Page 5 of Raven's Hacker
They were the only ones who knew. It was weeks after we’d started working for me to get past everything that had been done to me. I did ask Bullet and Hades to let me talk to my egg donor after they brought her back. We’d made sure life was absolutely horrible for my egg donor for months before picking her up; we told her all that she did and let be done to me, that she had abused me all my life. I didn’t want to see what happened to her. Just meet her one last time and tell her that I’d hate her forever, but that I forgave her, so it didn’t destroy all of me. Thatwas a liberating day for me. Knowing she was no longer on the planet, and doing anything to anyone else.
Prez told his mom once. We gave hernodetails about anything specific. That was enough for Prez, our former Prez, and former first lady to go out to the outhouse to get rid of some shit, and to make sure that I was accommodated with no unwanted touching and at least two locks on my doors and windows. They were great, and always making sure I was doing better, bit by bit.
The long story was that when I was five years old, about to be six, my dad was sent overseas to fight, and he died. That was what my mom had always told me. I was probably about sixteen when I found out whatactuallyhappened. My mom had been cheating on him with multiple other men, doing a cocktail of drugs, and she ran away with me in the middle of the night one night. He was, in fact, in the military. He was sent overseas, and a few years later, she took me and left. And, unfortunately, he did die over there, saving his unit from a grenade.
She stole me away from the only loving parent I had, based on what I can remember from what few memories I have of that time. My dad was my best friend. He was my hero. I’ve only ever had bad memories of my mom, dating back as far as I could remember. After moving the first time, I noticed we were always short on something. Whether it was food, water, clothes, or money, it didn’t matter. Some nights we slept in our car, packed full of all our worldly possessions. In the beginning, Mom always made sure I ate at least once a day. She said she had to eat more because she was working to make money for us, and that made sense in my little head. We were always on the bad side of town, usually in some crappy little motels that you paid for by the hour. She had guys over all the time, all different guys,all hours of the day. When I was really little, when we first left, she would hide me. She would put me in the bathroom or the closet, or send me to one of her friends’ rooms in the motel. At one point, I think she might have still cared about me.
But eventually, I think something fundamental changed inside of her. I think the drugs finally ate away at her brain, and she was super depressed with how her life turned out. She stopped feeding me for days at a time. She would get mad that we didn’t have money for food or drugs, so she’d put her cigarettes out on me. She would beat me, tell me I was nothing. I was worthless. I was weak. Everything was my father's fault, which would become my fault, because I was his child, and started looking exactly like him.
The one thing that hurt the worst was when she said I would never be more than I already was, which was an insignificant nothingness she couldn't get rid of fast enough. Her beatings got even more intense. She began beating me with not just her hand, but with a shoe, a belt, a fist, whatever she had within reach. One time, it was a hot frying pan with grease still in it. I have the grease burn on my right side as a memento of that special beating. By the time I was twelve, she was prostituting herself to anybody and everybody. Drug dealers, cops, truckers, Johns, it didn’t matter. Sometimes she’d be paid in drugs. Sometimes she’d be paid in cash.
Then she got in deep with her drug dealer. Owed a lot of money, more than she could pay back by herself.
She started selling me to him and his friends to pay for her habit.
I could handle the starving. I ate the free lunch from school. The lunch ladies always gave me a little extra after, packing it in brown paper sacks that I could take home with meto hide. It wasn’t the beatings, because I could handle those too. She was weaker when she was coming down from her high, but that was because she was stronger and felt invincible when she was high. It was basically like fighting a kid my own size, maybe a little bigger. Fighting once or twice a day. The bullying from the kids at school because I’d be wearing dirty clothes, or my hair would be messy, I could handle all of that because I knew it would change at eighteen. I knew I’d be able to break free and become someone new.
I could handle all of that.
It was when she started fucking pimpingmeout. Forher fucking habit.
That was when I started to give up. When she would let those men touch me. When I would start fighting back, she’d be high out of her mind and hold me down, helping them to violate me in every way possible. Eventually, she fitted restraints to her bed so she could tie me down more easily. It went on for years. It wasn’t until sophomore year, at sixteen, when I fainted from blood loss after being brutally raped anally by no less than four men the night before. It was the middle of gym class when I fainted. That was when the school finally fucking noticed something was wrong.
That was when they called CPS, when they called the police.
I was able to obtain a lawyer to emancipate myself. I’d been working as a hacker with an ancient laptop, I got from the computer teacher in middle school. It was slow as shit, but that was what I learned to hack on. It’s what I kept until I could afford the upgrades that it desperately needed. Then I took to hacking the school computers. I made sure my grade stayed up, and the kids who put forth no effort on the group projects were all giventhe appropriate grades. Little things like that. But that was also how I got involved with a PI from out of state who was looking for someone who could dig up dirt on a client’s husband.
I took the job, thinking it’d be a one-off in junior year.
I got so good at it that he kept me on payroll. Once I started here, got into therapy myself, I wanted to find a way to give back. I wanted to find a way to help those who needed it when no one was looking. I started by donating the flat fee I charged for each job, at the end of every year, to the women and children’s shelters in the form of clothing, blankets, shoes, toys, or other necessities that the shelter would be short on. I have also used that as a way to raise money to help girls get on birth control if they want it, and therapy for children. I had planned and organized for Planned Parenthood to come to the compound for check-ups, birth control, whatever they needed, and we had a line of girls, women, and boys. I talked with Prez and his mom to see if we could keep it going for a week. I think we had over half the county on some form of birth control when the week was over.
Willow loved the idea of it so much that now we do a fundraiser to make the Planned Parenthood weekly drive happen every year. I’ve only ever tried to give back what I wished I had gotten back then. I knew that wouldn’t make sense to some people, but for those who got it…
I see you.
My other employer, not the MC, the PI, contacted me one night, about nine in the evening, and told me he had an emergency case. He gave me the name of a lawyer, husband and wife, and he wanted me to find anything that showed the husband and lawyer working together, and anything showing the husband was having an affair. After giving me names, phonenumbers, and other details, I hung up and got to work. It wasn’t hard to find once I had the basic information.
The husband looked like a douche and an absolute tool. Matthew Owens? Who was he cheating on? I pulled up a profile he was tagged in, and saw the most beautiful woman I think I had ever seen before. She was stunningly beautiful, causing me to pause in my quest for information to bring down her husband. I stared at her picture for more than a few moments. Her name suited her. Raven. She had dark hair, big dark blue eyes, and a petite frame with curves more beautiful than cursive.
Hewas cheating…on her?!With who?! A fucking supermodel?! A goddess?! I pulled up a video from my email, and it looked like it was from a very shaky phone. It was her. Why did she have tears in her eyes?
The video in front of me played as I heard the sounds of sex, and the camera flipped from the silently crying goddess to see that Matthew twit, fucking a woman on his desk, raw. Fucking sick. I watched until the video ended, as Raven the Goddess was in the elevator. You could hear her hyperventilating and crying right before it cut off.
I wanted to hug her. Which was a weird feeling or urge for me. Because I didn’t like touching of any kind. But, especially from women. Too many flashbacks of my mother holding me down and laughing as I cried, begging her to stop. After having my mother hold me down, forcing me into those restraints to be violated, I don’t let anyone near me, but especially not women.
Never. Ever. A woman. No, thank you. It was too painful.
But her? Her, I wanted to hug.
Interesting.
I set out with renewed vigor to get her away from this dumpster fire of a man, and by the end of the search, I had more than enough evidence to bury this guy. I sent it over through email to the PI and then mailed the physical copy so it would be there for the trial.
I wanted to hug a woman…weird.
F I V E: Something Funny.
Hacker’s POV
