Page 109 of Kings Fear No One
“But maybe you can just… leave him out there. So long as he stays away.”
“It’s more complicated than that, baby. We know he’s got ties to the Barreras.”
“The men who had me at Zapote?”
Logan nods, squeezing my fleshy hip. “They were selling you to him.”
“Selling me!?”
“They’re in the flesh trade. Almost all cartels are.”
A feeling I can’t place worms through me. Some kind of combination of disgust and terror. I process it for a second—or do my best to—and then murmur the only question that seems to make sense.
“Then does that mean I was… the first time?”
“It’s possible,” he answers. “It’s possible that’s what happened to the both of us.”
“Oh.”
The word puffs out of me in a breath that makes my lungs feel like they’re on the brink of collapse. I’m not sure why I’ve never thought more about why I was selected when I was. I haven’t let myself think much on that evening where I’d wandered onto the parking lot of the Sunny Side Up like I’d done dozens of times before.
I’d wait a few minutes for Grandma Renae to drive by and pick me up.
Instead, somebody else altogether showed up. A white van crashed onto the scene and men jumped out to grab me. I couldn’t fight them off. I could barely scream before I was being smacked hard enough to see stars and then dragged away.
The traumatic scene fades before my eyes with my next blink.
Logan squeezes me closer against him, sensing I’m upset. “It makes sense that’s what Abraham and the Saints have been doing—they’ve got to get their people from somewhere. You remember that wine they used to make us drink?”
“That tasted funny...”
“It was spiked with something. Probably courtesy of the cartel too.”
“It made it so hard to… to stay awake. So hard sometimes to… move.” A ticklish sensation hits my throat, making swallowing difficult. “Sometimes I’d wake in Abraham’s bed and… and… I couldn’t do anything but lay there… as he…”
A sob cuts me off. I bury my face in him, my tears hot. Logan’s muscles clench against me. Otherwise, he’s gone still. He’s peering up at the ceiling fan as it whirs around. The steely blue shade of his eyes has darkened.
He lets me grieve what’s happened, taking however long I need.
Then he does something he’s rarely done. He tells me what it was like for him.
“The same thing happened to me,” he says, his tone lacking feeling, like he’s forced it away. “The wine made it hard to think. Hard to do much. When I did fight back, I paid the price for it. I refused to give in for a long time. Then… then eventually… I realized I had to. I had to do it. I did whatever Mandy wanted me to do to her. I did whatever Abraham told me to do to others.”
“You were there for years. You did what you had to to survive,” I sniffle. “I don’t know how you lasted. I couldn’t have.”
“I almost didn’t. More than once. Including the afternoon I escaped. I was about to end it… end my life. Then I saw the truck unattended and I went for it.”
The blood chills in my veins. “I didn’t know that.”
He points at a scar on his throat, half obscured by the stubble that’s grown in. “I tried to slit my throat.”
“Logan,” I croak, tears rushing to my eyes. “Why would you ever… why would you do that?!”
“’Cuz I was a fucking coward taking the easy way out,” he answers, his dark expression reflecting his internal conflict. “I couldn’t handle knowing I’d failed… that he was doing what he was and there was nothing I could do. So I was giving up.”
I can’t even speak. My voice has gone out to make way for the cry that bubbles out of me. Thinking back to that point in time, I’d never guessed what he was going through. I had no clue what he was about to do…
“I made a shiv from a hunk of wood I found. I sharpened it to a point. All I needed was a moment alone.”
