Sneak Attack (Tapped Out 2)

Before I knew what I was doing, I followed another link. Click here for more stories of missing children. The page loaded, full of faces. Some smiling, some serious, all far too young. Most would be changed irreparably if they came back from what they’d lived through.

Some wouldn’t come back at all.

I couldn’t stop clicking. So many stories. I couldn’t digest them all. Sometimes I found my way to a survivor’s story. That’s what we were called.

Victims who became survivors. Endurers. There should be another word. I didn’t want to just survive any longer.

I wanted to live.

An article about a seventeen-year-old named Lainey Peterson caught my eye. She’d been taken on her way to school one day when she was thirteen. She’d stepped off the school bus just feet from her school, but it had been too far. Her backpack strap had broken off and she’d been the last one off the bus because she tried to fix it. She’d lagged at the back of the pack of kids, and a man had been waiting.

She’d been imprisoned for six weeks, raped and beaten repeatedly. Until one day he’d just let her off on a street in downtown Chicago, far from her home in Champaign. She’d wandered in circles, not knowing where to go or how to tell people what she’d lived through.

I shut my eyes. That was one of the worst parts of the whole ordeal. Coming back and having to tell people what had happened. It was like being victimized all over again. But silence was worse, because then people wondered why you didn’t “bounce back” faster. Why you looked mostly the same on the outside, but on the inside, all the parts and pieces had been moved around to form a new whole.

She’d made it. She’d lived. Hers was a success story. They even wrote a followup article, a few years later, when she was starting college and engaged to a nice young man. She was excited about the future, she said, and she’d come a long way.

The only problem was, the road that she was on—that I was on—was one without end. We could come a long way forever and never reach the end. Every day we started at the beginning all over again.

Time disappeared while I searched for more on Lainey Peterson. More proof that she’d made it. She hadn’t turned on herself and erased all the progress she’d made. Somewhere she was living with her nice young man, making love and babies. Going to work and school, her life utterly boring and normal.

But I couldn’t find anything else about Lainey. She’d vanished again, for a different reason this time. The routine of normal life had absorbed her. I hoped.

God, I hoped.

There were other Laineys. Different stories, different details. Too many kids to count. All of them struggling, trying to find a way to make sense of what made none.

What would my story say, after my life was over? That I’d fought hard, and lost? Or that I’d won, in my own little corner of the world, keeping to myself, holding on to what was left of my sanity with an iron f

ist?

My story wasn’t over yet. I still had time to change it.

The buzzer rang and I startled, nearly upending the laptop. A hurried check of my phone showed that I had spent almost an hour and a half lost in the stories I’d found. I had to get ready for work soon.

The fight never stopped. At least when I was in the ring I didn’t have to pretend otherwise.

Crossing the room, I tried to shake off all that I’d read. “Who is it?” I said into the intercom.

“Lorenzo. Let me up.”

I stilled. I didn’t even breathe. What the hell was he doing here?

I debated my options. Refuse him entry? Call Tray? Go down and kick his ass in the vestibule?

Or let him up and trust that I could handle myself by myself, whatever happened.

Victim. Fuck that shit.

After releasing the door, I waited by mine and had it open the instant I heard footsteps in the hall. Though he was dressed in unrelieved black from his suit to his shirt to his wing tips, he wore a jaunty red tie that was about as incongruous as a clown’s red nose.

“Mia.” He tipped his head at me and walked into my apartment.

I followed him inside and shut the door behind us, but I kept my hand on the knob. “What are you doing here?”

“Always so full of manners.” He walked around the apartment, his gaze drifting from wall to table to floor. Examining my things in a way that felt horribly intrusive, in spite of the fact that he only looked, never physically laid a hand on anything. “You know, normally it’s customary to offer a guest a beverage. Perhaps a scone.”

I crossed my arms. I wasn’t nearly as unaffected as I seemed when it came to this man and his brethren, but I’d be damned if I acted cowed. No one would put me in a defensive position again, least of all a man in wingtips. “I don’t serve fucking scones.”