The Fall of V Read online

  This was the reality now, ugly as it might be.

  And I had to be strong enough to face it.

  My body shook as I forced my head over toward Chris' side of the basement, finding her sprawled on the floor, facing me, and I wondered if that was on purpose, to frighten me, to taunt me.

  Because her beautiful face had been brutalized, bruises around her eyes, blood soaking into the whites of one, a dried trickle of it coming from her nose, more of it coming from her mouth, a fresh band around her throat of bruises, ones that matched her wrists, dotted up her arms and her thighs since they had stolen her pants.

  My jaw shook as I looked her over, as the anger became something else, something that spread out of my small body, seemed to coat the air around me.

  I swallowed back my saliva as I looked into her unseeing eyes, as Aunt Janie came back to me.

  Never back down.

  Never give up.

  Fight.

  And I was going to fight.

  For me.

  For Mary.

  For Chris.

  For every other unknown woman they had done this to.

  I was going to make those fuckers pay.

  SIX

  Lo

  I felt... useless.

  I never felt useless.

  Not in years.

  Not since I was a young woman, trapped in a marriage with a man who tormented me.

  I made it my mission after that never to feel that way again, to build a life around myself to ensure that I was always in control, to surround myself with men and women who had differing skills from my own, so they could pick up my slack.

  And we did good in the world.

  We helped so many people like the woman I once had been; we healed ourselves by healing one another. We swooped in when others found themselves without hope, saving the day as often as we could.

  We didn't fail.

  We insured ourselves against it with training, with constantly bettering ourselves.

  But we were failing.

  I hated even to think that, even to let such a vile thing cross my mind.

  But it was what was happening.

  No matter how much I lied and said it wasn't.

  Maybe you could call it pride.

  I sure would be considered guilty of it more than a few times in my life.

  This wasn't pride, though, it was a white lie to save my loved ones heartache they didn't need more of right now.

  Everyone at Hailstorm was on it. Those with skills on computers, trying to find the car, trying to search for a trace of V on the darknet. Those who were good at tracking, were tracking. Those with contacts that might have had their ears to the ground on topics such as trafficking, were making calls or setting up meetings. Everyone else was on the streets.

  And then there was me.

  Doing nothing.

  Not a fucking thing.

  What? Directing it? Answering endless emails or texts saying the same thing - nothing.

  No one had anything.

  And this was Ferryn, goddamn it.

  My Ferryn.

  I loved all the kids.

  They all had chunks of my heart.

  But Ferryn - the first - arguably had the biggest piece.

  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 m
anaged 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.

  I don't know how long we stayed like that, just holding onto each other as the world fractured apart.

  But then he suddenly yanked away, eyes huge, lips parted.

  "What?" I asked, shaking my head at his reaction.

  "Fucking Daniel," he said, raking a hand through his hair. "If anyone knows V and how she works and where she might be, it's him."

  "Go," I demanded, actually pushing him to make him get a move on.

  Of course.

  Of fucking course.

  Of all the people we had called, all the rocks we had overturned, all the doors we had knocked on, how the hell had we all simultaneously forgotten him?

  Daniel.

  Who had played V for the public, so no one knew she was a woman.

  Who had been the one with the last laugh because he had been an undercover agent the whole time.

  Who had shacked up with Faith in the city, loosely involving him with the New York Mob families.

  The man who might finally, finally have some answers for us.

  Cash was running.

  A second after the shock subsided, I was too, tearing across the compound with a renewed sense of hope, of possibilities.

  He could tell us about contacts we might not have known before, send us to them, so we could lean on them until they broke. Until they could get in touch, set up a meeting, get us an address, and then we could do it.

  We could go in.

  We could get our girl back.

  My shoulder rammed into someone else's as I charged past.

  "What's..." Jstorm started, but I didn't have time to explain.

  I just kept running.

  Toward the first real lead we had had in almost sixty hours.

  This was it.

  This was what we had all been praying for.

  A way to get our girl back.

  --

  Janie

  I reached up, rubbing my shoulder, watching Lo's blonde hair float out wildly behind her as she stormed through the compound.

  I didn't follow.

  If someone had found her, she would have yelled it to me on her way.

  She wasn't running because someone found her. She was running to chase down a lead.

  And I prayed to every possible god that could exist that it was the one we had all been working so hard for.

  Because everything was leading to dead ends and roadblocks.

  I could feel it, a weight on my shoulders, something oppressive and unyielding, sinking my feet deeper into the ground.

  Sinking.

  I was sinking.

  And there was no denying it as I walked into the empty kitchen to get another cup of coffee, this was bringing some shit up for me.

  That shit.

  That shit that I tried never to think about.

  That shit that sometimes forced me to think of it at night still, all these years later, making me troll the darknet while Wolf and little Malc slept, or go catch a meal with Repo if he was struggling too.

  That shit that would never go away.

  But I tried not to think about it.

  When I could.

  When I had the power.

  It had been so long.

  So many years stretched in between, years filled with usefulness, grim determination to right wrongs. Years filled with training, forcing my body to fight until it shut down on me. Years filled with learning, reading, calm, practiced care building bombs because some place or people needed to blow the fuck up.

  Then, later, years filled with new things, things I never believed I could have, never thought I could open myself up enough for, show my damage to.

  Wolf, namely.

  My silent giant, my fearsome protector - even if I relentlessly insisted that I did not need to be protected, and that if I did, I could do it my damn self.

  I never thought I could have him.

  Never dreamed the universe could be that kind after all the ugly it had sent my way.

  But there he had been with those eyes with a depth that you could jump in and sink endlessly. With those hands that could tear open ribcages and rip out hearts, but also touch me like I was something precious, some miracle, could give me something I never thought I could feel comfortable accepting from a man, could lift me up if I needed it. I mean... I didn't need it. But it was nice to know they were there if I needed them.

  And his heart.

  We couldn't talk about Wolf without talking about that. It was as big as he was. As accepting, forgiving, understanding, and giving.

  He came into my world.

  And he forced me to do things, confront things, try things.

  Along the way, I found a depth of feeling I didn't know I was capable of - and I emoted a lot. Rage and frustration mostly, but emotions nonetheless. But he showed me a softer thing, a deeper thing, something that had become a bigger part of me than anything.

  Love.

  The kind of love that felt overwhelming at times.

  The kind of love that could help you move forward.

  But not forget.

  There was no forgetting.

  This experience was proof of that.

  I tried not to let the thoughts creep in, knowing they would be no help, that all they would do was cloud my mind, make it harder to concentrate on the task at hand.

  And Ferryn needed me to concentrate, to pull off superhuman hacking, to search every goddamn camera in a three-state radius that I could get into, to troll the ugly hidden depths of the darknet, searching for little breadcrumbs that might lead back to V.

  She had to be there.

  That was maybe the most frustrating part to the whole team of us working on it. She had to be on the darkweb. That was how clients found you, how you arranged meetings, sales, how you traded human lives for something as empty as money.

  But people who did this kind of sick shit for a living knew how to do it smart, how to hide their actions under uncommon keywords, how to demand anonymity until they knew you were a real client with real interests.

  V had been a lot of things in her day - namely a heartless fucking bitch - but she hadn't been overly tech savvy. She shouldn't have been too hard to find. Unless all those years locked up gave her time to think, to plan, to figure out how to operate an untraceable empire. Then once she got out, she would have gathered up some old money stores we all knew she had stashed somewhere as any smart criminal would - never putting all their eggs in one basket. Then dug them up and hired someone who knew more than she did on matters such as this.

  That was the only explanation.

  Because, quite frankly, no matter how hard I tried - and Alex tried - to stay up-to-date, to know all the ins and outs, there would always be those who knew more, who whipped around the darkweb at warp speed, going in and out of corners we didn't even know existed, that would be closed off before we ever found them.

  Such was the nature of technology.

  It was always something we accepted, worked to learn more about, but didn't overly stress about.

  But now Ferryn's life was on the line.

  She was likely in a basement, cold, scared, uncertain.

  Like I had been.

  She was likely listening to footsteps overhead, praying they didn't move in the direction of the stairs, didn't come down, didn't find her huddled in a corner, chained and defenseless, didn't come at her with leering eyes and predatory hands.

  Didn't, day in and day out, make her pray and beg for death because life - the life in the basement at the mercy of merciless men - was worse than not existing at all.

  "Don't go dark."

  Those words came from my side, from a voice that was familiar, yet not, since it was cracking into manhood, no longer my little boy-voiced babe, but a strong imitation of his father, all depth and
impactful cadence.

  It was odd, at times, when I looked at him, to think we had made him, that we had needed a place for our love to overflow into since we were full to bursting.

  But there was no denying it when you saw him, when you got to know him. He was an odd, perfect combination of the both of us that seemed impossible, but wasn't.

  He was calm and observant, taking things in, a people-watcher, a bit of a - if you'll forgive the term - lone wolf. But once he watched long enough, made up his mind, he had my impulsivity, my tendency toward righteous anger, my ability simply to argue with you until you gave up.

  He was smart, prone to reading, though he rarely took my suggestions, preferring non-fiction books - history, survivalism, and true crime novels that Ferryn tossed his way when she declared they were worth a read.

  But he was also all action, taking off with Wolf into the woods, learning whatever life skills his father had to teach him, going to the gym with friends, taking self-defense lessons alongside Fallon, his only age-mate in the group.

  And, also like his father, he had a way of reading me, something I had always found a bit off-putting. Like when he was still in grade school, coming home, sensing I was having a rough time no matter how hard I tried to cover it because I wanted my child to have a perfectly well-adjusted mother, and gave me a hug, gave me a kiss, made me art, demanded we take the dogs for a walk, anything he could think of to get me out of my own head.

  And the ability had only grown through the years.

  "I'm trying not to," I admitted, knowing lying would get me nowhere as I turned to face him, holding out a coffee because, well, there was no fear of stunting his growth since he was already only three inches shorter than his father, and had several years of growing left.

  Maybe a little stunting would be good. Cut down on the constant need to buy him entirely new wardrobes.

  "It's about Ferryn, isn't it?" he asked, gaze steady.

  "Yes."

  He nodded a bit at that. "What happened?"

  He was thirteen.

  And while I wouldn't give him the whole truth, he deserved at least a part of it.

  "I think she is in a dark place," I said carefully, seeming to know that he would understand my meaning.