“Marta, dear, would you get us some tea?”
Marta nodded. “Sure thing, Nan.” She disappeared back inside.
I looked at the old woman. “Nan?”
She laughed. “They call me nana because I’m old. I don’t look that old though, do I?”
“You’re the youngest person here.”
“Thanks, dear. Massage my ego.”
“What is this place?”
She shrugged, knitting. “It’s a halfway house. It’s a safe place. We take in broken women, we try to nurse them back to health, and then we release them into the wild.”
“How?” I asked her. “How does this place exist?”
“Louisa Barone.”
“But why? Aren’t you hurting her family?”
The woman just kept smiling serenely, knitting as she spoke.
“Louisa is an interesting woman,” she said. “Maybe we’re hurting her family’s business, but as far as she’s concerned, we’re helping to save them, too. What do you know about human trafficking?”
“Not much,” I admitted.
“It’s horrible. They addict these young girls to drugs, get them into debt, and then force them to prostitute themselves until they’re dead or all used up. In Louisa’s mind, saving these women is also helping to save her family’s soul.”
I nodded, frowning. I didn’t know anything about the mafia or about Louisa, but everything this woman was saying made sense to me. I understood why Brooks didn’t trust these people, but so far I’d seen nothing that made me think they were trying to do anything but help.
I stood up. “Thanks, Nan,” I said. “I’ll leave you to your knitting.”
“Tea hasn’t come yet, dear,” she said.
“Is it okay if I just go for a walk? I’ll just be in the woods.”
She looked at me, smiling. “You’re not trying to run away, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Honestly. I just need to think.”
She stared at me for a second, and I saw a hardness in her eyes. Finally, she nodded. “Okay. I’ll tell Marta where you’ve gone, but don’t go far. And come back soon. We’ll be eating in an hour.”
“Thank you,” I said, and then I walked off toward the forest.
I felt the cool breeze on my skin and realized that I had left Chicago for the first time.
I grew up in the city. I knew the streets better than anything else in my life. It was my home and I didn’t know anything else. Sure, I was only out in the suburbs, but I felt like I was lost in an enchanted forest.
The women back there were amazing. Every one of them was so strong, so much more than I could ever have imagined. I knew that if Brooks just saw what I saw, he’d understand. These people weren’t here to hurt us; they were here to try to help us.
More specifically, they wanted to help me.
But the fact that they were taking Brooks in as well spoke volumes about him. I knew he said he didn’t hurt women, but I was willing to bet that the Spiders didn’t take men in very often unless they really were special.
As I walked through the forest, soon losing sight of the house, I knew that Brooks was something special. I’d never met someone like him, and although he was a killer, he really did care about me. He didn’t trust these people, but that made sense. He didn’t know them and probably had been burned too many times by too many different people to really let his guard down.
The more I got to know him, the more I felt like I could understand him. There was an anger inside him, an anger at life. He became a killer because that was all he knew, death and violence. But I couldn’t picture him as dangerous, not really.
I sighed and breathed in the cool air as I walked, twigs snapping. I had no clue how this day had gotten me here, but I wasn’t trying to fight it. I was done fighting it. Life simply swept me up and bore me along, and I had to learn to react like water, flowing along with it. I couldn’t control it. I just had to learn to form myself along with it.
Suddenly, I heard a twig snap nearby. I looked around, my eyes wide. I felt my heart begin to beat fast.
“Marta?” I called out. “Is that you?”
I heard another twig snap and whirled around. Brooks stepped out from behind a tree.
“Fuck,” I said, releasing a breath. “You scared the shit out of me.” My heart was hammering in my chest.
He smirked at me. “Sorry. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Where’s your guard?”
He shrugged. “Looking for me, I guess.”
“You lost her?”
“She didn’t stand a chance. I gave her the slip pretty fast.”
“Why did you do that?”