The Fall of V (The Henchmen MC 13)

Smart, quick, confident, fearless, dedicated, fierce, and yet somehow still incredibly kind-hearted. She was a rare creature, the likes of which I don't think I had ever come across before.

Really, if she wanted it, if she was willing to work for it, I had a mind to leave Hailstorm to her when I finally decided to step aside.

She would reign over it as well - if not better - than I had in my time.

She was special.

And she was missing.

And I was smart enough to know that the longer this went on, the more damage was being done to her, the more changed she would be.

V had a knack for breaking women.

I saw a lot of it.

In the aftermath of her inevitable downfall.

When we had needed to stay behind while Reign and his crew got out of there, collecting the women, taking them out, bringing them to the hospitals or back to Hailstorm if they adamantly refused treatment.

Whoever these women had been before they were taken, they became something else entirely after. After weeks, months, years of being systematically tortured, raped in traditional and horrendously imaginative ways, there was very little chance of them holding onto who they had been before.

Some went home, went back to their lives with their loved ones. But we kept track, we watched in case PTSD turned them psychotic or violent, lashing out at their loved ones that they couldn't distinguish from the monsters they knew all too well.

They went home. Put on their old clothes. Slipped into their old roles. But something was fundamentally changed. Their smiles held reserve, their laughs hollow sounds, their eyes wary and watchful, looking for hands trying to drag them away again.

Others never could go back, much like many of the people at Hailstorm who found themselves too damaged to go home, to pretend, to try to be normal again.

They built new lives, didn't pretend, constructed whatever kind of fortress they needed to keep the world away.

Others still broke.

Shattered.

Crumbled.

Got lost in their heads, ending up in restraints or padded rooms, medicated to keep them calm, to make their lives as numb as possible.

That was what V and her men could do to women. Had done to countless women. Because the ones we had managed to break free were just a few of many spread across continents, trapped in the sex trade until they OD'd, killed themselves, or were murdered by their captors.

And that couldn't happen to Ferryn.

Not the girl who used to stick Barbie heads on dinosaur bodies, who told me with all the confidence of a seven-year-old (which in her case was a surprising lot) that she didn't want to play princess because she was going to be a knight instead because they got to have the swords, who whispered little girl secrets in my ear, who I let steal sips of my coffee because her mother wouldn't let her, who borrowed books from me, who debated heavy topics with me, who trained with me.

Trained with me.

I needed to remember that.

She had trained with me.

And Janie. Malc. Cash. Pagan. Laz. Edison. Lenny. Cyrus. Anyone, literally anyone who had a skill they could teach her, she had spent time with them learning it.

She took to martial arts the way labs took to water, with some intrinsic, primal, animalistic, evolutionary pull. Like it was in her blood, her marrow, like her muscles had sense memory of something they hadn't known in this life before.

She was good.

After eleven years of relentless lessons, she would be.

There was no changing her inherent weaknesses. She was female and slight, not possessing the brute strength of boys her own age let alone men twice her weight and width.

But that had always been a focus of her training, overcoming her shortcomings. Learning to be faster, more athletic, knowing how to anticipate an attacker's moves, so she could avoid them, using her legs as much as possible, where her center of gravity was strongest.

And we had gone hard on her, as Summer had demanded, getting her body accustomed to pain, showing her how to think clearly through it.

And I knew her, I knew her as well as she knew herself.

If she found an opportunity to use it, she would. She would claw, punch, kick, hit, bite, gouge.

She would put up one hell of a fight.

She would do whatever it took to hurt them, to make them think twice about putting their hands on her.

"Lo."

Cash's voice wasn't itself.

It hadn't been since we had gotten the news.

I was starting to worry it never would be again.

"Yeah?" I asked, watching as he moved toward me, shadows under his eyes, body tight and boneless somehow at the same time.

All he managed to do was hang his head, moving bodily into me, his head crashing down on my shoulder, his arms going tight around me. "I know," I said, feeling the sting of tears, trying to fight them, knowing it was a useless task.