Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(84)

Her voice cracked again, and she broke down for a moment, her face downcast, her shoulders shaking. Then she took several deep breaths and wiped her eyes again. “And Ophelia . . . she wouldn’t let them.”

“Your sister tried to protect you,” Livia said, and for a moment, she wasn’t sure who she was referring to, herself or Ophelia. Both, maybe. Despite all the years of professional reserve, she felt her own eyes well up.

MacKinnon nodded. “She fought them,” she whispered.

Livia could imagine her little bird so clearly. The blood between her legs. Her thumb in her mouth. Her vacant eyes. Her unresponsive body as Livia held her and cried.

“But they did it anyway,” Livia said.

MacKinnon looked at her, her face twisted. “They made her watch,” she said, and her voice cracked again.

Livia made no attempt to hide her own tears. “I’m sorry, Becky.”

“And then they made me watch. My father said, ‘You see, boys? This is what we do to disobedient girls.’”

Livia remembered Fred Lone’s fixation on her own “disobedience.” She forced away her disgust.

MacKinnon wiped her eyes again. “So. Now you know about my family.”

There was a long pause while they both collected themselves. Then Livia said, “I think your brothers, at considerable risk and expense, arranged for my sister and me to be shipped to Llewellyn from our village in Thailand. Could what you’ve been telling me be why they wanted sisters? I was thirteen. Nason was eleven. Could your brothers have wanted to . . . I don’t know, recreate what they were doing to you and Ophelia when you were a similar age?”

MacKinnon looked like she might be sick. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

It made sense. It fit. And as horrible as it was, there was satisfaction in piecing it all together.

She thought of how she had felt after what Skull Face and his men had done to Nason. How she had wanted to die. How the only thing that had made her keep eating, made her keep herself alive, was that Nason might need her. Looking back, she was amazed she hadn’t succumbed to her longing for oblivion. For Ophelia Lone, it seemed, the sirens of oblivion had sung louder.

“Is that when Ophelia jumped from the window?” she said.

MacKinnon looked at her, her face slowly contorting. “That’s a lie,” she hissed.

Livia blinked. “What?”

“They told everyone she jumped. But she never would have. Never.”

Livia stared at her for a moment, feeling like she’d been hit by a throw she hadn’t seen coming and slammed into the tatami. She had been remembering her own despair, her own longing for death, and had projected it onto another tormented teenage girl. And the projection had blinded her to another, even more horrifying possibility.

She would never have made a mistake like that as a cop. But this, she realized . . . this was too close to her. It was interfering with her judgment.

She shook her head, as though doing so might clear it. “You think your father—”

“I think it was Ezra. But”—her voice cracked again—“she was the only one who loved me. She would never have left me alone to them. Not for anything.”

“Why do you think it was Ezra?”

“Because he was the most horrible. For my father and Fred, it was mostly about power. And sex, of course. But Ezra . . . he liked to hurt us. And . . . he told Ophelia he was going to do something to me. Something he liked to do to her. And she told him if he did that, she would tell. She would go to the police. He could do what he liked to her, but not to me. And you know what he told me after she died?”

Livia was afraid she did know. But she said nothing.

“He told me, ‘That’s what will happen to you if you ever say anything.’ And then he did the thing to me anyway. I begged him. I was screaming. I told him he was killing me. And he just laughed and did it harder. After that, I don’t even remember. I think I blacked out.”

A moment went by. Then MacKinnon said, “I knew better than to scream, but I couldn’t help it. Whatever made me scream became his favorite thing. So I learned not to. Just to be passive, and wait for it to be over. But really, that only made it worse. It frustrated him, and made him look for new ways to make me scream.”

Livia looked at her. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”

MacKinnon returned her look. “Why didn’t you?”

Livia scrubbed the back of her hand across her wet cheeks. “Because no one would have believed me. I was just a little refugee girl. And your brother was the most revered man in Llewellyn.”

“Well then, you already know why.”

“But all these years . . . don’t you understand? Your brothers . . . they had my sister and me taken all the way from Thailand. And who knows how many other children they’ve raped, traumatized, destroyed, that we’ll never even know about? You could have stopped that. Maybe not when you were a child, but any time after.”

“Don’t you dare judge me. Look at you. What have you ever done to stop it?”

“I did stop it.”

She said it before she could think not to.

There was a long pause. MacKinnon looked at her, understanding slowly dawning in her eyes. Livia thought she was going to ask, and prepared a denial.