Chapter 209: Maizie
Rhys stared at the manilla envelope in front of him, looking like he had seen a ghost. He didn’t say anything, which made me a little nervous. His dark eyes scanned the room in an almost panic before he ripped open the envelope.
For a moment, I debated leaving and giving him his privacy, but he made a choking noise, and I couldn’t help myself. I needed to see what had him so worked up.
It was a single picture, but it was gruesome. My stomach churned at the sight. Her blonde hair was matted and coated in blood. It didn’t even look blonde anymore. She didn’t even look like her anymore. Her eyes were both swollen. Her shirt was practically in shreds. Her knee was clearly dislocated. Her arm could potentially be broken. She was covered from head-to-toe with various cuts and bruises. Hardly any of her skin looked untouched. I did not envy her in the slightest.
“Oh my god.” I whispered, forcing my empty stomach not to betray me.
I had lived in the program long enough to have seen some shit. Torture was one of their favorite means to keep kids in line, especially when we first entered the program. I had learned quickly how to say the right things, but not everyone learns that fast. Some feel a sense of power when they fight back, and I had had to clean up some real messes. But none of them were as bad as Grace looked.
“Maybe it’s like AI or something.” I tried, but we both knew that wasn’t true. “Do you feel your mate bond?”
“I know she’s not dead if that’s what you're asking... But that’s the only thing I can feel. Every time I reach for her, I hit a brick wall.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered before something dawned on me. “You seemed to know what was in the envelope before you even opened it, have you received this sort of thing before?”
Rhys nodded, but his eyes were still glued to the picture in front of us.
“Where?” I asked. I didn’t want to look at them, but something inside me told me too.
Rhys pointed to a stack on the little end table in the corner, and I wondered how it was I had never noticed them. Well, actually, I had noticed them. I just hadn’t paid any attention to them. Rhys had never made them seem important before. And perhaps they hadn’t been, but I found that hard to believe.
I grabbed them up off the table and took them to my usual location on the floor. I didn’t waste any more time. My heart pounded as I ripped open the one on top. This one had more than one picture. Almost all of them were of dead bodies that I didn’t recognize, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the brutality of it all or if I actually didn’t know them. I was again grateful that my stomach was empty as I went through each picture. The last picture though was different than the rest.
It was a child. An alive child. My heart pounded. At least, she looked alive. She was maybe 8. Definitely not much older than that. She was not nearly as mutilated, but she definitely was not in the best of conditions. Her pictures were the most sinister. My heart hurt for her. My heart hurt knowing I couldn’t protect her. I couldn’t protect any of them back in that awful place.
I put her picture to the side and tore open the next envelope. Rhys hadn’t touched this one either. It was very much the same as the previous one. Gross, gruesome pictures of what I could only assume were dead bodies from the city based on what I could see, which really wasn’t much. And then the last picture, smaller than the rest, was of a boy. He was maybe 15. Again, he looked alive, but in terrible condition. There was something familiar about him, maybe I had known him in the program. Maybe my imagination was running away from me.
I grabbed the next one, full well knowing the pattern now. 6 –8 photos of dead, mutilated bodies, and one alive child. Why would this pattern exist? This envelope was open, but I pulled them out anyway. There was something here that we weren’t getting. It was clear this was supposed to be a message, and I assumed it wasn’t just to scare us. There has to be more. There was no way there wasn’t.
I flipped through the envelope almost numb to what I was seeing until the last photo. It was a kid with blond hair cut short the way they usually kept it at the program. The poor kid was 12 at most, bruises littering his whole body, and I could see some medical tool in the background that they weren’t really trying to hide. It took my brain a moment to process to know what and who I was looking at.
My gasp ripped through the silence of the room like a hurricane. Rhys looked at me with relative alarm before noticing I was going through the envelopes.
“Those are hard to look at,” He admitted. “You don’t have to -.”
“It’s Michael.” I cut him off, looking up at him with a lack of restraint on my emotions.
“What?” He frowned and immediately stood up, moving to where I was on the floor.
I handed him the picture. The picture of my best friend. The picture of the boy who had done everything in his power to protect his siblings time and time again. Who couldn’t enjoy being here because he knew that he couldn’t protect them here, not that he ever could there. But he tried. He had taken every ‘treatment’ they could give. He took his siblings punishments. He did everything he could, so they wouldn’t have to. And yet, it still wasn’t enough. It never had been. And this was just one picture of him in his most vulnerable state.
I tore through the next envelope. I skipped over the dead bodies entirely this time, skipping right to where I knew a smaller picture of a child would be.
I knew exactly what I was looking at right now. It was Carly’s brother, he was 17. We had entered the program at nearly the same time.
Oh goddess.
The door to the office opened and in walked Michael and Sawyer.
“Hey, what’s up?” Michael asked.
But before Rhys or I could say anything, Sawyer said the one word I had been hoping to hear since I met, but his timing was terrible.
“Mate.”