“I need you to tell me everything,” Victor says with gentle intent. “Tell me about your relationship with Javier. You said he believes he is in love with you.”
I nod in a slow, rapid motion. “Yes. He told me once that he was in love with me, but I know better. He’s crazy. Possessive. But he protected me from the things the other girls had to go through.”
I don’t like to think about these things, much less talk openly about them. I am ashamed and I hate myself for what they endured.
“He protected you?” Victor asks, needing more information.
“Yes. I was off-limits to Javier’s men. And Izel, well, Javier nearly killed her when she hit me in the face once. After that, she wasn’t allowed to touch me. And I was allowed luxuries the other girls weren’t, too. Hot showers and good food and I got to see places outside of the compound. I even flew on a small plane with him several times. Javier would rarely let me out of his sight. Izel hated me for it, accused Javier of ‘going soft’, falling for a ‘stupid American girl’.”
A spark of intrigue passes over Victor’s features.
“What kind of places were you taken?”
I shrug softly and let my hands fall in-between my thighs, my fingers curling nervously around one another.
“Sometimes,” I begin, “he’d take me with him to other rich men’s houses, with sparkling blue pools shaped like horseshoes and other strange things. Javier said it was just to mingle but I knew we were there for drug deals. And girls. Sometimes we came back with a new one. He would dress up in a nice suit and shiny black shoes just like yours.” I glance down at Victor’s shoes briefly. “He didn’t look like the scumbag you saw the other day, living in filth. He is rich, despite what you saw.”
“I gathered that much.”
I go on:
“And of course he’d make me dress up, too.”
I lower my eyes shamefully, mostly because sometimes I enjoyed it, dressing up and being treated like a princess. That was how I always thought of it: a princess, as disturbing as the circumstances were.
“I felt like an arm trophy.”
“That is exactly what you were,” he says and I look back up at him again, quietly stung by his words. “Do you remember anything about the men whose homes you were taken to?”
“Yes,” I say with a nod. “But I think they were vacation homes, or something.”
“Why?”
“Because they mentioned things about how they were only in Mexico for a few weeks, or how they were heading back to California, or Nevada or Florida, places like that.”
“They were Americans?”
“Some of them were, I’m pretty sure they were,” I say. “They didn’t have accents, foreign anyway. They definitely weren’t Mexican, that’s for sure.”
They may have been American, but I knew they wouldn’t help me like I hoped Victor would. They were just as evil as Javier. Two of them even tried to buy me from him. No, none of them would ever have helped me escape so this is why I consider Victor the first American I’ve seen in nine years. Those men lost that privilege by association.
“Do you remember any of their names?”
Victor looks more eager now than I have ever seen him, yet he still manages to maintain an almost flawless unemotional façade.
I think back, trying to recall and coming up short.
“No,” I say, frustrated with myself, “not right now, but I did hear their names on occasion when one would introduce one to another.” I pause and say with more emotion, “Victor, what is it?”
His dangerous bluish eyes lock on mine.
“At the compound, or anywhere Javier could keep tabs on you and control you, you weren’t a threat to him. But now that you’ve escaped, you’re a bigger threat than anyone because you know too much. It is apparent Izel was right to think him foolish with his feelings for you; he probably never anticipated you leaving. You being alive and free is a threat to his entire operation and anyone involved in it.”
I think on it a moment, letting the obvious truth of Victor’s words sink into my mind. I may not have ever known where I was kept in Mexico and even right now I wouldn’t be able to tell American authorities where Lydia and the other girls are being held against their will, but I do know names, still hidden in the back of my memory, but they’re there nonetheless. And I remember faces and conversations, although casual they still held many small bits of information that, I suppose, given to the right people could expose them as drug and sex traffickers.
“Larsaw, or maybe Larsen,” I say suddenly as the name appears on the tip of my tongue. “Gerald Larsen. I remember he was the first American I was ‘shown off’ to when Javier took me to my first house. He had white hair. He was chubby. But I was never directly introduced to anyone. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I learned their names by listening to their conversations.”
Victor looks deeply in thought and shakes his head suddenly.
“John Gerald Lansen is the CEO of Balfour Enterprises and founder of the most reputable charity for ending violence against women in the United States.” He looks right at me. “The information you hold, no matter how insignificant you think it all is, could bring down a lot of high profile people. I imagine if word gets out that you have escaped and the right person—a vengeful sister, perhaps,” he says, I know referring to Izel, “who decides to tell the right people, more than Guzmán will pay to have Javier killed and Javier knows this.”
It hits me like a shock of electricity and I jump from the bed and try to make a run for the door. Victor catches me mid-stride, grabbing me around the waist. I whirl around at him, punching at him blindly. I manage to hit him, but I’m not sure where as my fists move clumsily and in such a chaotic motion that my eyes can’t keep up within the scuffle.
My back hits the floor and I look up, my auburn hair whipped savagely around my face, to see Victor pinning me, straddling my waist.
“Let me go! Let me go, godammit!” I thrash around under his weight, unable to do much with my legs, my hands pinned against the floor above my head, trapped by his own.
“He’s going to kill me! Someone help!”
He manages to bind both of my wrists with one hand, the other he presses over my mouth to muffle my screams. Tears shoot from my eyes. I beg him over and over again, my voice almost completely shut out by the weight of his hand.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he says calmly. “If it was my intention, you’d be dead already.”
He waits for my tense body to ease some before I feel his hand loosen ever so slightly.
“Are you going to be quiet?”
I nod because I still can’t speak with his hand over my mouth.
Finally, after a long moment, Victor moves his hand away slowly.
“Why wouldn’t you kill me?” I ask, my voice still trembling and choked by tears. “Still using me as leverage?”
“In a way, yes,” he answers.
I want to scream again while I have a chance, but his words keep me from it:
“And I don’t kill innocent people.”
Silence fills the small space between us.
“No one is innocent,” I snap, surprising myself. “Least of all me. For years I let that disgusting murderer violate me and I never said no. I sat back and watched in silence as he and his men and that bitch sister of his beat and raped and sold the girls I became close to. I did nothing. I never screamed or fought back or stood up for any of them. Not a single one.” I hear my voice beginning to rise with anger, but I don’t care. I clench my fists together on my chest, looking up into his eyes as he remains seated on top of me. “I pretended like nothing bothered me, that Carmen’s hands being smashed to bits by that hammer didn’t faze me! I didn’t flinch when Marisol was forced to have an abortion by a butcher doctor who left her to bleed to death on the table! I didn’t shed a single tear when the girl with the red hair and freckles was killed right in front of me because the man who came to purchase her didn’t like what he saw!” I bring up my fists and go to slam them down on the tops of his legs out of anger, but he catches my wrists and holds them solidly. “I am not innocent!” I roar.
I feel his hands wrench my wrists, but my head is too clouded by emotion to care.
The things I’ve admitted are things that have haunted me for the longest time. They’ve been buried in my soul, burning through to the very core of me, rendering me emotionless and turning me into someone entirely different than I was supposed to be.
I let my head fall to the side, feeling the pang of defeat. I can’t look at him anymore. Not out of anger or hatred or revenge, but out of shame. I can’t look a murder in the eye because not only am I no better than he is, it’s possible that I’m worse.
“You are very strong,” he says and raises his body from mine. “With a strong survival instinct. It is the only thing that separates you from those other girls. Like them, you were still held there against your will. You were still made to do things against your will. You were physically and emotionally abused. You should not blame yourself for their weakness.”
He walks back over to the table.
I pick myself up from the floor and just look across at him, trying to make sense of his words. Or, maybe the guilt I’ve harbored for so long is only trying to force me not to believe them.
He glances over at me and adds, “You did the right thing.”
I shake my head. “No. I didn’t. I should’ve done something to help them.”
Victor shoulders his duffle bags and takes up the suitcase in the other.
“You did,” he says, standing in front of me now. “You kept your cool. You waited for your opportunity. You pretended to the point of acceptance and trust. You’re risking your life right now to go back for that girl.”
He walks past me and goes toward the door, turning to look back once he gets there.
“You are innocent,” he says. “And it’s why you’re still alive.”
Then he opens the door and hesitantly, I follow him out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We arrive in Green Valley nearly three hours later. Both of us sat in silence for most of the drive. I had too much thinking to do, too many unresolved issues to work out, which I didn’t come close to doing in such a short time. And it will take me a very long time to lay my guilt to rest, if I ever can. I don’t care that the things Victor said made sense, I still feel like the most selfish person in the world for what I did. I’ll probably feel this way forever.
And I did ask Victor why we were heading to Green Valley. He had said before that he would tell me what was going on, but when it came down to it, he was vague. He told me that he has an exchange to make near Green Valley, but he wouldn’t go into detail. I guess all that talking he did back at the hotel in Douglas went over his conversational word limit. Because he was back to himself again so quickly, the quiet, reserved, intimidating assassin who, for reasons unknown to me, I almost feel completely safe with.