The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(75)

“In the morning. They came out looking for me when they noticed I was gone. The chain had gotten caught in a root system, and when I tried to work it loose, I fell over the edge of a ravine. The manacle caught and broke my ankle. I was just hanging there. They beat me for trying to escape.” Using the bear’s soft paw, I trace the scars on my cheek. “Broken bottle.”

She leans her head against my shoulder and waits.

“They put me in the root cellar after that. It was stone and the trapdoor had a lot of locks. I don’t know if I would have been brave enough to try again, to be honest; it didn’t matter. But a few days later, I woke up to yelling. Yelling and gunshots. I was huddled there in the dark, and the locks scraped and the door opened and there was a big man standing there. I was terrified. It could only get worse, right? But someone handed him a flashlight, and he made it dance around my feet, and he came down the stairs and knelt in front of me, and said his name was Victor.”

I can feel her surprise, a full-body startle that ends in almost the same posture. “Our Vic?”

“Our Vic. He told me I was going to be okay, that those men were never going to hurt me again. The men had taken the shirt I lived in, so Vic wrapped me up in his jacket while someone brought down tools to take the manacle off. Someone else—Finney, I think—brought a blanket and a teddy bear.” I wave at her with the bear’s paw and feel more than hear her soft huff of laughter. “Vic picked me up and carried me out into this mess of stand lights, dozens of people milling around. Some of the men who had imprisoned me were dead, but most were injured or handcuffed. And as we passed, there was this momentary . . . hush. A bubble of silence as everyone stopped to stare, and then went back to what they were doing.”

“I know our side of that hush.”

“There wasn’t a road that deep into the woods, no way to drive through. Vic carried me two and a half miles to the closest access point, and the cars had their lights flashing like crazy. He took me to an ambulance, and I didn’t want to let go, so he sat in there with me as the paramedics worked on my face and ankle, and all the other wounds. He said he was going to take me home to my parents.”

“I can’t imagine that going well.”

“I started screaming. Told him I couldn’t go home, couldn’t go back to my papá hurting me again. I promised to be good, begged, anything so my papá couldn’t touch me again. And his face did this . . . I honestly don’t know if you’ve seen Vic when he’s about to rain down fire and destruction.”

She shakes her head against my shoulder. “I’ve seen him pissed, but not like that. Saw a hint of it with Archer’s fuckup three years ago, but he left that to Finney.”

“When the hospital had done all its scans and wrapped and treated everything, he came back in with a social worker and another police officer, and they asked me about my father. My room at the house was still the same; my father couldn’t change it because it would look to the rest of the family like he was giving up on my safe return. All the rest of the family thought I’d been kidnapped, even my mother. He was the only one who knew differently. So the police went and they saw the lock, and the dress-up clothes with the blood and semen on them, and the diary I had duct-taped to the back of the headboard. My father was arrested, and the men from the woods admitted I’d been given to them to settle a gambling debt. The family denied knowing anything about him molesting me. Family.”

She nods.

“They were furious when the court sent me to foster care. I was supposed to come home. Oh, but they were pissed at me, too, because I should have just said thank you for rescuing me from the woods. Should have come home and kept my mouth shut, because family. I kept getting moved to different foster homes because my relatives would show up and start harassing the adults. My tía Soledad tried to kidnap me from school a couple of times. After three years, my social worker got permission to move me to a different city. I’ve seen one of my cousins a couple times since then, but that was it. But they won’t . . .”

“They won’t give up on you, even though they gave you up years ago.”

“Yes. Yes, exactly. My father has been in prison ever since, and all going as it should, he’ll die there. Sooner than expected, maybe, with the cancer.”

“That why they’re trying to talk to you again?”

“They’ve never really stopped. It’s why I change my number so often. But yes, it’s why my mother came out. Esperanza told them I work for the FBI at Quantico, that I’m an agent. Their little girl, look how far she’s come. I’m the victim and I’m an agent, and surely if I ask for him to be released so he can spend the rest of his days at home, a judge would do it.”

“They’re really asking you for that?”

I nod, and can’t help but smile as she mutters what sounds like curses into my shirt.

“Did you request Vic’s team?” she asks once she’s subsided.

“No. Wouldn’t have, even if I could; seemed a bit weird, trying to prove myself as an adult agent to someone who’d pulled me naked out of a root cellar when I was ten. When I received the assignment, he took me out to lunch before I even got to meet Eddison, and we sat and talked, to see if we could both do this. He said there was no shame if the answer was no, he’d make sure I got assigned to another team, no stigma, no gossip. At the end of the day, though . . .” The bear is a comforting, familiar brush against my neck, twenty-two years of cuddling and nightmares and triumphs. We were in a car accident once, me and the bear, and I wouldn’t let the paramedics touch me until they’d stitched up the bear’s arm, even though my own arm was bleeding all over the place. I was twelve. “He was the reason I became an FBI agent. He pulled me out of absolute hell, and his kindness made me feel like maybe safe was a thing I could be someday. He rescued me, saved me. And it wasn’t about trying to repay him, but just . . . I wanted to do that for others. He gave me my life back.”