Chapter 3
Ella checked the hallway again. Then, with trembling hands, she bunched up the thick velvet of her skirt, pulling it up just enough for me to see her lower back and thighs.
The breath was violently punched from my lungs.
Her pale skin was a canvas of horrors. There were bruises in varying stages of decay—some yellowing and faded at the edges, others viciously purple, blooming like dark, terrible flowers across her fragile flesh.
“Every night, Daddy comes to my room,” she choked out, her voice fracturing. “He says it’s our special game. He says good girls play the game… but it hurts, Uncle Mike. It hurts so bad. And Mommy… Mommy says I’m lying. She says I’m naughty, and if I tell, the police will take me to a dark box where bad liars go.”
The kitchen seemed to tilt. My vision tunneled until all I could see was this broken, terrified child. I have spent two decades interviewing whistleblowers, sitting across from hardened criminals, digging through the worst of human greed. None of it—absolutely none of it—prepared me for the suffocating, blinding rage that erupted in my chest at that moment.
“Butterfly, look at me,” I said, forcing my voice to remain smooth and steady, anchoring her in reality. “You are not a liar. You are the bravest girl in the world. I am going to stop this. But I need you to hold on just a little bit longer. Can you be brave for me?”
She nodded, burying her face in my shoulder.
“Ella!” Elia’s shrill voice echoed down the hall. “Get in here!”
Ella flinched as if struck, dropped her dress, and sprinted back toward the dining room.
I remained on the kitchen floor for a long moment, my hands gripping the edge of the granite counter so hard my knuckles popped. My own blood. My own brother was a monster. And his wife was standing guard at the door, complicit in the destruction of their own child.
I walked back into the dining room. I drank my coffee. I smiled at my brother. But the man who sat back down at that table was not the man who had arrived. I knew how to build a case. I knew how to dismantle a liar’s life brick by brick. I had just never done it to my own family.
But as I looked at Cortez’s smug, arrogant face, I made a silent vow. I was going to tear his kingdom down to the studs, and I wouldn’t stop until he was buried beneath the rubble.