Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,76

to blossom into someone new.

If she said yes, there would be more of him looking. Seeing. It was too much of a risk to have Maddox this close with everything she was doing. Maddox was no longer the boy she’d kissed on the back porch of his parents’ house. He was a cop.

He was a cop who arrested monsters and saved victims.

She was not a victim. Not anymore.

Her goal was to become a monster.

“Okay,” she said, unsure who was speaking inside of her.

Was it the victim, the monster, or was it Ri? Who she’d been so certain was just another stain she left on the floor of that cell?

Fourteen

One Month Later

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or do I have to become a detective?”

Orion looked up from where she was kneading dough. She was making blueberry lavender scones. She thought lavender was a fucking weird thing to put in a scone, but what did she know? She was ten years behind everybody else.

April was channel surfing on her new television. They’d decided after a couple glasses of wine—Orion was now quite partial to it—that the TV wasn’t big enough. Or fancy enough. Orion had bought the cheapest one on the market out of habit.

That same night they had also decided it was well past time Orion spend all the money that was burning a hole in her bank account.

The lawsuit had come through. It hadn’t been the long, tedious battle that Orion had expected, so she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For someone to jump out from behind a curtain and realize she was a Darby, shove her in a trailer, empty her bank account, and forget about her.

But then again, the other shoe had dropped ten years ago.

So, the legal stuff went off without a hitch since the publicity of the case had somehow remained at the top of the public conversation. The state of Missouri and the country itself could not afford to look like they were stiffing victims of the most horrific case of the century.

Someone had linked photos, hence the label of the most horrific case of the century. They had images of the devices. The things that were used when they were bad. The box and the mask and the chains. The stockade and the whips with fish hooks on the ends.

There were pictures of The Cell. Of the stains. The worn mattress and the burial pit out back.

It all looked so . . . fake to Orion. Otherworldly, despite the fact she dreamed of it every night and saw it all when she closed her eyes, so she knew all too well that it was real. But seeing it on the news, used like meat dangling in front of a rabid, starving audience, made it seem somehow different.

The world was commercializing their suffering. Maybe the more it looked like a movie, the less people would consider the reality that monsters lived among them and could snatch their daughters off the street. And when Jaclyn died, and her funeral and her death were fed to the masses, posts began circulating on the cesspool of social media, a place Orion avoided at all costs. Questions about some of the girls’ pasts. Some were prostitutes, they said. Some were “partiers” like Jaclyn. Some “deserved it.” Orion fought hard to avoid every bit of it, to focus her concentration on the mission at hand. On the monsters who used her.

Those same monsters who stained the mattress with their filth were still doing it, Orion had no doubt about that. Their party had been busted, but another party was just a drive away.

There was no way men like that, with appetites like that, could just stop. It was a business. That much had become clear to Orion when the same “customers” came again and again over the years. The same smells, taunts, and demands. It wasn’t just two fucked-up men taking girls off the street. It was a whole fucking system.

Orion planned on bringing it down, starting with an adored doctor.

The money would help. Revenge was great when you were bloodthirsty, but you needed ample finances to get away with it. Orion had learned the ins and outs of murder cases in the state of Missouri, what got the killers caught, what they did right, and what they did wrong. She knew that in order to get away with her scheme, in order to defeat this new world of DNA and high-tech cameras,