“Yeah,” Ford replies. “He’s not into holding onto money. He spends it as fast as he makes it.” And then he stops to look up at me. “He likes to own property and businesses. Some grand scheme of his.” Then he absently looks out at the campground. “He tried to get me to come deer-hunting with him out here a few years back.” I try to picture Ford deer-hunting and then we both burst out laughing. “It’s like he had a mental breakdown that day. I dunno.” And then he looks at me again and gets serious. “I do not hunt.”

“I figured. Me either. I won’t be joining that party.”

Spencer returns and pushes me out of his seat. “We got the Eagle’s Nest cabin. Sleeps ten, but at least it has a bathroom.”

We stop off at the campground market to pick up provisions, then head out to our new digs. It’s a pretty place—very Daniel Boone.

Inside the cabin is just like a three-bedroom house, complete with wi-fi and satellite TV. Spencer starts the grill to make burgers, Ford is still messing around on his computer, and I just sit and watch them from the dining room table, thinking about home. “Maybe we should call Elise or Antoine and see if there’s any news of Ronin.”

“Negative,” Spencer says. “Those FBI assholes are just waiting for us to show ourselves.”

When lunch is ready we all grab some food and eat in silence and then when we’re done, Spencer hands everyone a beer and brings a bottle of Jack and three shot glasses out to the living room, beckoning us to take a seat. I take a large overstuffed chair, Ford sits opposite me in a wingback, and Spencer stretches out on the couch. “OK, Rook. Spill it. Start from the beginning and end with climbing up a coal chute yesterday.”

So I do.

And it feels good to finally get it all out. I tell them about my mom overdosing when I was just a kid, all my various foster homes, and how I ended up with Wade. Spencer’s heard this part before, but Ford hasn’t. They lean in a little as my story progresses into the time after Wade. “I was in my last foster home and the father”—I stop to snort—“tried to come into my bedroom and touch me a few times. And believe it or not, even after all those foster homes, the crack ones, the single moms with scummy boyfriends, the ones who collected foster kids just so they could make the mortgage every month, this was the first time one of the grownup guys tried anything. And I figured I’d had enough. I was sixteen, I already took my GED, so I never went to school, and I was just done being someone’s problem. So I left and lived on the streets for a while with a girl I knew from a previous foster home. Then she got busted for drugs and I was all alone. And then Jon found me in a diner, scarfing down a sandwich that I bought with my beg money.

“And he had everything, you guys. And he was handsome. He was just like Ronin. He had a college degree, he had an apartment in Lincoln Park. It was small, and not all that nice, but it was still an apartment in Lincoln Park. He had a job and a car and food.” I shrug my shoulders and look between Ford and Spencer to see what they think of this but they just nod, like they get it.

“So I stayed with him. He never touched me at first. Not for a long time actually. I was only sixteen and he waited months before even kissing me. It lulled me into a false sense of security. Like he was a gentleman or something.

“But he wasn’t. He was a predator who knew exactly what he was doing because I wasn’t the first girl he took in and I definitely wasn’t the last one either. He liked the kinky sex, that Fifty Shades shit. Except… not sweet.” I stop and look directly at Ford. “He liked it rough and mean.”

Ford’s jaw clenches and he downs his shot and pours himself another one. We all stop to drink. Me because I know what comes next, them because they can take a good guess.

“So one day, before we even slept together, he came to me with this piece of paper. It was a sex slave contract. And even though I realize now that it wasn’t legal, I really thought it was back then. I feel so stupid, but I just didn’t know any better. And he said this was what he needed from me in order to allow me to stay with him, so I signed it.”

“You couldn’t have known, Rook,” Ford says. “It’s not something a child should ever know about. It’s not your fault.”

“I know, Ford. But I just accepted it. I was so dumb. So after that he started having sex with me and it started out bad right away. I was a virgin and the things he was doing to me… they were just weird. I was so confused, and it was just too much for me. I—God, I’m so fucking embarrassed to tell you guys this.”

“Rook,” Spencer says, “we’re not judging, OK? We just need to understand how we got to this day, you know? We need to know so we can make the right decisions going forward.”

I get that part, but it’s still so embarrassing. I take a deep breath and continue. “Well, to cut to the chase, even though he tried his hardest to make me… come”—I look away and blush as I say the word—“I just, it just… it never felt good. You know?” I look up and they’re both nodding at me, somber frowns on their faces. “And this made Jon very angry. And one night he took me to his BDSM club to do a scene and I didn’t… get off. And his friends there realized he wasn’t able to get me ready, and they all talked about their girls and how they should trade us off, see if that might improve our… responsiveness.”

“Oh, fuck, Rook,” Spencer says.

“No, Jon didn’t agree. He was possessive of me. But he did agree to help those guys with their girls. By this time we had already moved out to the country in the serial killer house, that’s what I called it. So these girls would come stay with us and he… trained them in the basement. He liked them a lot better than me, to be honest. He stopped fucking me so much after that. I sorta just became the house slave. Which I could definitely live with, but he got more and more violent.

“And then, I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow he became involved in like, matchmaking. Selling, I guess, since there was money exchanged. They had auctions in our barn, I kid you not. Girls showed up, willing, money was exchanged, and at first I’m pretty sure the girls were the ones getting the money wired to offshore bank accounts. Their contracts had expiration dates. Six months, a year, that sort of stuff. But later, those girls were not there because they wanted to be. They were kidnapped.”

I look over at Ford and he’s slumped over, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. Spencer’s got his hand over his eyes, like he’s picturing the scene and wants it to go away.

“Jon came to me one night soon after this started. I’d just found out I was pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” Spencer and Ford say at the same time.

“Yeah, I had just found out I was pregnant and things sorta got better. Jon seemed happy about it, and by this time we were already married, so in a rare moment of trust, he came to me and asked me to help him hide some stuff. In case these partners of his ever decided they wanted to get rid of him or turn him in for what he was doing. He told me it was in my best interest since I was his accomplice. So we went down to the basement where his uncle had already made the hidey-hole underneath the laundry room drain grate. Jon knew about it but he was too big to do anything with it, he needed me to squeeze down there, dig it out and make a safe spot where he could keep me and the important things he had in case anyone ever came to mess with him. I would be his ace in the hole, he said.”

“What happened to the baby?” Ford asks quietly. He’s still got his head in his hands.

“I lost it. Miscarriage.” I continue quickly before they start asking too many questions about my son. “Things got pretty bad after that happened. Jon was angry and I mean constantly. He started beating me. Violently, much worse than any of the stuff he ever did sexually. And then he almost killed me. And that’s when I ran away and ended up in Denver.”