Freed (Assassin's Revenge #3)
by Tara Crescent
Prologue
Alexander:
“Do you believe in karma?”
The question hangs in the air and my therapist looks intently at me.
I don’t know how we’ve wandered onto this subject. We talk about many things, the good doctor and I. Sometimes, we even touch upon the core issues. My father’s sins. My aunt’s complicity. The accident of my birth. The suicide attempt.
For the last twenty minutes, we’ve been talking about reincarnation. The concept that a man pays for his sins in his next lifetime. It is a seductive thought in a world where people seem to get away with so much wrongdoing without visible consequences.
“I have to,” I reply. “I have to believe the wrongs get redressed. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to carry on.”
Though I have no secrets from my therapist, I don’t voice the next sentence. I might believe in karma, but I play my own role in restoring balance. I’m not afraid to use my money or my power to act as I see fit.
Durov is dead. Sylvia Anliker’s destruction is only a few days away. And one day, I hope to right the most grievous wrong of them all. One day, I’ll be able to make myself face Dylan McAllister and pull a trigger.
Even though this is something I haven’t been able to do for over ten years.
***
Fifteen names. Fifteen women. One man’s legacy.
I felt responsible for many things in my life, but this, I felt the deepest. Those fifteen women, stolen from their homes and their lives, so that Dylan McAllister could train them to his perverted ideal.
Marie-Therese had been the first one, abducted from a small village outside Arles. The very village where my farmhouse was located, in the heart of Provence. Dylan had been sloppy that first time. Had the right person raised an alarm and revealed her suspicions, he could have been stopped right then and fourteen women could have been saved.
But shamefully, that person had kept silent. When Marie-Therese had died less than two years after he took her, Dylan realized he liked his women captive and afraid.
He’d never snatched a woman himself again. He’d used brokers, middlemen and procurers. People that he could go to and announce that he wanted a virginal blonde, a feisty brunette or a tall redhead. People who would, for the right sum of money, watch for their targets, picking the weak, the vulnerable and the uncared for. There were many such women. Runaways from foster homes. Women with indifferent families and no friends. Women who had no one to raise an alarm when they disappeared.
Fifteen times, he’d taken these girls and whatever hell they’d already seen, he exposed them to worse. I knew what happened in his compound. I wasn’t naive. I knew he beat the women till blood dripped down their back. I knew they were thrown to his guards to be gang-raped as an object lesson that bad behaviour had brutal and terrifying consequences.
I never wanted to forget these fifteen names.
When I’d finally been in a position to act, seven years ago, I’d tried to find each and every one of them. But it was hard. Even the names were difficult to come by, only possible because by then, I was trusted enough to be able to look through Dylan’s accounts. But I was never allowed access to the files where Dylan had kept their personal information.
But I worked at it. I combed through police cases and missing people reports. I did what I could, matching names and descriptions in a Herculean attempt to find Dylan’s former slaves.
At least Dylan’s current slave had known what she was getting into. She had been carefully recruited for the role. Yet the idea of Bethany alone with Dylan was a thought that sent a lance of roiling guilt through my insides. I had no access to Dylan’s dungeons and I had no informant among Dylan’s guards. I couldn’t guarantee her safety, so I kept constant tabs on her. My visits to Dylan were as much to do with my real need to make sure she was okay. Even though Bethany had been trained for this and even if she assured me that she welcomed the pain.
It was unavoidable. Necessary.
Of the fifteen women, six were dead. Marie-Therese had died in a difficult childbirth. Five others had died in various other ways, either when trying to escape the brothels that Dylan had sold them to or at the hands of clients who dished out more pain than the girls could take.
Five women I had been unable to rescue. Their names flashed through my head every time I closed my eyes.