Ellie shook her head. “Hey, it’s okay, you don’t have to—”
“I know what you all think of me, that I’m a cold, vicious bitch, and you’re not wrong. But I can’t tell you how much I hate,” Katarina choked out the words, “hate being linked to him, how much I despise this connection we have. And I hate myself for wanting to run to him for protection, even when he was the one shooting at me. Isn’t that the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard? That even after every awful thing he’s done, that I still somehow look to him for comfort and help? Shit, maybe I am crazy after all.”
She stuffed her fist into her mouth to choke back a sob.
“That’s not pathetic.” Jillian’s hand curled around her forearm. The contact made Katarina flinch, but she didn’t move away. “It’s a normal response to trauma in kidnapping victims, a form of Stockholm syndrome.”
“Jillian’s right. There are studies of former kidnapping victims who described those exact same behaviors and feelings. And that was in cases where the victims were adults, and the kidnapper didn’t also act as a parent substitute.”
Katarina used her shirt to dry her eyes. What a pathetic idiot. She hated that she’d melted down, especially in front of these two. Kingsley would have punished her for weeks over such a huge lapse of self-control. “God, I’m never like this. I’m just worried about Bethany.” She glared up at Jillian, who still hovered near her shoulder. “I swear, if you try to hug me, I’ll headbutt you in the nose.”
The blonde backed away with her hands up. “No hugging, I promise. You don’t smell all that great anyway.”
Relieved by the shift to a lighter topic, Katarina sniffed her armpit and winced. “Yeah, didn’t get around to showering much in the hospital. Deal with it.”
“You can use mine once we’re finished talking about Kingsley. What do we think his endgame is? To get us all together in the same spot and pick us off, one by one?”
Katarina scoffed at Ellie’s suggestion. “Please. He’s not some freak strung out on bath salts who runs around eating random people’s faces for shits and giggles. He wants to feel powerful, which he achieves by outsmarting everyone around him. He gets off by taking people and molding them into the exact person he wants, into someone who will perform in a big way for him, at his bidding.” She sneered to shove back a fresh burst of pain. “Nothing gives a man a greater sense of power than bending a strong woman to his will.”
“And did he? Bend you to his will?”
The quiet question came from Ellie. Katarina debated answering, then shrugged. Why not? What did she care if they rehashed or judged her old traumas? Maybe one of the stories would further their investigation, and she’d flay the skin off her own back if that could help rescue Bethany.
Staring at her hands, she opened her mouth and let the stories spill out. Starting with the first one, when Kingsley stole her from the Davidsons and manipulated her to wield a knife on them before she started the fire that burned their mangled bodies and continuing on through all of the crimes that followed.
The endless hours of training and preparation he’d subjected her to first to make sure she was ready, like martial arts, knife work, and breaking and entering. She shared how he’d taught her to scam people and steal and ended their lessons with real-life training. When she was still green, he tested her out on easy marks like half-deaf little old ladies with canes and graduated her to tougher scores by the time she hit thirteen.
As she recounted the early crimes he’d put her up to, her throat clogged. She’d never even had a chance.
Another hand curled around Katarina’s shoulder, but this time when she glanced up, it was Ellie’s face that hovered over her. Their eyes connected and understanding flashed between them. For the first time, Katarina wished things could have been different between them and wondered if, in another life, with different pasts, the two of them could have become friends rather than enemies.
The sensation was fleeting, slipping away in the blink of an eye as Ellie stepped back.
“There was this one kidnapping victim I handled, back when I was just starting out as a beat cop. She was a little girl not much older than Bethany, who’d been snatched by a friend of the family. A mother whose own child had just died.” Ellie gripped the back of an empty chair, her voice soft as she told the story. “The little girl felt scared and sad about being taken away from her family and angry at the family friend for stealing her, and also guilty. There was even a part of her that felt bad for the woman who snatched her because of the daughter who’d died.”
Against her will, Katarina was pulled into the story. “What happened to her?”
“Eventually, all those emotions proved too much for the little girl to take, made her feel so helpless that she ended up shutting down and going completely numb. As a survival mechanism, she went on autopilot and started to obey her kidnapper and do whatever she was told. Sometimes, that’s what you’re forced to do to stay alive, especially when you’re young. You place your survival in the hands of the exact person who terrifies you.”
Katarina struggled to connect with the detective’s message but ended up sinking into the chair in frustration. Her body was spent, more wrung out than a wet towel, and her skull throbbed all over. “Is that supposed to make me feel better about what happened to me?”
Ellie gave a single shake of her head. “No. I told you that story to help you feel better about what’s happening with Bethany.”
24
The waitress’s white sneakers squelched on the sticky concrete floor as she sauntered toward two burly men sporting ZZ Top beards and leather
