She’d know she’d had it the second it was taken. The absence of it would eat her up inside.
Which is why I’m here. To hopefully take it right back.
Along with their manhood if it was a slightly less shitty day.
It didn’t look like it was going to be difficult. The idiots didn’t even notice me swapping out my dosed beer for the one I’d stashed in the corner behind me. I always chose a seat with a view of the door and my back to a wall. A little of my brother’s advice sticking, or just common sense in this particular line of work.
I let myself be groped and roughly tossed around, gritting my teeth when the dirty paws of some animal cupped me between my legs. Even though I was prepared, even though I knew I was in control, it didn’t make that moment any less degrading, didn’t mean it didn’t take a tiny slice of my dignity from me. Every time it happened, I was back in that room—he was touching me, violating me. It was almost too much in those few seconds before I got a hold of myself. And I did. Remembering that I couldn’t stop what happened to me in the past, but I might be able to do something for someone else who hopefully would never know what I did for them.
The stench of sweat and human waste was thick enough to choke on in the room they planned on being their house of pleasure and my house of horrors. I could taste the sorrow and the pain of the women who came before me. Or maybe I was imagining that because I knew those women were lost. No matter what I did now, they would be lost.
There was money to be made, after all—trafficking in human beings was the third biggest business in the world. Almost one million people were trafficked among international borders annually. Eighty percent of them women, half of them children. And of that almost one million people, eighty percent were trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
They were gone the second they were put in this room. The second they took a sip of the drink laced with rohypnol, GHB, or ketamine, or a cocktail of all three.
Not me.
I was already lost in a different way, in a way that meant I could at least prevent someone else being taken, even if I couldn’t save the ones who’d come before.
My bones and muscles protested with the way they handled me, but it was good, because them being rough gave me the opportunity to press a button stitched into the thick leather cuff at my wrist without them noticing.
No sound came when I pressed it, but I knew what it did.
I had about seven minutes, give or take, depending on how much of a distance Lucian kept when he followed us from the bar.
I’d run into them by chance, him and his team. It was the first time people like these assholes had tried to drug me. Lucian and the boys came in to try and save me. My captors were all dead by the time they arrived, guns drawn.
I grinned at them. “Sorry, boys. You snooze, you lose.”
And it began. They were all ex-military, all here for reasons that weren’t important to anyone but themselves. They were here to escape something. And it just so happened that the best way to escape something was to kill people who deserved to die. Our operation was just that, traveling around Venezuela mostly, with me as the bait.
Which was what I was right then.
I lost a handful of breaths as I was hurled onto broken and cold concrete, the impact winding me. I stayed still, braced against the pain. I was used to it.
I mentally scheduled myself in for a tetanus shot and maybe a round of penicillin to be safe. I immediately changed the maybe to a definite when rancid breath kissed my cheek and an equally rancid tongue ran along my face.
“Cunt tastes good,” he declared in Spanish.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of black as a figure entered the structure that could be roughly classified as a shack. After I kicked the man with the knife off me, breaking his neck in one swift movement so he collapsed gracelessly at my feet, I glanced up and found my initial guess of a newcomer was correct.
A very familiar one at that.
His icy eyes regarded me levelly, thick tattooed arms crossed as he leaned leisurely against the wall, not speaking, not interfering, just watching.
“Perra!” a voice snarled.
My attention moved from the newcomer to another attacker. I skirted the body at my feet to dodge the knife that was hurtling toward my neck. My dodge meant that I sank my own penknife into the man’s own neck before he knew what was going on.
His eyes widened in grotesque surprise, a wet gurgling noise coming out of his mouth. I held his frantic and desperate gaze, keeping my grip tight on the handle of the knife.
“Yeah, you didn’t expect to meet your end in this room, did you?” I hissed at the small amount of darkness remaining in his eyes. If you looked really closely, you could see the evil draining out of him, sinking into the soil, searching for a new home and a new landlord. His warped and ugly soul would follow and meet a man named Lucifer. I hoped.
Or maybe that was just my mind taking creative license in the midst of murder. My teachers always said I had an ‘active imagination.’ And ‘problems with authority.’
They weren’t exactly wrong.
I held his eyes a beat more. “It’s been a profound honor killing you. If only it had been a lot sooner and your death a lot longer.” I sighed. “But a girl can’t get everything she wants.”
Another thick and wet sound escaped from his body as I yanked the knife out, then stepped away from the spurt of blood that came with the gesture.
“Hit the carotid artery,” a flat voice observed. “Nice.”
My would-be attacker turned victim collapsed ungraciously on the ground, the smell of fresh excrement filling the already rancid air.
I screwed up my nose.
People shat themselves when they died, something they did not show you in the movies. Then again, good always triumphed over evil in the movies, and the girl always rode off into the sunset with the hero.
This particular girl rode off into the sunset alone to make sure her particular hero stayed far away from her. She’d already turned him into the villain; no use ruining what remained of his life.
I whirled, shaking thoughts of referring myself into the third person out of my head. I was already half crazy, I so didn’t need to go full Charlie Sheen.
I glared at the owner of the voice.
“Yeah, I know how to kill someone. I’m not in kindergarten,” I snapped, then regarded him, tilting my head and holding my scowl. “You didn’t feel like, I don’t know, helping me?”
Gage looked at me, then at the two bodies at my feet, with a blank, unblinking gaze.
“You didn’t exactly need help,” he replied, digging in his pocket. “And I’m rather attached to my balls. Don’t like the thought of you ripping them out because I decided to get all chivalrous and help you kill a man. Feminism and all that.”
He put his smoke between his lips, the flicking of his Zippo replacing the quietness of death that hung in the air. I’d quickly gotten used to that, though it didn’t mean I liked it. Death was ugly, whichever way you spun it. Killing someone evil didn’t make you good. It did exactly the opposite. Murder was murder.
Gage wasn’t wrong. Him helping me would’ve been the most annoying thing he could’ve done, apart from just being here in general. Any other man in my brother’s club would’ve rode in, guns blazing, testosterone overdosing, determined to save the girl they saw as their little sister.