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Part of the job was delivering ugly news. Maddox had done it plenty of times. But it didn’t get any easier. It was acid, sitting in his stomach, ready to come up with the words he had to utter to a family member, friend, spouse. Then he had to watch them break down, split apart, or worse, just shut down. Watch as life scooped something whole out of them, leaving nothing behind.
And that was happening to Orion right now.
After he’d uttered the news he’d been sick about delivering. Telling her that her main torturer, jailer, rapist, and would-be-murderer (if she hadn’t fought her way out), took the coward’s way out before any real justice could be served.
“Orion?” he said, taking care to make his voice soft but firm. It had been two minutes since he told her the bad news. Two minutes since any words were spoken.
She blinked rapidly, as if coming out of a trance. “He’s dead,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but he answered as if it were anyway. “That bastard’s dead.”
“He hung himself last night.”
“You don’t have any other leads?” she asked. “On the others? The clients?”
Maddox found it strange, the way she asked. Not in the way a fearful victim might, to make sure she didn’t have to look over her shoulder or check the locks three times before going to sleep. In his experience, most victims did that long after the perp was caught.
No, Orion wasn’t asking like a victim. She was asking like a . . . criminal. Like she didn’t want the obvious answer. Like she didn’t want him to have caught anyone. Fuck, his lack of sleep was catching up to him.
“No,” he said, ashamed at having to admit it. Ashamed that he was failing her once again. “Despite seeming like they were slobs and addicts, in addition to being animals, the house didn’t have any evidence that could lead us to the others. We’ve got the computer forensic team digging through hard drives and phones. It’s only a matter of time before we link these guys to something larger. This isn’t over yet, Orion. My job isn’t done. And it won’t be until I get all these fucks who did this to you.”
The house had plenty of evidence of other things though. Torture. Horror. Hardened cops he looked up to had gotten sick at the sight of it. At the evidence of what was done there. And Orion was standing in front of him, having had all of that shit done to her. She was healthy, she was sober, she was upright, she was strong—physically, at least.
Orion nodded calmly, as if she wasn’t hearing that the men who had tortured and raped her were still walking free. Like he was telling her the store was out of her favorite fucking cereal.
“I’m sorry, Orion,” he said, voice catching. It hit him then how fucking weak those two words were, how much he’d used them with her since she escaped. They made him sick.
Something moved in her eyes. It could’ve been a trick of the light. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “He’s dead. I guess that’s a victory.”
He didn’t believe her.
“Is that it?” she asked after a few moments of awkward silence.
He jerked back.
No, that wasn’t fucking it. He wanted to tell her that not a day in these past ten years had gone by without him thinking about her. He wanted to say that he was in awe of her, of her strength, her power. How she was standing up straight, how she managed to maintain her beauty when ugliness was all she had known for the past ten years. He wanted to ask her out to fucking dinner so he could look at her. How he wanted to kill every single piece of shit who hurt her . . . and then some.
He wanted to tell her that if he lived one thousand lifetimes, he would carry the guilt of what happened to Adam with him. But he said none of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Thank you, Detective Novak.” She held the door tightly, motioning toward the exit with her head.
He moved toward the door, tipped his imaginary cap. “Ms. Darby.”
Then she closed the door in his face.
Orion tasted acid as she walked through the door of Jaclyn’s apartment. She had thrown up in the kitchen sink right after she’d slammed the door in Maddox’s face.
Was it because of the news he carried or the man himself?
It had to be the former. It was the former. Something cracked inside her with the knowledge that he could do that, that he could take his own life. It was a mercy not given to them. Nothing was theirs, not even their deaths.
Orion didn’t know how Jaclyn was going to take it. She had watched her spiral this past month. Watched her change, her eyes hooded, shoulders drooped. Orion postulated Jaclyn wasn’t acclimating all that well, and how could she? She had spent five more years in The Cell than Orion. Five more years of rape, savagery, brutality. Orion thought back to her own issues with the news, the bouts of sobbing in the shower, the anger so visceral she could feel it pumping through her veins, the hunger for vengeance blooming within her. She could only imagine what Jaclyn was going through, and how she would respond.
