Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,36

Plus, they were familiar. Shelby didn’t do well with change. Fuck, she didn’t utter a word for most of her time in The Cell. Cried mostly, wept. It made sense, considering what they went through.

Shelby coming from a loving home, never knowing any violence beyond a tap on her behind when she had been in trouble in her youth. It was understandable that she had reacted the way she did. It made sense that she broke.

But no one really thought of the jarring trauma that came with being rescued. Everyone expected elation at being saved and tasting freedom again.

But they hadn’t been saved. And freedom was a thin façade.

The only way to save them would be to erase the captivity from their lives, to give them all those years back, to take away their agony. Impossible tasks, to be sure.

Orion did her best to cling to her mask. The one she’d perfected from years of torture and rape. Somehow, it was harder holding it in place with camera flashes and questions being yelled in her face—this feeling that came to her as the media fought to get those pictures and questions, that these people saw her as only a story, not a human being with real feelings and emotions. In that way, they were not that much different than her captors.

“How does it feel to be out?” one of them yelled.

“What do you have to say to your rescuers?” another reporter shouted.

Orion kept her gaze on Maddox’s back, like she had in the hospital.

An anchor.

One she didn’t want. But one she needed. Right now, at least. Soon she’d have to grow strong enough to lose him all over again. Strong enough to stain her hands and clean her soul.

The police separated them.

Orion should’ve been expecting that.

But she wasn’t.

All of her instincts were dull, her thoughts soft, but her nerves had a hard edge.

The room looked like an interrogation room in the movies. Desk in the middle. Mirror to the left. A D.A.R.E. poster on the wall.

She sipped a shitty coffee. She didn’t like coffee, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to grow to like it. Isn’t that what happened when you went to college, got a job? Became an adult? You started drinking coffee . . . and slowly, you started to enjoy it.

She drank it more for something to do than anything else, and the little buzz it gave her. She needed the energy after spending most of the night pretending to sleep amongst the giggles and loud whispers. She had quietly seethed at them all, but most of all at herself for not being able to join in, to be part of it.

But she couldn’t. Orion knew the second she saw Jaclyn’s face when she talked about what she wanted to do to the doctor. She knew that she was alone in her vengeance, in her anger. That something different was broken inside of her. Something that would serve as a barrier from ever being able to make any kind of human connections. She felt an unnatural evil simmering beneath the surface.

Maddox had affected her more than she could admit. His blue eyes were searing into her skin. The way he interacted with April. He had been mad at her, but there was a softness to that anger. A caring. She had been surprised at the mention they lived together. She didn’t want to be curious as to how that came about. She didn’t want to know about what had happened in their lives since she’d been gone.

But she was forced to with Maddox being the investigator on this case. Another cruel twist of fate.

She tried to sink into herself. Into her cold, hard interior, to the place where she retreated constantly these past ten years.

It didn’t work.

Especially not when the door opened and Maddox and Eric strolled in. Not when he smiled at her.

She narrowed her eyes as they sat down across from her. “You’re shitting me.”

Maddox’s eyebrows raised in question.

Orion forced herself to take one slow breath, keeping her gaze even and not look away from his stare. “You can’t be interviewing me. Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?”

Something flickered on his face. He looked to his partner and then to the mirror. Orion wondered if there was a lineup of his superiors watching. She guessed this was a big case. It’s not every day that you find girls that had been missing for years, and the bodies of others. Not every day you