Roman

I shouldn't have done it. I'd taken it for her, not for me, and there were no excuses, anyway. The warning was right there on the top of the folder: Medical Professionals Only. But I couldn't resist it. I felt awful, the lowest of the low as I pulled the folder out of my rucksack. It was about an inch and a half thick, and stacked with densely printed pages of white legal paper, often annotated with almost illegible medical scribbles in the margins.

Ellie's medical records.

It was hard to believe that anyone could have suffered enough injury and pain in one life to fill the entire folder, but apparently Ellie was one of those people. I don't know what made me do it, but I started at the back. The first record was dated December 2010. Ellie had broken her collarbone skiing. May 2011, she'd fractured her eye socket falling in the driveway. November 2011…

I blinked, looking away. I could barely bring myself to read the account of Ellie’s torture that lay so innocently in my hands. Because torture is what it was.

I bristled with anger as I read the passionless, impartial medical text. It was so devoid of heart that it may as well have been another language. It was so clear to me what had happened to her, I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed to have picked up on what, to me, seemed like obvious signs of domestic abuse. I was no stranger to violence, I had meted it out every day of my life, but never to women, never to children, never to anyone who didn't deserve it. It was a strange moral code, that was for sure, but it was all I had.

The man who had done this to her? He was another kettle of fish entirely. A bully, an abuser, a man, if you could even call him that, who got his kicks from hurting women. And not just any woman, but Ellie.

Finally, after pages and pages and pages of heartless record-keeping, something made sense. The hastily scribbled note read: referral, adult protective services? I almost tossed the papers in the air for joy, but the relief was short-lived, for there was no record of anything actually progressing for the better from there. It was a good thing I didn't. The whole folder read like a horrific catalog of abuse, and a timeline of a woman sinking ever deeper into a spiral of depression.

There was one question in my mind, though. This was a woman who had stood over me with a kitchen knife, ready to plunge it into my heart, and she'd only been around me for a matter of hours. How had she lived through years of unrelenting, unremitting

A record from June 2014, broken finger, mentioned: Stockholm syndrome? But again, nothing was actually done. I drummed my fingers against the marble counter, up and down, up and down pounding out a relentless beat of frustration. It was scarcely possible to believe that, in this day and age, no one had said anything, no one had done anything, and above all nobody had stood up and stopped it from happening.

I grabbed my laptop. The Alexandria Herald's website was still up from when Ellie had used the Internet. I closed it down and opened a private browsing window. Like everything in my life, I liked order. The computer was no exception. I never had more than one tab running at any time, never any more than one program active. Simplicity had been drummed into me at an early age, and the virtue of cutting everything and everyone that wasn't absolutely necessary from one's life had been made entirely clear. I knew exactly why Ellie had never torn herself free, why she'd allowed herself to become a punching bag for a broken, bitter man. I understood it all. The reason was simple.

The same thing had happened to me.

My brother Timothy, Tim was standing in front of me, his hands tied behind his back around the wooden post. His lips were tight, and white with fear. "Hit him, Roman," dad slowed, his words barely audible through the drink. It was a game our father had made us play a hundred times, but the word game didn't do the reality of it any justice. There was no justice in that basement. That dark basement, where hope disappeared as quickly as the light when the door to the hallway upstairs swung shut.

The rules were simple. Simple, but unyielding. If either of us refused to play, neither of us ate. If I failed to make my brother cry, I didn't eat that night. If my brother cried, he didn't eat. We had to do it, my father said, to toughen us up, to make us the instruments of death that we were born to be. We'd learned a long time ago that it was best to do as my father ordered. Tim would cry, and he'd wince bending over for a week, and the next week it would be my turn.

But if we didn't do it, then there was no food at all. If we did, at least we could share a couple of hurried bites in secret.

My body was stiff, tense with remembered hatred and fear. I hadn't thought of him in a long time, yet it was a measure of the power the man still held over me, and over my emotions that within seconds my heart was racing as fast as if I just finished a hundred meter Olympic sprint. We'd had a thousand opportunities to escape, my brother and I, but neither of us took them, not for years, not until it was too late. Abuse doesn't start out as abuse. At the beginning, the flashes of anger and the beatings, they're rare, understandable. They only come out when you've done something wrong, and the rest of the time you're smothered by love, care and affection. Only, the longer it goes on, the less frequent the affection becomes, and the more accurate the anger. And then, after a while you start to crave those brief flashes of affection.

I kept reading. Anything to take my mind off the memories.

I walked to a drawer, pulled it open, hands white with tense, clenched anger. The drawer was stacked with cheap cardboard packages. Ten dollar cell phones, burners. I didn't want a smart phone, didn't need one and wouldn't use one, even if I had it. In my line of work, you keep using the same phone, you're not long for the world. I powered the cheap black plastic device up and punched in a number off by heart. It rang twice, and a man's voice answered, simply. "Go."

"Gregory," I replied gruffly. My voice was hoarse with barely contained anger. "It's Roman. I need some information."

I needed to know that whoever had done this to Ellie, to my Ellie, wasn't walking the streets. If he was, then one thing was absolutely clear in my mind.

He wouldn't last long.