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“If I tell you, you’ll be accessories,” she says.
I laugh a little under my breath. “I think that ship has sailed,” I wink at her.
“No, this is really bad, Mikhail. It’s everything you guys were running from. Your worst nightmare come true.” Her eyes grow worried as her breath becomes rushed as she seems to start to second guess everything. “In fact, you shouldn’t be here. You’ve got to go. Please before anything happens and they find you here. Go back to your lives.” She walks toward the door. “The recruits will lead you out. You can’t stay here.”
Axel clears his throat and when I look at him, he’s shaking his head and twisting his lips as if he’s having a battle with himself over whether he should stay or leave. He raises his head to speak as if coming to a decision. “You are a part of our lives, Julissa. We wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. I can’t go back to my life without knowing you’re going to be okay.” He gets up and walks over to her.
Calder is getting up off the couch to join us at the door when he grabs our attention with a bag in his hand. “Meth? Julissa?” he asks.
She starts to fidget and moves quickly toward him to snatch the bag. He closes it in his hand.
“Where did you find that?” I ask him.
“It popped out from the cushions when I was getting up,” he says to me before turning to Julissa. “Baby. Why?” he asks.
“Please give it to me.” She stands before him as if she’s about to crumble in embarrassment.
I can see pain in his face as he surrenders it to her.
“J, I promise, whatever you’re running from, we can find a way out of it together,” I say from across the room.
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
Chapter 42
Axel
There’snoaccusingherof trying to manipulate us now. I can tell she’s genuinely distressed and I’m finding it hard to separate my emotions from the need to be an objective friend to her. My heart breaks from her speech as I see a woman is broken and lost, in need of a reason to keep going. More than that I see the woman I love in pain and it’s taking everything within me not to want to do anything to get rid of her problems for her. Knowing our past and the routes Julissa has taken, I can’t imagine how much worse things must have gotten for her to turn to meth for relief and to be so ready to end it all.
I don’t know but throughout the time that we’ve been separated, I’ve imagined her being happy to do the things she’s been so adamant about doing and loving every minute of it even if it kills her in the end, something I couldn’t bear to stand around and watch. I never imagined to see her so frightened and so exhausted. So done. And all I want to do is put a bandaid on her wound and fix it.
“I’ve done some things that I can’t come back from,” she says. “Things that make it hard for me to even look in the mirror anymore.”
“Let’s sit down again, please?” I say.
She’s hesitant. “You guys can’t stay…” she starts.
“Okay, let’s sit down and talk about why we can’t,” I respond because as much as she’s right, she chose this path and walking away would be in my best interest since she dug this hole for herself, I want to be here to help to pull her out of it.
She clutches onto that bag of meth like it’s her lifeline and I know there’s no point trying to get it from her now. If she needs to hold on to it in order to feel comfortable enough to open up to us, well so be it.
“We can’t know the amount of danger we’re in if you don’t tell us what’s happening here. What is this place?” I repeat the unanswered question Mikhail asked.
She obliges us and takes a seat. “This is the facility where we carry out our business in private. There are cells on one level where we’ve captured pimps and turned them back out on the streets to work for us.” Her eyes get teary. “Things took a turn for the worst, I had to kill a few sixteen- and seventeen-year-old recruits because they were letting trafficking slip by underneath my nose, I killed the nurse I took with me from The Berkshires because she led the mafia directly to me. Her body is decaying in the punishment room upstairs and I hate that I had to kill her because I really liked her. In a way I even miss her. I’ve got a freezer stocked with dead bodies as well as the heads of Las Vegas government officials and law enforcement officers. Evelina, a family member of The Wasps is after me which is the least of my worries. The worst of them all is how much I lost control of myself. I defiled my own body and became the very thing I hate. I raped a pimp several times, convincing myself that he deserved it. He grew attached and I started to enjoy…” Her voice cracks and I notice that she starts playing with the bag of meth in her hand while looking queasy. “I…um…” She tries again but her eyes fill with tears. “I was so desperate for affection that I let myself enjoy being with him,” she finally says.
“Instead of fucking him to punish him, I let that unworthy slime that forced victims to sell their bodies, abusing and using them at his will, I let that piece of waste into me. I let him fuck me.”
She stops talking and begins to pull at her mouth as if she wishes to rip it off her face. “And it gets even worse. To top it all off, he escapes and when I catch up to him, I bust in on him sexually assaulting a woman crying and trembling in fear as I shot him in the head and watched him fall on top of her before I rush out, not stopping to help her as his blood splashed over her body and she screamed in horror. In that moment, I could hear his words and the words of the nurse dead upstairs like their ghosts coming to haunt me, singing to me like a siren, calling me to join them on the other side as they remind me that I’m no better than the ones that I hate, I’m just like pimps I punish and I don’t give a shit about the victims enough to actually make sure that they’re safe after ‘rescuing them’,” she says, using air quotes.
“So even though I learned that most of my recruits aren’t against me and won’t betray me, it still doesn’t change the fact that I have no purpose left in this world if the one thing I was living for, I’ve managed to fuck up. I’m no better than the ones that I’ve killed, so I don’t get off easy either. I’d eliminate them, so it’s only fair that I eliminate myself. I can’t live with the person I’ve become. I’ve fucked up too much to turn around and I don’t deserve another chance because I wouldn’t spare a second chance to someone like Snow or any of the other people that I’ve killed.”
Well, okay then. She wasn’t joking when she said we’re in danger and when she said she did a lot of things she may not be able to come back from but I mean, it’s Julissa. If I’m being honest, I expected to hear a lot worse.
“I hear you and I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t feel the way that you feel but can I tell you what I think?” I ask, without waiting for an answer.
“I think that while you’ve gone down a path that is strikingly similar to the one you’d rather have died than have taken, there’s one thing that separates you from people like Snow. That thing is the fact that you have guilt, overwhelming guilt and that means you’ve still got some of your humanity left. You have the awareness of knowing that you can’t excuse your actions, which means you have the opportunity to take responsibility for those actions. You don’t have to die Julissa. The solution doesn’t always have to be death. Sometimes the solution can be owning up to what you’ve done and taking the steps to make better decisions going forward. Besides, I can’t judge you, can I? If I let the guilt of everything I did in the past consume me, I wouldn’t be working toward becoming a counselor to help others. We can exist in this world with evil and good within us. We don’t have to be one or the other, by whatever standards. The key is in making better decisions going forward. Decisions that help rather than harm. Would you look at me and tell me that I shouldn’t be allowed to live because I murdered people in cold blood?” I ask her.
“That’s different. That was survival. I didn’t hate myself then. What we did then was for the greater good. What I’ve become now isn’t,” she says.
