Salvation Read Online Free Page B

like the Italian mafia, with a clear, organized hierarchy. It’s more like loosely related clans, often connected transnationally. Gideon’s operation was able to take down the U.S. network of one of those clans.
    I’m explaining this for clarity—not because it mattered to me at the time. I didn’t care about any of the nuances of Albanian gang culture or about the success of any of the FBI’s organized crime initiatives. The only thing that mattered were the specific men who had hurt me.
    Those men pleaded out on the rape charges, with minimum consequences because they were needed to testify against men higher up the food chain.
    That’s how it works. If you want to take down an organization, you have to overlook smaller criminals to get to the big ones. The men who raped me would go to prison, but a U.S. prison would be a cakewalk compared to what they’d probably lived through growing up in the Balkans when they did.
    I’m not sure anything that could happen to them would be bad enough to make me feel better.
    There didn’t seem to be any feeling better for me. Just the hope that numbness would continue to cover over the pain.
    In the hospital, I’d asked about Gideon—because I really did want him to be all right. They told me he was pretty beat-up but he would be fine, and that he was going through a required, extended debriefing, which I guess was pretty intense.
    He’d been undercover with the worst kind of men for eight months. I’m not sure how that would affect you, but I’m sure he needed some recovery and orientation time afterwards.
    When I was out of the hospital and at my dad’s place, he started to call me.
    I didn’t recognize the number the first time, so I didn’t pick up. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hadn’t seen any of my friends since it happened and I hadn’t gone back to work, so I wasn’t about to talk to someone on the phone whose number I didn’t recognize.
    He left a brief message on my voice mail, saying he was just checking in to see how I was doing. He gave me his number and asked me to give him a call when I felt up to it.
    Hearing his voice did something strange to me. It broke through the safe numbness that had wrapped me up for so many days. Just a crack, but it was enough to send a surge of panic shooting through me.
    I remembered details about that room, about what happened when they’d dragged me out, about how it had felt when they raped me. I didn’t just remember. I experienced it all again. And that brief moment of re-experiencing it was so intense and so horrifying that it was like demons had taken possession of my body.
    I didn’t call him back.
    He kept calling. Not often enough for it to be creepy but enough so I couldn’t forget about him. Sometimes he left messages, and sometimes he didn’t. After a while, there was an edge to his tone. Not anger or even frustration but almost desperation.
    I didn’t understand. I appreciated everything he’d tried to do for me. I really did. But he was never a part of my life before, and it was ridiculous to think that such a horror should somehow make him a part of my life now.
    He made me remember the horror more vividly—his voice caused demons to rise—and that’s what I couldn’t let happen.
    It happened anyway. However safe it feels, that numbness just can’t last forever. And then it’s nothing but the pain.
    And eventually it feels like the pain is everywhere, everything—like you’re nothing more than how much it hurts.
    Some women are strong and they can go on with life, despite the pain. I’m not strong, and I couldn’t.
    For two months, I put on a pretty good act. My dad worked most of the time, so I could fool him when I saw him. I’d known the couple who kept his house since I was a baby, and they were incredibly kind. But they were domestic staff, so I could keep my distance. I talked to my friends on the phone as often as I could stand, and they seemed to think I was starting to