Page 50 of Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games 2)
I freeze. Poisoning?
The file I read listed her uncle’s cause of death as heart attack, and that it happened a year later, when she was eighteen. Stunned, I glance over at Tabby. She’s pale and unmoving, her eyes downcast, her gaze on her plate.
“Due to the presence of a note and her uncle’s history of depression, the death was ruled a suicide. Department of Children and Families was brought in to choose a guardian, and the minor was placed in foster care…for a period of one month, until she disappeared. School records show she continued attending classes, but officials were never able to locate her—”
“They never looked,” she says quietly.
“Wait,” I say, an odd tightness growing in my chest.
“—and when she became legally an adult at eighteen, the case was closed. Address records show residences for every year except 2007.” Harry gazes at her, long and hard. “So my first question is this. Where were you for that missing year?”
She raises her head and stares at Harry. When she speaks, the floor drops out from under my feet.
“Living with Søren Killgaard, of course.” Her laugh is low and bitter. “Actually, that’s a gross misuse of the word ‘living.’”
Shocked past words, I stare at Tabby. An interval of four heartbeats passes before Harry turns his hard gaze to me. “You said you vetted her.”
“I…I did…there was no missing year, there was nothing to indicate—”
“It’s not his fault,” says Tabby. “The FBI are the only ones who have the accurate data.”
My head is swimming. My heart is hammering. She lived with Søren. She told me she wasn’t in love with him. She led me to believe she hated him, but she spent a year of her life under the same roof with the man.
She fucking lied to me.
Anger turns my vision red. I’m trying to get my thoughts straight to ask a coherent question, but Harry beats me to it.
“You’ve made it obvious you can bypass our firewalls without even breaking a sweat, Miss West. Which means you can just as easily access any other database. So my next question is, why would you change those few details in public records but leave the truth for the FBI?”
She looks at him first, and then turns her eyes to me. “Because I knew someday I’d be having this conversation.”
Through gritted teeth, I ask, “What does that mean?”
She holds my gaze for a moment, her expression unreadable. She’s searching my face for something, but the only things I’m feeling are fury and betrayal, neither of which seem to satisfy her. She finally abandons her search and looks to Harry. “You’re familiar with Stockholm Syndrome, I assume.”
“Capture-bonding,” comes the immediate reply. “Where hostages express empathy for their captors, to the point of defending or sympathizing with them.”
“Or falling in love,” I hiss, hackles raised.
Tabby ignores me. “It’s a form of traumatic bonding—”
“You’re saying he held you hostage?” I interrupt angrily. “For a year? While you attended school during the day?”
She ignores me again and keeps speaking to Harry in a cool monotone as if discussing the weather. “An adaptive psychological defense built into our DNA. Identifying with an abuser is one way the psyche defends itself, especially in women.”
Harry’s calmly nodding. I want to tear out every strand of hair on my head.
“When my uncle died, I had no one left. No one. The government put me into foster care. The first week I was there, my foster father came into my bedroom in the middle of the night and tried to rape me. He didn’t succeed—he was a fat fuck, and I’ve always been strong—but my foster mother didn’t believe me when I told her. Neither did anyone at the DCF. I was denied transfer. The family had been fostering for years with no problems, they said. It must be me, they said.”
Her pause is fraught with anger. “He tried to rape me again a few weeks later.”
Listenin
g to her speak, my rage turns to horror which then turns to a violent urge to take her into my arms. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as helpless in my life as I do right now.
“But that time was different, because someone was there to help me. Someone had been watching me carefully, and when my stepfather pulled the covers off my bed and I screamed, he got a very unpleasant surprise in the form of a baseball bat to his balls.”
Into the silence I say, “Søren.”
