to be processed didn’t help. How much paperwork could one runaway have?
When I spoke, it came out like gibberish, or maybe like an auctioneer on crack. The visual made me giggle. My voice was high-pitched and nervous. And then a thought stopped me mid-laugh: Stockholm’s Auktionsverk is the oldest auction house in the world. Not-so-random and useless information like that flooded my head for no reason at all, or maybe because it simply had no place else to go.
They wanted to know what I was doing on Gavin Vault’s estate, running and screaming, “Help!” That I was barely dressed from the waist up, another mystery. I would tell them, but in my own words. I refused to lie or say something that could send Gavin to prison. And the statement they’d written for me? I was about to tell them where they could shove it when the cop shot me a “you’d better start talking, or we’re gonna start the torture” look.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” I said as I sipped hot, institutional-tasting liquid, realizing what I’d said made absolutely no sense to the officer. There’s no way she could have known what she’d gotten herself into. Sadly, she was about to find out. “I’ll tell you what you want to know, but you won’t believe a word of it.” Those were the most coherent words I’d spoken since I’d arrived.
The cop seemed confused, like she was surprised I was capable of forming articulate sentences. She watched as I pulled at the sleeves of the oversized sweater on loan from one of the male cops. Then I grabbed my head in my hands. Vivid images raced through my mind, before leaving as quickly as they’d appeared. They were memories that would free me from this stagnant mental prison if only I could set them in the proper order.
The fly whizzed past me. I was a volcano of turmoil and angst and sat, leg-shaking and squirming in the metal chair, attempting to calm the impending eruption. The officer just stared as if I were a nut that needed cracking, only she didn’t have the right tool.
“I’ll tell you everything as soon as my mother arrives,” I offered, sitting back in the steel chair. Mom would take care of everything.
The officer looked at me, then down at her blank pad, then back at me, and said, “Miss Miller, do you need a doctor? Were you harmed in any—way?” She leaned over the table, lowering her head and voice conspiratorially. It took me a second to realize what she’d meant.
But she was out of her mind if she thought Gavin would harm me. She wasn’t even asking the right questions. Like, “What’s someone like you doing here, and how did this happen?” I had to get out of there. I needed to find my brother, Remi. I needed to know what was going on with Gavin and what they had done to him. What’s taking Mom so long? It should not have surprised me. She’d always been unreliable. I tapped the table to keep from picking up my chair and throwing it at the two-way mirror. I needed to keep my anger in check, but I didn’t know how long I could. How had Gavin and I ended up in a police station, he accused of an unspeakable crime, and me his supposed accuser?
“How did you find me? How did you know where to find me?” I reluctantly asked. I should have been able to get the answer on my own, to read her mind.
“We received an anonymous tip,” she offered, raising her eyebrows, her tone secretive. And then I saw something, a fuzzy vision.
I tilted my head sharply to the side and cringed. The intrusion of my brain hurt like heck. A man, talking, then handing over an envelope with pictures of me looking like something the cat dragged in, then gone—the man and the vision. I gasped as the pounding in my head kicked into overdrive. Evidence? How? Gavin had never hit me. It’s a lie.
“What do you want from me? You seem to have all the evidence you need.” My eyes shifted from her small face to her name tag then to her “serving since” pin. Two years.
Officer Bladen looked away from me when she replied, “You’re at the very least a witness to a crime, Miss Miller. Has no one explained to you what’s going on?” She leaned forward again, cautiously, and opened the folder on the