TORTURE ME_ The Bandits MC(7)

The murders…they were all already done. What good could she really accomplish? What good was there in telling people that life was still worth living when their reason for being was snatched away?



Gage’s message just sat there, the screen glowing on Fiona’s face. She didn’t know what to say. Yes, it would be nice, just once, for there to be a survivor other than Fiona. It would be wonderful, just once, if someone else got away. If it wasn’t just her that got to live—while all the other nameless, faceless, anonymous young women had to lay down their lives in punishment for the crime of being born a girl—that would have been great. But Fiona didn’t live in that world.



Could she say all that to Gage? Would he understand, or would he hate her for refusing to help him when he most needed it? Why do I care if he hates me? It’s none of my business anymore, she reminded herself



Before she could type out a response to his last message, another one from Gage appeared on her screen. “Don’t you want to feel good, for once?”



She was tempted to reply back, “I do feel good. I feel good all the time. Here, with Carl, in my new life, I feel plenty good,” but somehow, that answer felt hollow to her. Sending it would have felt like a lie, something else to punish herself for. Instead, she let her fingers do the talking, typing out, “Yes” and hitting “Send” before she had a chance to overthink it.



“Oh, Jesus,” she murmured out loud to herself, finally getting up from her chair and walking back to the bedroom to get her jacket before leaving the apartment. Carl was still in bed, cuddling up to Fiona’s pillow, still half-asleep. Fiona walked over to the side of the bed to drop a kiss on his head, and he immediately awoke, mumbling something incoherent before wrapping his arms around her.



“I gotta go!” Fiona said as she pulled away, laughing. “Listen, I have to talk to you later, okay?” She would procrastinate the fateful conversation to this evening, partly because she really had to go see her client but more importantly because she didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with it right now.



For now, Fiona would pretend that none of this had happened. For one last day, she would enjoy pretending to be a normal person before diving back into reality. That was what Gage represented to her: the truth that she could never run from. She’d turn back and face it one last time, face all the dark truths of her life, and then she’d be free of them forever.





Chapter Three




Gage reread that single word, over and over again—“yes.” He didn’t know what it meant, exactly, out of context. Was she coming back to the city? Gage’s heartbeat immediately picked up, echoing in his ears as it thudded against his chest. It was like his heart had just woken back up after months and months of sleep. That was the kind of effect that Fiona had on him, even with a single word.



That’s the way it had been before when she left him. A single word had caused all this damage, had completely shattered him and left him in pieces. When Fiona had first come to him and said that she couldn’t do it anymore, he thought it was just a bluff. Like she always did after a particularly hard case, she had come home, popped open a bottle of wine, and sat in the dark of their bedroom, silently crying and flinching away from him whenever he tried to touch her. Gage had decided to just sit next to her on the bed, to be there for her in whatever small way he could, even though he knew there wasn’t really anything he could do to help.



“It’ll be okay, you know,” he said to her, but even he was aware that his voice didn’t come out particularly reassuring.



“You don’t know that,” Fiona whispered back hoarsely, raising the bottle of cheap red wine back to her lips to take a huge gulp. “It’s not okay. It’s not okay at all. It never will be again.” She sniffled a little and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her black work dress. “Their little girl is dead, and she’ll never come back to them. Ever again.”



Gage didn’t know what to say to that. He figured any talk of God or heaven or “everything happens for a reason” would just aggravate her at this point. In any case, she resumed talking a minute later.



“You know, he kept her in his basement for a week before he killed her. He starved her and he tortured her and he…did what men like him do to girls like her. She probably thought…she probably thought it was her fault, that she was stupid enough to get kidnapped in the first place. So she just sat there all alone while he played with her, until he got bored and threw her out with the rest of the trash,” Fiona said, summarizing her latest case before sipping some more on her wine.