Page 81 of Priceless Diamond

On December 2, Leo wrote back.

Leo ZZZ

Bring her back to the warehouse

Jonas ZZZ

If you pack enough this month

Leo ZZZ

She’s MY daughter

Leo ZZZ

You can’t do this

Leo ZZZ

Please

Leo ZZZ

Just send a picture

The communication was silent for nearly six weeks, and then Jonas finally responded.

Jonas ZZZ

Hard work earns rewards

He attached a photo of an infant. The baby had dark hair. She was sleeping, swaddled in a pink blanket. Her mouth was pursed in a tiny rosebud. Her impossibly small fingers curled around a necklace with a gold-painted charm, a Russian icon. Black letters were only visible when the picture was expanded: Saint Svetlana.

The communication continued irregularly. Jonas issued demands for more work, for faster work, for fewer hours of sleep. Sometimes, he provided pictures of the baby. A lot of the time, he didn’t.

Intermittent reinforcement, my psychology training supplied. The subject does not receive reinforcement each time they perform a desired behavior; instead, rewards are random. Subjects consistently yield the greatest effort, study after study after study.

Leo was turned into a lab rat. A Crash-packing, slave-bound lab rat.

Cole Wolf analyzed every pixel for us. The photos are real. The child really exists. But there’s no way to say that she’s Leo’s daughter, my niece.

I still doubt myself enough to say to Trap now, “Maybe I missed something in Herzog’s records.”

“You didn’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I know you went through those files like your own life depended on it.” His voice stays absolutely even as he recites the facts we’ve both memorized. “You found Svetlana’s purchase order. You found her bill of sale. She was shipped to Abu Dhabi a month after she arrived at the New Castle house.”

I found the video too, the one that haunted my brother. I only watched it once, but that was enough. Leo was in an all-too-familiar room, Klaus Herzog’s study. He was fellated by a man, both of them terrified, Leo barely responding. Ursula led in a frantic woman who begged in a language I was pretty sure was Russian. Leo raped the girl.

Even if he impregnated her, she probably wouldn’t have known when she was shipped to the United Arab Emirates. After her sale was final, there was no reason for the Herzogs to track her. Her new owner could have kept her, could have killed her, could have done anything he wanted with the baby, if it ever existed.

The photos sent by Jonas to Leo are just another cruel blackmail—like the video of me killing Klaus, like the recording of Bart Carver raping me, like Leo with Svetlana. That’s how the Herzogs work. That what they do.

Worked. Did.

We arrive at the cemetery. There’s no reason to do this in a church—Leo didn’t believe in God. He never mastered Narcotics Anonymous’ second step: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

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