I’m dry and innocent. The first finger jabbed inside me is agony.
“Easy now, Mary,” he murmurs thickly as I scream. But he doesn’t stop.
Fighting back the waves of nausea, I rip my head to one side so I can’t see the dark pleasure now sparking in his lifeless eyes.
The torture lasts and lasts—an endless stream of pain and humiliation. Tears spill onto my cheek as he tries to force my hand toward his crotch.
“Stop.”
The word is softly spoken, yet jagged with conflict.
“Hush your mouth, boy,” I hear the old man roar.
“You’ve gotten what you came for.” Luca’s gaze is still cast to the floor. “She’s pure.” There’s a pause. “You only ever linger with the pretty, pure Marys.”
My hand gets dropped from his crotch. The evil finger is wrenched from my body.
Sobbing, I roll away, drawing my knees up to my chest. My talisman proved an empty charm. My mom couldn’t stop the torture, but a black-eyed boy did.
Luca takes his beating without a sound, absorbing the punches and kicks like his body is a powerless vessel on a stormy sea. He never resists. He never fights back. It’s as if his mind and soul have floated up to the same place mine went when that pervert forced himself on me.
After he leaves, Luca unfurls on the floor—like a bloody flower coming back to life after the coldest winter. He drags his body over to the bed and drapes a thin woolen blanket over my body.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers back, and his voice is so full of pain that it brings fresh tears to my eyes.
I hate this boy for what he’s done to me, but his kindness is a drug that stupors that emotion...
“Miss Bailey?”
Evan’s imaginary face snaps to Jackson’s: flushed, perspiring, panting...
“Take my cock, you frigid whore.”
“Miss Bailey? Are you joining this courtroom, or not?”
Jackson’s face changes to Molesey’s decomposing grin.
“I know what you did, bitch... And so does the boy.”
He’s not a boy anymore, I want to scream. He died that night and he came back to me as a killer.
“Miss Bailey!” comes an impatient voice again, wrenching me back to the courtroom and Judge Harris’s angry red face bearing down on me from the bench. “Do you want me to hold you in contempt of court before the opening address?”
“I’m so sorry, Your Honor,” I scrabble to my feet to a low snicker to my right. There are two defendants today. Two desks. Two public defenders—one who is slowly losing her mind, and the other who is the same constant prick he’s always been. “It won’t happen again.”
“It better not.” Judge Harris glares down at me over the rim of his glasses. “Now that you’re back in the land of my courtroom, Miss Bailey, you may proceed.”
I go to step around my desk when I feel Luca’s touch on my arm. I yank it out of the way as if a rabid dog is lunging at me. If anyone cast the first stone that sunk me to this relentless hell, he did.
If it wasn’t for him, I might have married Evan. I might be a soccer mom who baked cookies on the weekend. I might be a disillusioned housewife sitting at home right now while my thirty-year-old husband fucked his secretary in the back of the family Buick on his lunch hour. I might have “normal” in my life, instead of bleeding ceilings, constant nightmares, and predatory, rapist colleagues.
The sound of my high heels ricochets like gunshots off the courtroom’s parquet flooring as I move toward the jury box. Before I begin, I make sure that I catch the eye of every single member.
For a fragile beat, I feel my composure slipping again.
Twelve.
Why do there have to be twelve?
I clear my throat and shut my thoughts down, slipping smoothly into my professional guise. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... For the duration of this trial, I have but one request.” Pausing for effect, I cast a disparaging glance at the DA and his team. “I implore you to look upon this case with open eyes and open minds. All is not what it seems, even when the evidence seems irrefutable. Even as my esteemed colleague here parades his so-called experts in front of you to attack and condemn. The real truth is that there are...inconsistencies.” I shoot another vicious look at the DA. “Missing evidence, questionable forensic methods, wild accusations by a police department under extreme pressure to produce results—”
There’s a loud sniff from behind me.
Angry at the interruption, I whip round to see who’s committed this new crime. Cain Moseley is sitting in his metal chains and orange jumpsuit, crying like a baby. His helpless features make him look like a puppy that’s been beaten one too many times and can’t be bothered with keeping up pretenses anymore.
He was never as strong as Luca and me. Not that we had much to do with one another back then. Luca was my assigned brain-washer, or Divine Disciple Secondary, as the cult liked to call them. It was just him and me during my time in captivity, up until that last night. Fighting, resisting...
Fucking.
Cain sniffs again.
This is not happening.
It’s never a good thing to have a co-defendant blubbering like he’s guilty when I’m trying to profess the opposite. I glare at Anderson to get him to shut his client up, but he just folds his arms and smiles back.
Judge Harris has no such restraint.
“Kindly contain your client, Mr. Anderson,” he clips. “I expect silence from defendants except when they’re on the stand.”
“Of course, Your Honor,” he says smoothly, whispering something at Moseley that makes the tears flow faster.
They’re not tears of guilt, though. I realize that now. They’re tears of fear, of exhaustion, of being trapped in a constant cycle of confusion by this bitch called life.
I recognize those tears because I shed them in the darkness too.
That’s when I know he didn’t kill the cult Disciples, whatever Luca is or isn’t telling me.
I don’t believe Luca did it either, however damning the evidence. He’s a killer for sure, I’ve seen him kill myself, but the blood of the Disciples doesn’t stain his hands crimson. I feel the certainty of it deep down in my bones, the same way that I know there’ll never be a happy ending for me. My fairytale was tied up by a ribbon when I was sixteen years old and sent far, far away.
Whatever fabrications I just intimated to the jury are just that.
Falsehoods.
Deceptions.
Delays until I can figure out a proper direction for this defense.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Luca
The chains around my wrist rattle as I’m escorted into the courtroom. I don’t know why, but the sound makes me smile. Maybe because it’s so quiet you could hear a pen drop—as in Madi’s pen. I know it’s hers because we’re connected like that. We always have been, even when she wanted to believe otherwise.
She can’t escape the truth now.
I’m the blood running in her veins and the air filling her lungs. I know when she opens her eyes and when she closes them. We’ve belonged to each other since the day I offered to chase a ribbon.
But it’s not her I seek out first.
As I walk toward the defendant’s table, I stare at all twelve jury members. One by one, I hold their gazes until they fold and turn away. It’s one of the only useful things my father taught me. “Always gain the upper hand first, boy. Whenever you enter a room, look a man in the eye, so he knows it’s yours.”