“They were begging him to…” she whispers, then looks up at Nicky who is crying beside her bed.
“Not to sell my daughter,” Nicky whispers shakily, then like a someone who’s had enough of being beaten down, she looks up directly at Nathan. “That day, my sister and I were begging him not to sell our daughter.”
The words drop like a fucking tune to a horror movie.
I hear the gasps of shock in the room, the stunned silence and the realization of the truth being spoken.
“What?” Nathan blows up, but Mia quickly speaks up.
“Yes, he… my own father… he wanted to s-sell me,” she stutters, crying and trembling some more. “But he was beating them. I tried to stop him, but he only turned on me and…” she falls silent, and then she snaps her head up, looking at Nicky as if something just occurred to her. “Is that why I’m here now? Did he do this to me?”
I’m gripping the arm of the wheelchair so tight that when the leather cushion rips apart loudly, Mia jumps and then finally, she looks at me, but I hate what I see displayed on her face for all the world to see.
I have no idea what she sees on my face but the misery and anguish in her eyes, made worse by the state she’s in… a growl makes its way out of me before I can stop it.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder. I don’t have to look to know who it is.
“I didn’t do any of that!” Nathan seethes, then he points at me. “He did it! Look at him, sitting there like a predator, taking advantage of my poor daughter’s impaired mind.”
But Mia refuses to be silenced.
“Where is my mom?” she demands looking around the room. “What did you do to her? Did he kill her?”
Holy shit.
“Oh, Mia…” Nicky whispers.
“Did he sell me?” Mia croaks. No one moves for a second. A minute. A fucking hour, I don’t know, I just watch her, realizing two things as Nicky opens her mouth to respond.
One, Nathan has attempted to fucking sell Mia before. And two…
“Mia, that was years ago, but sweetheart, two weeks ago…”
“What? What happened to me?” Mia questions. At Nicky’s silence, Mia looks around the room. Rage flows into my system like nothing else. When her eyes slowly meet mine, I can almost see the gears shifting as the realization is in her grasp. “I was beaten up. This is definitely a gunshot wound and my body aches so bad… it already happened, didn’t it? He sold me to the people who came in the middle of the night, demanding for the money that Da—Nathan—owed money to.”
Two… this is the day of fucking reckoning.
“Who were…”
“The fucking Matthews’s family!” I snap, getting on my feet. “I already told you.”
All hell breaks loose.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Julian
“In light of everything that has happened, we have new questions to ask you, Mr. Fitzgerald.”
Everyone is still reeling from what just happened in Mia’s room. Fucking Nathan has been detained. More cops were called in and now, like before, I’m being interrogated over what happened two weeks ago.
Though she hit the nail on the head with everything she said about Nathan, Mia’s amnesia changes everything, but it also makes justice fucking illusive.
Mia is being treated like a child with half a life missing.
I overhead one the cops saying Nicky might just be lying since no report of domestic abuse was ever filed by Nancy Montague when she was alive. And that set off Dad on a vengeance spree.
As for me, it’s my word against… well, a fucking child abuser!
“We’ve been over this before, Detective. My son told you everything,” Dad snaps, pacing. He hasn’t been doing well since Mia revealed that Nathan hurt Nancy, his dead lover.
“Yes, but we have new questions.” I sigh and then wave a hand for them to continue. “In your initial statement.”
“My only statement.”
“Yes, well, you told us that Sean and Shane Matthews abducted Mia and took her to the abandoned warehouse that you then set fire to in an attempt to rescue Miss Montague.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see Sean and Shane Matthews in the warehouse?”
“Yes.”
“When did you set fire to the place? Was it before or after you went in?”
“Before.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to flush them out. I was sure that if those bastards saw the fire, then they’d come out where I was waiting and knew the fucking police and fire trucks were on their way.”
He writes something down, but I know he’s just fucking scribbling. After a tense second, he looks at me. “What did you use for the fire?”
“Gasoline and a freaking matchstick.”
“Julian, language,” Dad mutters. I ignore him.
“And then what happened?” the cop questions.
It’s like reliving a fucking horror moving but what else can I do? What else do I have when Mia doesn’t even remember me?
“Things changed. I heard screaming.”
The detective writes that down.
“When did you get to the warehouse?”
“Right after sunset.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald, how did you know to go to the warehouse?”
“I’m sure you saw on my phone records that there was thirty second call between that fucker Sean Matthews and me,” I grit out, looking up at them.
“Are you saying he called you?”
The fuck? I can see the knowledge in their eyes.
“No, I called him.”
“Why?”
“Because of the fucking text he had sent me earlier in the day! He made it clear that he had Mia.”
“Can we see the text?”
“No,” I grit out. Just thinking back to that photo… I see red all over again.
“Why not?”
“Because those inbreds took a fucking compromising picture of her!” I seethe, glaring at everyone when inside, I’m hating myself so hard, it’s out of control now. “She wasn’t even in apposition where she could cover herself or even fight for herself!”
The room falls silent. We can hear the commotion and rush in the hallway. Mia’s room is five floors above mine, but the police are both here and on her floor.
“What was the state of Miss. Montague when you got there?”
“She was…” I trail off. I remember the blood. Actually, I could smell it. I heard the screams. Yes, a baby was being born but I fucking saw that fucking bed. I could smell the vomit. I saw the fucking pipe they used to beat her. I saw it all. “She was in a terrible state, but she was still standing.” And fighting.
I’ve never been so scared and proud in my life like I was when she was kicking that bastard, bashing his fucking head with the heel of her foot.
“So, you were nowhere near the Matthews compound when this all happened?”
“No,” I mutter, suddenly suspicious of where this is going.
“But your brother was there.”
Yeah, here we fucking go.
“He was looking for Mia. We all received the same text.”