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Rebel sighed. “I can’t even imagine what those poor women are going through. I can’t stop thinking about them. Do they have families who are searching for them? Or did they target women who no one cared about enough to notice they were missing?”
“Probably the latter.”
Rebel shook her head sadly. “That’s somehow worse.”
I wanted to put an arm around her and hug her close. I wanted to tell her it would be okay.
But I didn’t know that it would.
I was pretty sure if I tried to hug her right now, I’d only be crowding her, making her anxiety worse.
She shoved her chair back abruptly and paced up and down the kitchen floor. “We need to do something.”
I groaned. “Ah shit. Please don’t say that. I promised Fang I’d keep you here, safe and sound while he took care of the problem. Please don’t make a liar out of me.”
She draped her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. “Would I do such a thing?”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. What are we doing? But it can’t take too long. We’ve got that dinner at my mom’s later.”
“I know. But setting someone’s house on fire doesn’t take that long.”
I laughed. “I thought I just heard you say you were setting someone’s house on fire.”
She was already moving around the kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards, rifling through them for who knows what. “I did. Hugh’s place to be exact. With him in it. Do you know where the matches are?”
I was sure my eyes were bugging out of my head.
But Rebel was a little tornado of action, collecting fire starters and anything that could have remotely passed as an accelerant.
I grabbed her arm. “Hey, pyro. Stop for a second.”
She shook her head. “Can’t. I have to do something.”
“You don’t. You have to stay here and be safe. With me.” I swallowed thickly. “Fucking hell, Roach. Don’t make me beg you.”
She stopped and looked up at me, her eyes big and sparkling with unshed tears. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it so I do.”
She took a shaky breath, breathing it out over a wobbly bottom lip. “It’s my fault that woman is trapped with the Sinners. If I had just gone to the cops when Caleb had raped me…”
I cupped the side of my face. “That’s not true.”
“It is! If I’d just gone, maybe they would have arrested them. Caleb and his friends could be rotting in a prison somewhere. But I was selfish and said nothing. I didn’t let Fang or War or Scythe go after him because I was so hell-bent on getting revenge myself. In the time I wasted, he took another woman.” She kicked at the edge of a kitchen tile. “I might as well have abducted her myself.”
She tried to pull away, but I grabbed the back of her neck, not letting her go. “Or you would have gone to the cops, and they would have blown you off, like they do to every other woman from Saint View who makes a claim of sexual assault against a powerful man. That’s why you didn’t go. You didn’t go because you know the system. You’ve seen it too many other times to believe in it. It’s failed your friends, your family, and it’s failed you. Why would you keep trying when they don’t lift a finger to help?”
She pressed her forehead into my chest. “You’re right. I know. But it doesn’t make it any easier to just sit here, knowing they’re probably hurting her the way they hurt me. Leonn is turning himself in. Fang is dealing with Caleb. Someone needs to go after Hugh. I can’t keep sitting on my hands. He didn’t even recognize me when I was in that coffee shop, Vaughn. Did he even see my face when he pushed me to the ground? Didn’t he see me cry when he ripped my clothes and scratched my skin? Didn’t he hear me beg him to stop or my screams of pain?”
She hadn’t meant to hurt me with her words. She’d just been venting, trying to get them off her chest. But every word she said was like shooting an arrow through my heart and twisting it, so the barbed edges did the maximum amount of damage.
She cared so much. She was tiny, but her heart was so damn huge. Who else would put themselves in danger for a woman she’d only spoken to via knocks through a bathroom wall? She didn’t know anything about her, other than that she needed help.
Rebel hadn’t deserved what they’d done to her. No woman did.
And Hugh was still out there, free as a fucking bird to do it all again.
While I was sitting here, in my mansion, scared to let her leave. Scared to let her have her revenge. Scared she’d wind up as dead as my father.