Page 79 of The Professor

“She was a monster.”

“How can you say that?” My heart squeezed. “It might not be true.”

“It’s true.” He gripped my shoulders. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“No!”

“If her number is in Ranson’s book, she was supplying him. We’d have confirmed it but…”

“No. No.” I banged my fists on his bare chest over his goddamn scales of justice tattoo. Where was the justice for me? I’d had my life ripped apart, my heart broken.

“Chelsea!”

“No. Get off me.” I spun away and marched to the door. “I have to go.”

“Wait.” He was behind me. He pressed his hand on the door, and it slammed shut right in front of me.

Then he was pressed against me, his long, hard body pinning me to the wood.

I stared at the handle and the lock beneath it. I longed for my old memories of my mother.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come in this room.”

“It wasn’t locked.”

“I’m usually home alone.”

I dashed at my tears. “How could she have done it? Those poor women? It’s barbaric? She must have known what she was sending them to.”

He didn’t speak. His mouth was by my temple. He kissed me.

“If she did this, I hate her.” I spun to face him. “She’s a terrible human being and…” A fresh thought came over me, and a sob so violent I thought it would rip me apart burst from my chest. “She used the money for our…our…lifestyle. Fuck! We had so much money.”

Everything I’d ever had. Holidays, ponies, private education, designer clothes, the multi-million-pound house, itwas all bought with the profits of misery, addiction, slavery and, most likely, death.

I fell to my knees.

Andrew kind of caught me and gathered me close. The tears were agony as they flowed from me. It was like being ripped apart, the very seams of my soul shredded.

“It’s okay. I’m here,” he soothed, his palm stroking my hair. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

It was something my mother had said to me, tenderly, when I’d been upset about a school bully. Yet how could I remember that now when she’d sent women and girls to such a vile future?

“Chelsea,” Andrew said. “Come on, let’s get you a drink.”

I allowed him to pull me to standing. My fingers clung to him of their own volition, as though without him I’d fall apart.

He sat me down and poured whisky. “Here, drink this.”

I knocked it back in one go then shuddered at the slap to the back of my throat.

“Another.” He poured more, and then one for himself.

He placed his hand on my knee. “It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind about us, now you know what I do.” His mouth was a thin flat line.

“What?”

“When we found out who she was, likely in the next month now we have Ranson’s book, I would have killed her,wewould have killed her. I can’t say that wouldn’t have happened, Chelsea.”