I gulped down the bitter taste of bile. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“At some point she said she went to sleep for what felt like two or three straight days, and when she woke up again, she was in a different room. A nicer room. She was able to see where she was from the windows. In a three-story mansion a long way out of the city.”
“The same mansion I was taken to when I was a kid?”
He nodded. “When she told me all the details about the inside of the place—she was never allowed outside—she described that hallway you kept dreaming about in the exact same way you did. It was the same place. They kept her there for two years. Men would come and do whatever they wanted to her, whenever they wanted. Usually at the parties they had, but on other occasions too, if they felt like it. She said there was one in particular who raped her and hurt her every week with a fucking smile on his face every time.”
I hadn’t yet worked out the exact timeline in my head, but I felt sick at the possibility that I might’ve actually been there with my father for one of his ‘parties’ at the same time as Lina.
“She said she never heard their names, but she saw their faces and heard them speak to each other at the parties, and she discovered from that—and also from talking to the other older kids there—that they were all rich, influential people. Judges, lawyers, high-ranking police employees, politicians, diplomats, and so on,” he continued. “She also said most of the other kids and teens there broke quickly. They seemed dead behind the eyes, going through the motions and just letting it all happen to them. But not her. She fought them at every turn, and she was punished for it, too. She was beaten and burned, worse than the others. She was also given to the guards and raped by them every day when the Circle members weren’t around. But she kept fighting. She gave them such trouble that when they finally decided to mark her as theirs—with the circle—they decided to carve it somewhere else, just to try and humiliate her and finally break her down.”
“Where was it?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Just above… I’m sure you can guess,” he said, his eyes traveling down my body to the front of my half-torn jeans.
“Oh.” My stomach roiled. That was why the scar wasn’t shown in the photos taken at the hospital. To protect her modesty, presumably, she wasn’t completely naked in them—she’d been given a bra and shorts to wear. The shorts covered up the circle scar. But it was there all along.
“There were photos taken of that scar, to show the police, but I didn’t want to look at them. It was too much. The others I kept just to….” He looked down, his voice fading.
“To remind you what was done to her?”
He nodded. “Something like that. It kept me focused all those years, seeing what they did to her. I hated looking at the pictures, but sometimes when it felt like I didn’t have anything left, no other way to find the rest of them… I’d look at those photos and feel myself ignite all over again.”
I nodded, understanding. “I get it.”
A heavy silence filled the room as I let it all wash over me for a moment.
“Guess I should finish the story.” Alex ran a hand over his face, letting out a heavy sigh. “After a while, they realized she simply wouldn’t break. One of them had also somehow gotten her pregnant even though they forced her to take birth control pills, and that was just another inconvenience to them. She said some of them drove her out to some property—probably this very same one—and told her they were done with her. She wasn’t worth the effort, and she was getting too old anyway, according to them. Ripe old age of fifteen. They threw her on the ground, beat her, then had one of their guards hit her and run her over with a car. They thought she was dead, so they took her body and dumped it on the edge of a road somewhere. It was pure luck that some random tourists happened to see her there a few hours later and revive her. Otherwise she would’ve been dead.”
I shook my head slowly, the sheer inhumanity and evilness of the story seeping into me like ice water in my veins. “Oh my god,” I muttered. “What happened after she told everyone what was done to her?”
His hands clenched into fists, and despite all the horrors I’d just heard, I knew the worst of the story was yet to come. “No one believed her. No one except me,” he said through gritted teeth.
My eyes widened. “What? But… all the scars. How could they not believe her?”
“They did at first. The doctors called the authorities immediately. The Police Chief himself came in to the hospital to talk to them and my parents when he got wind of what’d happened, and he promised he would investigate. A few days later he came back and told us she was lying. He said he had proof that she’d simply run away with an older guy, her ‘boyfriend’. The boyfriend turned out to be horribly abusive, beating her, torturing her, and forcing her to have sex with him. She finally ran away from him after falling pregnant, only to find herself hit by a car when she stumbled onto the road. She was too ashamed to tell the truth, and so she made up the horrible, fantastical story about the elite sex ring and the mansion. He said she was clearly unstable, and my parents and the doctors had no reason to disbelieve him, especially when he handed them proof.”
“Proof?”
“He said they had a man in custody. Some big, tattooed twenty-six year old. He’d apparently admitted to having a relationship with her and letting her live with him for two years, even though she was underage, and he admitted that he’d abused her. He got a few years in prison for it, but he eventually got out on good behavior, then disappeared into the wind. I know why. He was one of the mansion guards. They obviously paid him off to ‘admit’ to a bunch of shit that never happened, just to discredit my sister.”
“So everyone would think she made the whole thing up,” I said softly. My stomach knotted from the injustice of it all.
Alex’s grimaced. “Yes. Who are they gonna listen to? The revered Police Chief, or a teenage girl with a history of getting into trouble?”
“God, that’s horrible.”
“No shit. And the same day we were told all this crap, the Chief went and fucking visited her in her room while I was there. He said he understood what she’d been through, and he understood why she felt the need to lie. He said he hoped that one day, she’d be able to admit the ‘truth’.” He looked down at the concrete for a few seconds before going on. “I’ll never forget how scared she was after he left. She was bone white, shaking with terror. Then she leaned over and said: ‘he was one of them’.”
“My father.”
“Yes. I was the only one who believed her. The only one who didn’t question what happened to her. I helped her as much as I could, and I promised her that one day, I’d find justice for her. But there was only so much I could do. I couldn’t take back what was done to her. I couldn’t make her happy, ever again.”
“So what happened?”
His eyes went flat. “She killed herself just a few months after she was released from the hospital,” he said softly. “It tore me apart. Broke my heart.”
“The note….” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I was too choked up.