The Fall of V (The Henchmen MC 13)

There would be none to find here as I tried to sort out a path to freedom.

I would have to eat to stay strong and focused. If I ate, I'd have to use the bathroom. And if I was stuck here for months like Chris, well, there were other undignified bodily things to consider.

My belly twisted at that thought, and it took me a good twenty minutes - I'm guessing of course, but figured it felt something like twenty minutes, though it could have been five or three weeks for all I knew - that there was no cause for shame, no reason to feel embarrassed over my body and how it worked. If they wanted to strip us of everything - including basic human necessities - well, then they could become aware of how our insides came outside every four weeks, and all the raw and ugly that meant.

Raw and ugly, after all, was what they seemed to like best.

What was more raw or ugly than girls chained in basements, unknowing their fate, forced to accept it whatever it was?

Except, well, maybe they hadn't counted on me.

Maybe they counted on drugged-out girls made malleable, or girls who escaped their minds and bodies like Chris.

They didn't factor in girls like me, born into worlds of uncertainty and violence, raised up to stand against it, to fight it, to overcome it.

And make no mistake, that was what I was going to do.

Stand against it.

Fight it.

Overcome it.

Come hell or, as my father might say, motherfucking high water.FOURSummerV had my daughter.

I could say My mother has my daughter, but that made it sound like they were having tea, and homemade cookies fresh out of the oven, chocolate still gooey - as gooey as the feeling as that scene conjures up.

But I doubted my mother knew anything at all about cookies and ovens.

What she did know about, though, was basements, and chains, and pain, and degradation.

I had a brand on my thigh and scars down my back to prove it.

And now she, and worse yet - her minions - had my daughter.

It's too early to know that, that was what Lo had said when the news came in.

Sure, abductions happened every day. To countless young girls all over the world.

But this, this was too perfect.

She had been under full-time guards for months, never out of sight of at least two people with guns, and the skills to use them effectively.

And the one time she sneaks out, some random slimeball grabs her? No. That was too coincidental.

I knew that.

Reign knew that.

Even Lo knew that.

They were probably just trying to keep my mind from going there.

But how couldn't it?

Even all these years later, my mind went there at times. When I was sleeping, when my subconscious decided I had been too happy for too long, that I needed a reminder of what all this was born in.

Fear and misery and a chance escape.

From the torture.

And the humiliation.

I paced the smooth, flawless floors in an empty hall of Hailstorm, the windowless darkness only interrupted by a small hanging bulb from the ceiling, creating ghosts in corners, much like the ones I felt in the recesses of my mind.

Ghosts with clanking bones and cold breath and wicked sneers.

Because Ferryn, much like me all those years ago, would be scared and alone and confused, unsure what might happen to her, why this was happening to her, what chance there was for survival, let alone escape.

"Ugh," I growled, just barely containing the urge to slam my foot into the wall, knowing how unbending it would be, and that now was not the time to drag any of Lo's people away from trying to find my daughter to put a cast on my broken foot.

I deserved it, though, the broken foot.

I should have listened to them.

Lo and Janie and Maze and Mina, when they had sat me down like some kind of intervention just a few weeks ago, faces grim, voices firm, telling me that it was time.

Time to tell Ferryn about V.

Time to tell her about what had happened to me.

"She's seen the scars by now," Lo had reasoned. "Don't you think you are doing her more of a disservice by keeping the truth from her? She's not a little girl anymore."

But she was.

In so many ways, she was.

Innocent and ignorant of the depth of evil ran in our blood.

Because that was what V was.

Pure, undiluted evil.

Not like The Henchmen, or Hailstorm, the Mallicks, Breaker, Shooter, Luce, even my dad before he died. These people lived in a gray area between actual good and bad. People with gritty, questionable jobs, but who were good men and women.

There was no way a woman could abduct and sell other women out to men who would beat and rape them until they were no longer young and beautiful could be called anything other than a monster, an abomination, a beast straight from hell.