Page 101 of Cruel Games

Once again, I had let something dangerous into my life, and here it was, hurting me from the inside. Would I even be able to kill them when the time came? The fact that Ifelt thingsfor them, well, that didn’t change their deservingness of pain and retribution.

I sifted quickly through the stacks of boxes labeled with each crew’s name and the year of the files, biting my tongue so hard it bled when the urge to whoop in celebration rose inside me. I found the year and their name on a box shoved in the back, tugged it free, and finally clicked on the desk lamp to flip through the folders.

I found it buried beneath the others, like someone had intentionally tried to hide it.

Ashamed of their own work, apparently.

But when I tugged it free, the joy and satisfaction I should have felt was short-lived.

I opened the folder and set it on the desk, my fingers trembling as I flipped the front cover back and spotted the picture in the corner of my father, just as he looked when he died, his charming smile looking eerily menacing in the lighting of the room.

Surely that was just a trick of the light.

My father never looked like that.

I read through their detailed bio on him: address, age, height, weight, license number, family–both live and dead, and his businesses. All these facts of his life were reduced to single lines of ‘data’ that gave these killers a profile to work with, a way to identify their target.

Bile rose in my throat. I was looking at the same file they used to determine he was an evil man in need of culling.

I turned the page, finding images that shook me to my core.

Girls, all of them too young to even drive, in a cramped shipping container with the business nameM-bargopainted on the side in his company logo. Not a one of them wearing clothes, their nakedness blacked out to spare the viewer from the travesty.

A dingy house with condemned signs on the doors, boarded-up windows, and overflowing dumpsters in the alley beside it. In the doorway, a man stood in handcuffs, one I recognized from his frequent trips to the house—our house. To my knowledge, he was a lower-level assistant in the company ranks. Sometimes, Father had him run errands. But in this image?—

He was covered head to toe in cuts and scrapes, bruises, both fresh and old, and his wrists were cuffed in front of him. The cops didn’t even bother to hide them with his jacket.

And to the left of the front door, there were more girls and some boys, all a little older than the ones from the previous photo, all with the same haggard look of someone who’d spent years strung out on IV drugs.Years.

Another image showed more of the same, girls and boys alike, all in beds they were chained to, buckets in the corners, the familiar sight of rat droppings in the corners.

I wanted to vomit.

How could anyone in their right mind think my father was involved in this? There was no way he?—

The last picture on the page was of two shadowy figures,their faces partially obscured by the shadows of the night. They shook hands, a young girl standing just off to their right, a chain around her neck. The other end of which was in the man on the left’s hands, no less. He held on to her like one would a dog.

My eyes traveled over the details in the image—not that there were many—until I spotted a car off to the side of the frame that sent chills down my spine.

I knew that car. I’d ridden in that car so many times it wasn’t even funny. It was my daily ride to and from primary school until he traded it off for a newer model. His ended up being t-boned in an accident one night while his assistant was driving it to?—

I flipped the page, and my heart stopped.

Time stopped.

I slammed the folder shut with a gag.

There was no fucking way. No.

No.

No.

The single photo on the second page of images showed my father with his pants around his thighs, his body hunched over one of the girls from the pictures inside the drug house, her legs spread around his waist. She wore a chain around her neck, and though her eyes were open, it wasn’t hard to see from the lack of light in them, the dull dinginess of her hair, and the odd positioning of her body, that she was no longer alive in that picture.

She hadn’t been alive, then, in the image where she was chained to the bed. Or if she had, she didn’t stay free for long.

My father was a good man.

---