The General (Professionals 4)

But it happened.

And my fate – and Eli’s – was sealed.

I spent the next week with plastic surgeons making it look like nothing had ever happened to me.

I went to a charity event for the local women’s shelter, talking about the atrocities that happened to some poor women while my tongue traced the edges of my stitches, hiding my beating and surgery bruises under thick makeup, my pain numbed only because I took four pain pills before we left the house.

I didn’t remember much of the trial, so beautifully numbed by the seeming endless supply of pills in the bottle on my nightstand. I had only been in court the one day, the day I had to testify, damn myself to hell by putting my hand on a Bible, swearing to tell the truth, then lying through my teeth.

Teddy had needed to walk me out of the courtroom. Not because I was so overcome by emotion as the papers implied – no doubt fed that line by the ever image-conscious Bertram – but because I was so messed up on the pain medicine that I could barely walk.

It wasn’t until he was convicted that I stopped taking them, deciding I deserved the pain that still plagued my body. But, more so, the emotional pain at knowing a man – innocent by my eyes – had to spend years behind bars away from his family because of me.

I deserved the pain.

I believed that to my core as I sat in the bathroom following each beating through those years, cleaning my cuts, icing my bruises.

I deserved it.

For what I did to him.

For what I did to my father.

For what I did to my mother.

I deserved it.

The pain was my punishment for all the ways I had ruined other people’s lives.

So wrapped up in my own martyrdom, it rarely occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who should have been suffering for what had happened.

That Teddy and Bertram were just as at fault for what happened to Eli Mallick. That they shouldn’t have been able to live their lives, buying expensive things, going on fancy vacations, having the time of their lives with a criminally clear conscience.

I guess abuse had a way of doing that. Slowly. Bit by bit over time. Lowering your self-worth into the ground, trapping you so fully in your own little hell that you didn’t see things the way you used to, the way any not-abused woman might. Everything simply became a shower, rinse, repeat. You shut it down, became an automaton, became resigned to your fate, saw no way out.

I hadn’t even realized I had been burying all the pain, the resentment, the helplessness, the anger, the real, raw, human parts of the abuse down deep inside until that night in the kitchen when it burrowed outward, overtaking me completely, making me go for the gun, slip a finger to the trigger, and put an end to it all.

TEN

Smith

She’d been a child.

Poor, desperate, starstruck by an older man’s charm and money and worldliness.

Really, it was one of those tales as old as time.

Young girls who never knew anything but wanting, needing, but never having, being offered a world that would never have needs unmet, where every want would be met by the object of their desire.

Of course, there hadn’t been much thought involved.

I mean, at seventeen-years-old, I barely considered the consequences of getting into all sorts of trouble with my buddies. I couldn’t be trusted to decide the rest of my life right then.

But that was what Teddy had done to her, asked her to decide her future when she was so young that he shouldn’t have even been talking to her, let alone putting his pervy fucking hands on her.

Grooming.

That was what grooming was.

Getting them young, getting them before they understood the world fully, before they developed too much self-worth, before they got too many opinions of their own.

Then give them what they need from you. Attention, compliments, promises of comfort, of an easy life.

Then take them to bed, get all that oxytocin flooding their system, making them feel like they were in love even if they truly weren’t.

Bide your time, put a ring on their finger, get them to sign away their ability to have any quality of life if they left you, then trap them for life.

It was worse with political families. We’d worked with enough of them to know the fucked shit they would do to keep their positions, to allow them to portray their squeaky clean personas.

Arranged marriages. Hush money. A team of fixers much like my team and me burying all their bad deeds so deep that no one could let them surface.

Absentmindedly, I wondered who Bertram worked with. Surely he had someone. And that was troublesome if they ever looked into us.