Page 29 of Operation: Integrity

The quality of his voice had changed. He sounded somber, sad. She knew without asking that nothing she did was going to help Jasmine anymore. “She’s already dead, isn’t she?”

Sam slowly pulled in a breath and let it out just as slowly. “I’m sorry. Her body was found a day after you were rescued.”

“He lied to me. Again.” She knew she shouldn’t ever believe a word he said, but in this case, if she hadn’t, she’d have been risking a life.

“He’s never going to tell you the truth, Kelly. But I do have good news. Come with me?” He gestured back toward the barn. “On the off chance that he’s out here, I don’t want to announce anything.”

She knew it. Sam had a plan. He was still the same Sam she’d always known. Protector and constant Sam, a shoulder to lean on. She followed his lead, and Zeus stayed at her side. He didn’t look up at her as he walked like he did with Sam sometimes, but she still felt safe with the huge German shepherd next to her.

Once they reached the barn, Sam glanced down at her hand. “I don’t know if that watch has the capability to hear, so I’d like you to take it off and leave it outside. I’d prefer if you left it off completely, but I can’t make you.”

She slipped the watch off and put it in the grass outside the barn. Sam led them all the way to the other end, so there was no way it could hear anything. He paused by the tack room where Edwyn had talked to her the first day and offered her a seat on a short bench just outside.

“Okay, I’m listening. What is this good news?”

Sam tensed, which made her worry meter slam into overdrive. “Sam? What’s wrong?”

“This has to do with the time we were together before. We haven’t talked about it and bringing it up isn’t easy.”

“But . . .” He had said this was good news. Why was he bringing up the past? She hadn’t told him what she wasdoing when they were together. Did this mean he knew? What was left of her hope shattered into a million pieces. He’d never love her again if he knew she chose that life. What kind of woman would do that? Whether she’d become saved since then or not, it didn’t wash away what she’d put him through, nor what she’d been through. She was abad girland always would be.

He held up his hand. “Just let me get through this before you start panicking. I saw Nathan when he was here, but I didn’t recognize him. When I was looking through some of our old pictures earlier tonight, I found one of you talking with him at a party. I have no way of knowing if that was the first time you’d met him or if you’d known him for years at that point. Pictures don’t tell me that. What I do know is that I gave that picture to Dominic. The man is a tech genius. He was able to isolate Nathan’s face and find it. We now know exactly who he is, and we were able to give that information to not only local law enforcement, but to the feds, too”

Her breath came fast and hard. Nathan might be arrested? No more texts. No more broken lives. No more death. It also meant that all those lies he’d told her about paying her would never come true. Somewhere deep inside, she’d hoped that was the one thing he hadn’t lied about. She wanted to trust that promise. If she did, maybe she wouldn’t be stained by this label of human trafficking victim anymore. She would just be a woman who chose an ugly path but who won in the end.

“What does that mean for me and for all the people he was holding?”

Sam reached out and touched her shoulder. She couldn’t understand how every other touch left her skincrawling, but his was simply warm and welcome because she knew that’s how it was intended.

“It means they’ll have to find where he was holding everyone. He doesn’t deserve leniency, and I doubt he’ll survive long in the system if they catch him. But I also didn’t want him to hear anything through that watch and disappear.”

She couldn’t bring herself to think anyone deserved to die, but she’d leave that up to those who had to protect Nathan once they caught him. Catching him would be the first step.

Sam sat closeto Kelly on the bench, thinking about his words and where this conversation needed to go. Just hours before she’d asked him to leave. Now she was standing so close to him he could smell her shampoo. She wasn’t running and she hadn’t been shocked when he’d told her that they’d known about the texts. That might have been because he didn’t accuse her of doing anything.

When he’d first come to Wayside, Connor had taught him that many of the victims would hide things from them. It could be information, parts of their pasts, food, or, in this case, communications with someone who could harm them. When those things were discovered, it was really important that they confront the behavior in a way that didn’t accuse the guest. They’ve been manipulated, groomed, conned, abused, and lied to. They’ve been trained to feel guilt for everything. Helping someone overcome that way of thinking was a slow process and couldn’t be done if the client felt the same about the path to healing as they did about being a captive.

Unfortunately, she now knew that he was aware of the possibility she was already a captive when they were together. He hadn’t forced her to answer that question and had given her multiple options for talking to Nathan. He’d hoped giving that bit would lead to better trust between them. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

She hunched her shoulders and seemed to shrink by three sizes there on the bench.

He didn’t want her to feel condemned. “This isn’t about guilt, Kelly. You aren’t required to tell me anything. It’s only a question.” He wasn’t her husband. She could see anyone she wanted to. Trouble was, he didn’t want to hear about her wanting to see anyone because his past hadn’t really caught up to the present yet.

“I should’ve told you that he’d contacted me, but I was afraid. He told me he was following me. I’m still afraid. You sent his picture, but he hasn’t been charged with anything. He could still be free. He’s good at hiding.”

“They all are. Let’s agree to drop this right now. I won’t ask you for that watch, but I want you to know that he only wants to make sure that you don’t tell anyone what you went through. Being here puts him in danger. He knows that. That’s why he wants you back.” He didn’t mean to sound so callous to her situation or make her think she was worthless, but to her pimp and trafficker, she was. To the rest of the world, she was valuable.

He’d become just as good at reading body language as he was at avoiding blaming victims, and Kelly’s body language spoke volumes. She didn’t want to talk about their past or Nathan. She didn’t want to talk about what she knew or how it could help them. Probably because the information she had would hurt Sam. Victims were also good at taking on pain to make sure others didn’t have todeal with it. They almost felt like mental anguish was their superpower.

He’d failed her. She didn’t say it out loud, but she didn’t have to. He’d realized when he’d found that photo that Kelly had likely been trafficked back then, before he’d left, and he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t been trained back then, but he had loved her and noticed she’d changed. He even remembered asking her about her stress, her lack of smiles, and her continual fatigue. She’d brushed it off as life and told him that it would all change once they were married.

Now he knew why.

The unfortunate truth was that a marriage certificate didn’t stop a woman from being trafficked. Nathan had probably tricked her, or he’d lied to her as he had been the last two days. He couldn’t change what he may have done back then. No matter what he thought, it would be speculation. He could do something right now, though.

“No asking about the past. Not now anyway,” Kelly said quietly, and looked up at him with wide eyes, pleading for him to understand.

“When Brendon asked me to work with you, I said no strings attached and I meant it. If you don’t want to broach the past, then we don’t. No questions asked. But you may want to break that rule with Brendon, because I feel like you need to process some things. If that picture is any indication, this guy coerced you into believing in him. That’s a lot to deal with.”

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