Page 48 of Vow of Vengeance
Instead, there's only a desk with an ancient-looking computer atop it, a widescreen monitor, and a stack of shiny silver CDs waiting to be put to use.
For a moment, it looks like I've stepped back in time through some sort of time warp. Burnt CDs? There's no way that all he was hiding from Soren up here was a secret penchant for digital piracy. And who the fuck even listens to CDs anymore? New cars don't even have players inside of them anymore.
I turn, looking for anything more. The only other thing in the room is a flat screen TV on a big dresser and tucked beneath it in the front... a DVD player.
NotCDs.
DVDS.
I can guess what they're of. More of their torture, no doubt, set up so he can relive his greatest hits and get off on them all over again as he watches from the armchair. Vin was a sick fuck.
But why go to the bother of putting them on DVD instead of just watching them from the computer? It would be ten times easier to just plug an HDMI cord to a laptop and review them that way. And I know the files are digital, somewhere in the cloud. If they weren't, I'd never have been able to find the images of him in the first place.
Because whatever is on those DVDs he wanted to keep off of the internet.
I don't know why, given that everything else was up there, freely available to the person who looked hard enough... me.
A glance down the stairs assures me Soren's still busy somewhere else, so I choose a DVD at random from the album set next to the TV. They're marked with an arbitrary code, a series of numbers and then two letters. It doesn't mean anything to me, and certainly not enough to try and crack his cypher, so I pick the first one my fingers land on and press the eject icon on the player. When nothing happens, I assume it means I just haveto put the disc up to the entrance and wait for it to do its thing, which is exactly what I do.
When I grab the remote, the TV turns on to the right input and I thank fuck I don't have to mess with it.
It is, exactly as I suspected, a home recording. But unlike all the others, the quality is less pristine, more fuzzy.
Also unlike the others, this one takes place in a bedroom.
There's a fluffy looking bed, neatly made in the frame of the camera, and I watch for a moment, waiting for something to happen as discomfort tickles the back of my neck. There's something about this video that's different than the others...
I realize it half a second before he walks into the frame with the woman slung over his shoulder.
I laid on that very bed, held that woman in it, told her I wouldn't fuck her until every trace of her husband had been driven from her mind.
It's his own fucking bedroom, and his own fucking wife. And given the way she drops where he throws her on the mattress and doesn't move, it's clear she's out of it.
Fuck.
Did Vincent drug his own fucking wife so that he could film them together?
Part of me knows I should turn this off. I don't need to see what's about to happen. I don't need to see my little bird so vulnerable, taken advantage of when she was entirely helpless to combat him. And to be fair, we haven't discussed whether they had any kinks. Maybe she was into it. Maybe she gave him the greenlight to try.
But I don't think so.
Vin walks out of the view of the camera, and I can hear rustling, movement, and... voices.
I can't make out what they're saying. The speaker that recorded this was muffled, but I can tell by the cadence that there are two voices there. Two male voices.
I grit my jaw as he walks back into the frame, shirtless this time, boxers slung low on his hips.
Except, it's not Vincent.
There's a tattoo on the back of his arm... a tattoo I've seen before.
The fucking dove.
But it's not Wes. My former college room-mate who brought me into the abyss of the human sex trade, is lighter-skinned than the man on video. So is Vin.
He shoves his boxers down his muscular legs and shows his ass to the camera a moment before climbing onto the bed, his thighs straddling Soren's unconscious body. From this angle, all I can see is the back of him as he leans down, but as his hands move, it's clear what he's doing. Undressing her.
My heart may have disappeared into another realm entirely, cause I can't even feel it beating anymore as I watch, waiting to see how far it will go. Surely, Vin wouldn't drug his own wife so that just anybody could take advantage of her. He was a fucking monster, but that's a special kind of sinister. That's a level of heinous my mind won't even comprehend.
