Page 19 of Faith
“Including me,” Lorelei Sloane said. “You don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to tell me your story. But the two men who brought you here trust me. They knew you needed to tell me what happened. And Frannie knows it, too.”
Nina looked at all of them. Her gut churned with anxiety. There was so much. Good, but mostly bad. The things she knew, had witnessed and done nothing to stop. “I didn’t help any of them.”
“Any of who?” Frannie asked.
“The others,” Nina said. “Gwendolyn listened to me. She said I was her little sister. She would talk to me. I could have told her to stop. Or done something to make her stop. I could have?—”
“Gwen would never have stopped. I’m guessing those bruises you have are from her hands.” Frannie gestured to Nina’s throat and face.
Nina nodded.
Frannie sighed heavily. “She wasn’t violent when I knew her. Obviously, I didn’t know her well. She didn’t talk about herself much. Or her family. She had a brother and her father, but I never met either of them. When Lorelei first told me Gwen was behind everything, I had a hard time believing it. She was my friend. She was someone I spent time with. How was it possible I missed so much?”
Nina nodded, her throat closing. She inhaled a shaky breath. “I ran to her,” she whispered. “I chose to go to her.”
“She deceived you, Nina. She manipulated you into thinking she was going to be there for you. That’s what happens.”
“I didn’t know she was so evil,” Nina whispered, all her emotions and regret and fear and pain bursting from her.
Frannie gathered Nina close and held her while Nina sobbed painfully all over the woman she’d known for less than an hour. Nina couldn’t stop the flood once she started, her chest heaving with pain and her lungs crying for air as she cried and hated herself for choosing to turn to a woman who would one day kill her.
When Nina’s sobs turned to hiccuping breaths, Frannie pulled back slightly.
“None of this is your fault. I know you’re not ready to hear that, and it’ll take a long time before you are, but I want you to hear it from me. Everything Gwen has done is on her. She’s to blame for her actions. Even if you tried to stop her, she would have beaten you more or sold you to someone or just killed you. You never would have made it back to your brother.”
Nina couldn’t accept that, but she appreciated Frannie saying it. Nina wished she’d done so many things differently over the last twelve years.
But she couldn’t go back.
“Lorelei is one of the good ones. She’s smart and she’s capable and she’s leading the charge to find and stop Gwen for good. Her partner is married to Damon’s ex, the one I mentioned?”
Nina breathed a laugh. “Really?”
Frannie smiled. “She got her happily ever after. Lorelei is living with the man who found her. The other room is full of women whose lives were nearly destroyed by Gwen and Damon and the rest of them, but who found their way through that to a happiness they never expected would exist.”
“Wow,” Nina breathed.
“You are welcome to join us. Now or any other time.” Frannie’s smile was warm and kind and made Nina wonder if there was a chance at a life for her.
“Thank you.”
“Will you tell me about your time with Gwendolyn Lennox?” Lorelei asked.
Nina faced the woman. She tried to build up the fear she felt when Lorelei spoke earlier, but it was gone. Hearing Frannie’s story, knowing she wasn’t the only one who trusted Gwendolyn and paid the price for it, told Nina she was safe.
She should have known Monty and Zeke would never put her in danger, but her instincts were rusty at best. And trusting a stranger was a mistake Nina was not willing to make again.
“I’m ready,” she said, nodding at Agent Sloane. Time to stop Gwendolyn.
5
Zeke leanedagainst the wall of the living room and listened to Nina tell her story. His body was rigid, every muscle tense. He hated himself more with every word she spoke. Every admission of what she’d been through and witnessed. Everything he could have prevented if he’d stopped her that night.
“Gwendolyn was a friend of a friend. I went to Club Curves a few times to see Beth. We played soccer together in high school. She was a year older than me, and she tore her ACL her senior year. Went from a full ride to college to no offers at all. She didn’t have money to pay for school, so she started working at Club Curves.”
“Most of us who worked there had similar stories,” Frannie said. “It was a place that felt safe even though it really wasn’t. But we didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t,” Nina said. “Beth had been there for a while, and we’d been in touch off and on. Monty was…” Nina looked at her brother.
