I need him to speak faster. I need him to get it out now. Rip off the Band-Aid and let me see the scar beneath it, a wound that was there but healed. Something that nearly killed him, but he survived with a little permanent spot of proof that it actually happened; it wasn’t just a bad dream. Then, I’ll allow myself to hope. Then, I’ll be able to believe I can fully heal too. Because Neil did.
“With all the skills I learned as a psychologist, I used my profiling abilities to find someone with talents I didn’t have. Computer knowledge—in my mind, I was thinking maybe a hacker. Instead, I found a child prodigy turned technological genius. I found him on my own, approached him and confided in him what I wanted to do. It was a leap of faith on my part, and thank God it worked out,” he breathes.
“Seth,” I murmur, more to myself than him but needing to say something to keep him going.
“Seth, aka Seven at Club Alias. But I’ll get to that bit later. Seth was Plan A. More often than not, whether the victim was a success story or not, the attacker got off with minimal punishment. They were never held accountable for the crimes they committed. Seth helped dig into backgrounds, get past firewalls… really anything we needed in order to make these men pay in our own special way. We drained all their accounts and gave the money to the victims by anonymous donors. Public humiliation by an unknown source, like exposing personal information they certainly did not want let loose. That sort of thing.
“The plan was going great. It was making me feel a hell of a lot better, this twisted game of Robin Hood—instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, we were stealing everything from the rapists and giving it all to their victims. It was doing wonders to lessen the guilt I never let go when it came to Shelly, and then with every patient I was never able to help. I could sleep better at night knowing I was doing something.”
I want to say something, anything about how he shouldn’t have felt any kind of guilt over Shelly and the other girls, but I realized I didn’t have room to talk about feeling undeserved blame.
“This went on a while. And right when I was feeling like I was really doing what I was meant to with my life… it happened again. Not my patient, but her best friend, who was assaulted with her by the same person, ended her life when she wasn’t able to get help. Heroin overdose. And like clockwork, the motherfucker got away with it, the brother of the police chief. This time, something in me snapped. These girls lives were ending. Taking these sadistic fucks’ money wasn’t enough.
“So then came Plan B. We needed someone else on this team I formed with Seth. Because while I was the one who would pick our marks, and while Seth was the one who could get us in anywhere to take care of the job, we needed a very special person to actually follow through with it and would hold to the code I could live with—a life for a life. We needed someone with either a military or law enforcement background, someone who didn’t have a problem using his skillset on a civilian. We needed a vigilante,” he says, but I feel like I’m missing something.
I thought he was telling me the story of how he formed Imperium Security, his security team who went in and rescued my sister. This entire time he’s been speaking, I thought he was going to tell me he formed his team in order to keep women safer, to maybe guard victims from their attackers so they wouldn’t have to worry about it happening again, like his Shelly’s rapist had threatened. But this sounds like something else entirely.
“I used my profiling abilities to find and select a very special couple of men, each with a set of their own skills that would help form this perfect team with Seth and me. Each of us was a separate gear in this living machine, our teeth fitting together and moving in a way that nothing could possibly stop us. Next came Brian, also known as Knight,” he says low, and I picture the towering giant of a man who would be intimidating as fuck if I hadn’t witnessed he was wrapped around his tiny, sweet wife’s little finger. But I have no doubt he could kill someone stealthily and make it look like an accident.
“And after him came Corbin, aka Sarge at the club.” He pulls in a deep breath through his nose and lets it out slow, his eyes coming to mine now after having gone distant as he looked into the past. I brace myself, knowing this is it. This is when he confirms what I’ve already put together in my mind. “And together we formed Imperium Security, a cover for our mercenary team.”