Torched (2 page)

It would take time, and a hell of a lot of patience, but one of these days that monster would put them in the ground too.

It was a fucking vow.

: 1 :

Philadelphia, PA

Three Years Later

The beeping.

God, the beeping was incessant. How the fuck did anybody sleep in a hospital?

Forget rest, all I’d managed to score was a grinding headache, now that whatever pain meds I’d been given were wearing off. It was like the cherry on top of a shit-flavored sundae, made up of a concussion, broken ribs, fractured eye socket, throbbing jaw, and gnarly stab wound in my left shoulder. The purple and blue scene under my hospital gown wasn’t much prettier.

All courtesy of Mitch Henslow—certified spawn of Satan.

In all fairness, I was getting the better end of the deal. Vince was dead and Mitch was cooling his heels behind bars. Minus the flesh wounds, I’d made it out of their house of horrors alive. Now I just had to get out of the hospital before I ended up in the morgue—or a jail cell—myself.

I already knew that the frazzled DEA agent outside my hospital door wouldn’t make it easy. I couldn’t hear what was going on, or who was on the other end of her conversation, but through the window I could see that she looked flushed and her hands were flying in all different directions.

She’d been in the room earlier and introduced herself as Agent Tricia Rhodes, then jumped right in and peppered me with all kinds of questions. I hadn’t been in much of a chatty mood.

That and I wasn’t an idiot. Cops and Feds weren’t exactly my… people.

I did manage to get some information out of
her
. Apparently, Mitch and Vince had been on the DEA and ATF’s radars for a few weeks, after being fingered for a multi-state drug and weapon ring by a jailhouse snitch. He’d also mentioned a rumor about sex trafficking. Unfortunately for the law, a felon ratting out another felon wouldn’t make for a reliable trial witness. And that same felon being shanked in prison days after talking was even less helpful. The fact that Mitch had a huge network of allies, kept his guard up consistently, and always operated in stealth mode hindered their efforts even further. So, here they were, with basically nothing to go on, trying to use me for information to build a case.

It wouldn’t happen. Not on my back.

I’d played dumb, acting like the stereotypical twenty year old I definitely wasn’t, and after about ten minutes of her nonsense—feigning memory loss and naivete—I told her I didn’t feel well. She sighed at the thinly-veiled request to get lost and stomped off. That was several hours ago, but she was back out there, no doubt trying to formulate a new plan of attack to get me talking.

A few more minutes of muffled, exasperated conversation later, she knocked and poked her head in apprehensively. “Can we chat a little more?”

I nodded and watched her stalk across the room. She turned on a recorder and took a seat in the chair next to my bed.

“How are you feeling, Chloe?”

“Like hell,” I said with a forced smile. This really wasn’t the time to act as bitchy as I felt. Looking like I had something to hide would just make it harder to get rid of her.

“I bet you are,” she commiserated. “You’re lucky it wasn’t much worse though.”

“Yeah.”

“Have any other memories come back?”

I looked her straight in the eye and lied. “No. Sorry.”

“So you still don’t remember anything between the time you were at the house and waking up here?”

“I don’t.”

Her brow scrunched. “We also found some scraps of fabric at the warehouse, Chloe. None of it yours.” Rhodes studied me intensely for some kind of reaction. She didn’t get one.

I shook my head. “I don’t really know what that means.”

“It means there were other girls there. Surveillance cameras picked up what looks like a group of women running away from the area of the warehouse. We don’t know if it’s connected, but the FBI’s trying to identify them. Were there ever other women in the house with you?”

I shook my head again and focused on believing the words coming out of my mouth. It was exponentially more difficult to lie when hooked up to heart and blood pressure monitors. “I told you, I was only there for a couple weeks. I didn’t see anybody except Mitch and Vince.”

I’d lied about my memory, last name, and the timeline, but hadn’t bothered to lie about the fact that I knew the Henslow’s and had been in their house. The cops would find my DNA there at some point either way. I figured my best option was going with a bunch of half-truths that would sound plausible enough to appease the authorities’ curiosity. As much as I hated the term, I knew I had no choice but to play a victim.

But Rhodes had a job to do, so she kept pushing. “Maybe you can tell me more about the last few weeks then. How often did you see them? Hear them in the house? Did you hear any suspicious conversations or see anything that didn’t look right? Even the most insignificant detail could help us, especially if you saw any drugs there.”

Oh, nothing I remembered was insignificant. Suspicious conversations? Check. Things that didn’t look right? Check. Drugs? Check. The only problem was that I hadn’t been just an outside observer in reality, and it had actually been a hell of a lot longer than a few weeks.

I closed my eyes and leaned back, acting like I was combing over all of my memories. Really, I was just counting to twenty. “I’m sorry, I can’t. I don’t know anything. They picked me up outside the club and kept me in the basement. No one else ever came down. They took me up to the kitchen once or twice to cook for them, but it was the middle of the night and there was no one else in the house. I kept asking what they were planning to do, but they just laughed and told me to quit asking questions if I knew what was good for me.”

She nodded and jotted something down in her notepad. “And there wasn’t an opportunity to run when you were let out of the basement? I mean, you had to have had access to knives if you were cooking.”

I scowled in response to this new angle she was taking. I didn’t like it. “Are you insinuating that I could’ve gotten away if I’d just tried a little harder?”

“No… Chloe, no,” she stammered, “I was just trying to get an idea of the circumstances. Mitch killed his own brother, I can’t imagine what he would have done to you if you’d tried. Look, we’re still trying to untangle all the forensic evidence at the crime scene. It’s a bloody mess. But you
do
have some defensive wounds, so clearly you’re a fighter.”

She was good at back-peddling, I’d give her that. I stared her down and bit my bottom lip in an effort to keep myself from expressing what I really thought of her questions. “You want to know if I fought? No, Agent Rhodes, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I outnumbered and kept in chains in that basement. And the few times they took me up to the kitchen, not only did they sit there and watch, but Mitch put a leash around my neck and kept the other end in his hand. Unless they had a death wish, I don’t think
anyone
would’ve risked trying to get away.”

She nodded. “You’re right, Chloe. I’m sorry, I should have phrased that better.”

I rested my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes. “Can you get somebody to give me more pain meds? I’m in a world of hurt here.”

She nodded. “Of course. I’ll be right back.”

A few minutes later, she’d tracked down someone with the good stuff. I knew it was the good stuff because within seconds of a nurse injecting it into my IV, a pleasantly warm sensation washed over me as it infiltrated all the veins down to my toes. I wanted to kiss whatever chemist had concocted the recipe.

Of course, Agent Buzzkill couldn’t let me enjoy my high for long. “I know you’re tired, but can we keep talking? We really need your help to put Mitch away for a long time. You want that, don’t you?” she asked.

I looked down and sighed. She had me cornered. I had to appear cooperative and realized that my snarkiness hadn’t helped. Fuck it, the sooner I satisfied her, the sooner I could start working on a plan to get the hell out of here altogether. “Yeah,” I conceded, “ask away.”

She gave me one of those irritatingly apologetic smiles. “I know this is difficult, but I need to ask about the sexual abuse in particular. Can you tell me more about that? What they did, how often, that kind of stuff.”

I didn’t know what it was about her question that suddenly jarred me. I’d learned to block out any emotion when it came to that particular aspect of my life with the Henslow’s long ago. Maybe it was the drugs, but I found myself instantly retreating to a dark place deep within my psyche that I generally avoided. “I… How can that possibly help?”

She reached out and stroked my arm. “You never know. Chloe, you can talk to me,” she coaxed. “You’re safe—”

“No,” I croaked, “I’m not. He’ll kill me. He’ll get out and finish it. I don’t want to talk about it—”

“I can have you in WitSec as soon as you’re released,” she countered. “We’ll protect you.”

Instantly, the energy in the room seemed to change. At least to me. With that mention of witness protection, some defense mechanism in my brain clicked into action. Sadness turned into anger, but I kept my eyes closed so that they couldn’t betray the shift.

Witness protection was a joke, everybody knew that. If Rhodes thought I’d fall for
that
crock of shit, she was sadly mistaken. I shook my head. “I don’t want to live on the run. Agent Rhodes, this is a lot to process with a head injury. They raped me. Repeatedly. The details don’t matter because I don’t want to press charges. I know how women who’ve gone through that get treated in court. There’s really nothing else I can offer you.”

“Okay,” she sighed, standing up from the chair. “Keep thinking. Something might come later when you’re feeling better.”

Not likely. As she walked to the door, I felt the need to hammer in the point that I wasn’t complicit in anything they could possibly try to pin on me.

“Agent Rhodes?” I called out.

She turned around.

“Those girls you saw on the surveillance cameras… Did they look hurt?”

She gave me another pitying smile. God, I hated being looked at with pity. “The video’s grainy,” she answered. “We’re trying to get it cleaned up to get a better look. They were running though, so it couldn’t be that bad.”

“I hope you find them.”

She gave me a nod and walked out. After exchanging brief words with the cop stationed outside my door, I could hear her heels clicking away down the hallway.

It was another lie. I hoped those girls had followed my instructions to lay low and keep their fucking mouths shut. That was the only way they’d be safe when Mitch got out. And knowing how corrupt the law was in Philly, not to mention the kind of money Mitch had to pay for lawyers, he’d be out soon enough.

Still, their chances of walking away unscathed were good. Because if Mitch would be coming after anyone first, it would be me.

: : : :

I woke up just before one in the morning, momentarily confused by my surroundings. It only took a single look around to remember where I was and that I had to get out as soon as humanly possible. Why the hell had I asked for that extra dose of meds after Rhodes left?

Fuck
.

Oh well, too late now.

First things first, I had to make sure I could actually
walk
out. I’d been on my back since everything went down. The worst part of broken ribs—and let me just say they hurt like a bitch in general—is that every move you make feels like an army of sword-wielding ninjas attacking your insides. Hell, the pain in my shoulder from being stabbed felt tolerable by comparison. But I breathed through it and slid off the bed.

My legs were scraped up and bruised, but thankfully I could walk easily. The police must have grabbed my purse from the warehouse because it was in a bag labeled “Personal Belongings” on the window ledge.

Unfortunately, the only things it contained were makeup and ibuprofen. It hit me then that I was a woman with no home, no identity, and no plan except to get the hell out of Philly. I’d just have to wing it after that.

Fucking Mitch. Locked up and still making shit hard.

I didn’t want to ask, but getting out of dodge would require some assistance, and the only person I could trust was my best—okay, only—friend, Lexi. I didn’t want the Feds all up her ass though, so making the call from my room was out of the question.

Lexi was scheduled to work that night, but wouldn’t be done dancing for another hour. I’d have to wait until then, call her from another phone, and keep my fingers crossed that she could come to my rescue.

: :

Exactly an hour later, I’d made a plan and gathered myself. Escaping from the room unnoticed wasn’t doable, although I
had
run through at least a dozen possible ways of doing it in my head. But the room was bare, the drawers all locked, the windows stationary, and I was in no shape to attempt any ceiling gymnastics.

Tired, sore, and low on any other ideas, I decided to simply try to talk my way out.

I peeked out through the door window. Not seeing anyone, I thanked my lucky stars and wandered out, pulling my IV stand behind me.