Breaking Hammer Read online

  son. Sacrificing herself for him.

  I unfurled my fingers, clenched into a fist at my side, and touched her face, a calming gesture, but I think I needed calmed more than she did.

  Meia didn't meet my gaze. Instead, she pulled herself up to a sitting position, moved her back against the bed, and tucked her knees up to her chest. She wrapped her arms around her legs the way a small child would. If I hadn't had the impulse to protect her before, there's no way I couldn't now, looking at her. She seemed fragile, tiny, curled up there in a ball.

  "There's more than that, Hammer," she said. "Aston's not some abusive boyfriend or husband. It's not that simple." She was silent for a long time as she ran her fingers over a locker that hung from her neck, rubbed it over and over like a talisman or something.

  “Is that your son in the locket?” I asked, nodding toward the piece of jewelry.

  She smiled sadly, opened the locket, and I saw a photo of a girl inside. She shook her head, averted her gaze, and sat there silently. I thought she wasn't going to answer. Finally, she did.

  "My sister," she said. "She hung herself, a long time ago. I was thirteen. She was a child. We were children."

  "Christ, Meia." I exhaled the words, barely able to speak. Her sister had not been much older than MacKenzie.

  "No one knows," Meia said, her voice little more than a whisper. "About any of this. Other than the...people involved."

  "I can be trusted, Meia," I said. "Whatever it is, you can trust me with it."

  "Growing up in my country - Burma - things became...difficult," she said. "My mother and father thought they were doing the right thing to send my sister and I over the border with men who would find us jobs - you call them coyotes here, I believe."

  I sat up beside her on the bed, trying to listen to what she was saying, all the while my mind racing, thinking about the implications of what she was telling me, the horrors she had been through. I don't know what I'd expected when I ordered her to tell me everything, to bare herself to me. A crazy husband, a kidnapped child...not something like this.

  "We were not given jobs," she said, with a bitter laugh. "At least, not reputable jobs. Instead, we were taken to a place in Bangkok. They called it a finishing school. It was a place for girls like my sister and I. They called us lost girls, women no one would try to find. We were girls who didn't matter."

  "Things were...difficult," she said, her voice trailing off. "Whatever you imagine, it was worse. Far worse."

  "Shit, Meia." I didn't have the words to say how I felt. It was like someone had kicked me in the gut. I felt sick for her, at the thought of the hell she had gone through as a kid.

  "The men there," she said. "They had to teach us the...skills we would need for them to be able to sell us. But we had to remain virgins. It was brutal. And Lily, she was smaller than I was. I tried to protect her, but there was nothing I could do. I tried to help her, to teach her to put herself in a far away place, to go somewhere in her mind, but it was just too much for her. They broke her."

  The thought of what had happened to Meia and her sister made me want to vomit. It made me enraged.

  "She hung herself there in that hellhole," Meia said. "I vowed that one day I would destroy the man responsible for her death."

  "And Aston?" I asked.

  "Aston." She spoke his name with disgust. "Aston was one of the men at the school. He was just barely an adult then. Not older like the other men. His father was the man responsible for everything."

  "So he was given free reign to do what he wanted," I said, the gut-wrenching realization of what was happening finally beginning to dawn on me.

  Meia nodded, anger flashing in her eyes, no longer looking like the timid, frightened little girl I'd seen a moment ago. "Yes, and he did whatever he wanted. He wouldn't leave me alone, even back then. Told me he wanted to own me, that his father would give him anything he wanted."

  "So his father gave you to him," I said.

  She shook her head. "No," she said. "His father sold me, to a man here in Las Vegas."

  "He sold you. Like a piece of property."

  "A child bride," she said. "To an old man here. I thought that it couldn't be worse than Aston, that at least I was getting away. But the old man was - not a nice man. He enjoyed...inflicting pain." When she spoke the words, her eyes brimmed with tears and I could tell there was so much more behind the words that she couldn't say.

  I took her hand in mine, feeling her tremble as she continued to speak. "When I became pregnant, he left me alone. It was a blessing. At the time, I only cared about the pregnancy because he stopped touching me. The torture finally ceased. But then I started to care about the baby forming in my belly, terrified that he would rip him from me. But Ben was born, and he didn't take him."

  "How could this happen?" I asked. "How could someone just buy you, keep you in secret? Keep a baby in secret?" It was unfathomable, that this was something occurring in this city.

  "When you have unlimited resources, you can make anything happen," Meia said. "It's easy to pay a doctor to make house calls. Easy to pay for someone to look the other way. I had no paperwork. No identity. Ben and I have no identity. We are ghosts."

  "How did you get away?"

  "The old man died," Meia said. "And I was finally free. He left us money, Ben and I. I think it was his apology for what he had done. Or some kind of attachment to his child. I'm not sure. He never held Ben, never asked to see him, so I never understood why he would care his son. But I thought I was finally free, that I could leave, take Ben with me somewhere far away from all the reminders of what had happened. I was wrong. Aston had never forgotten about me."

  I had not forgotten the day Aston came to take Ben from me. How could I? It was etched in my memory, the last moments I had with my son. I had no idea what would happen when I started looking for a way out, trying to figure out how to escape the country with no passport and no identification. With a baby.

  I was a naive child at the time. I should have run immediately, gone into hiding somewhere and used the money to buy Ben and I paperwork. But I didn't understand how anything worked. I didn't understand the urgency of everything. I was wrapped in this little cocoon, inside the walls of the old man's estate, where I thought I was safe from the outside world. The old man was dead, and the threat was gone.

  If I would have had any foresight, I would have understood that the real threat was out there, still lurking, just waiting. The man who had been obsessed with me, who had tortured me as a child, who had broken me once before.

  It was an idyllic week I spent with Ben, after the old man's death, and before Aston showed up. The truth was, it was an idyllic couple of years before the old man died. It was like all of the pain from before had never happened. He banished us to a guesthouse on the property far from the main house. Out of his sight. The prior torment was over, and Ben had room to run and play, an expanse of manicured lawns and a home that was vastly more than I had when I was a child.

  Two years of relief in a series of years full of suffering.

  And then Aston arrived. How he found me, I didn't know. I didn't understand the extent of his reach back then.

  ~ ~ ~

  Ben pressed his little body up against my leg, his arms wrapped around my knee. I bent over to scoop him up, kept him against my chest as he whimpered, sensing something was wrong almost immediately.

  "Meia," Aston said. "It's been a long time."

  "Please." I begged him, trying to be calm, trying to keep myself from falling apart, there with Ben in my arms. I had to be strong. For him. I clutched him tight to me, as if by holding him I could keep him from being taken away. "Whatever you want, I'll do it. Don't hurt Ben."

  All I could think about was that Aston would kill Ben, right there in the garden where he'd been happily playing, oblivious to any kind of evil that existed in the world around him. Please don't let Aston kill him, I prayed silently to a God that had never heard me before, pleading for my son's