The Carrero Contract - Finding Freedom (Book 3 of Contract Trilogy)

14

"Pictures, videos ... of you. That scum kept a catalogue of both on every girl he ever ..." Alexi cannot formulate the words, so repulsed by what he knows went on in Rick's world and I shudder at the memories, slapped with what I was not expecting him to say.

I was wrong. It is as bad. Maybe worse.

My blood runs cold, much like finding out he had my journals and my eyes fly to his, gluing to them in wide-eyed horror. Fear, that he didn't just know of the existence of those things, but he watched them or looked in the folders and piles of disgusting media I knew Rick kept. It's one thing to read about those vile acts and another entirely to see it visually.

I feel sick to my stomach, instantly paling and hit with a dizzy spell that has me clutching the table edge to steady myself.

Why would he tell me this? I was stupid to ask, to push.

I remember well, the hysteria and mess every time that man laid hands on me. He loved nothing more than to document how brutally he used his victims and most of those pictures show me bloody and broken. Various states of delusion as my brain tried to detach from the horrendous acts befalling me and save me mentally. Sometimes I would float on the ceiling, looking down on my lifeless body and watch him ravage me until I bled. It's a miracle my body is not more twisted and scarred and dysfunctional than it is.

Rick liked to document his perversions on film, in stills, and motion, for some sort of satisfying ego boost. He was a sick fuck who kept a filing cabinet of girls' names and folders and thousands of pictures he would make us help develop and store for him. That was how twisted he was. He did it to us, filmed it and then made us help him turn them into viewable items for his collection.

I don't doubt there were hundreds of me, tied up, naked and broken in all kinds of disgusting poses with marks of his torture and debauchery on me. He would film his 'adventures', his newest 'kinks' with his little girls and save them for self-pleasure when he was alone, or to sell to his ring of perverted clients who got off on seeing kids ruined. Sometimes he would make me kneel in front of him and blow him off while he watched them on a screen the size of his wall. A projector, reliving the things he would do to us. I was not the only child he defiled. I was one of many of the poor unfortunate souls who strayed into his path. Stories like mine, with mothers who were wasted junkies and only saw children as a tool for getting high.

"Please tell me you didn't keep those too?" My hands and voice shake, barely audible as I try to get it out, shock giving way to a full-blown panic attack as I gasp for air and force myself to stay calm. Alexi shakes his head.

His rage as intense as my pain as he too relives what he saw, and I know he must have seen enough to react this way. Maybe he didn't watch them all or flick through every image, but he saw more than he wanted to. That would change any decent human's opinion of the girls in that room of memories. That would leave a mark, even on someone like Alexi.

He may be a monster on many levels, but he is not a paedophile or a violent abuser of women. The things Rick kept; they would scar anyone who saw them. I lived it, and yet the images I was forced to help file still traumatised me. I cannot even imagine what Alexi must think as I sit and die all over again, knowing that he knows things no one else could know about me. Things I never even wrote down.

"Everything I found in that place connected to you, I burned. I wiped you out of that hellhole; every trace as though you were never there, and then I wiped him off the face of the earth for putting you there. I intended to just kill him until that point, but those pictures, those films ... I'm not a nice person when I don't have reason to be and seeing even a tiny amount of what he did, Cam, I made him wish he was never born, and then some. I'm not sorry I made his last days hell. It was nothing compared to what he did." Alexi looks fiercely dangerous for a moment, that cold tone that used to send the fear of God into me, yet now, sat here, it brings me comfort. That sadistic look and dangerous manner, they are all that's keeping me from crumbling on the floor and sobbing my heart out.