To Catch A Rook (All The Queen’s Men #1)

14. Chapter 11 - Hillary

“ W here to this evening, Ms. Lane?”

Josephine’s gray eyes peered back at me expectantly in the reflection of the rear view mirror. Her long, dark hair had been tugged tight into a ponytail today. The band of her scrunchie matched her standard uniform of a white tailored suit and practical black boots.

My driver and bodyguard, Josephine was a svelte machine of taut muscle and unassuming strength, the remnants of her military days still imprinted beneath her skin.

She had been one of Sammy’s recommendations, and after an unorthodox interview where we grappled on the mats of his gym for a few rounds before I reviewed her unredacted history, I was sold.

Her quiet confidence and stoic demeanor were perfect qualities for a protector, and though our relationship was strictly professional—maiming criminals aside—I trusted her implicitly.

Few people in my life knew about my extracurricular activities. Winter, my most cherished friend, and Logan, a man I could now call upon like a brother, were left completely in the dark on purpose. Years ago, they’d had their own trauma to work through, and I wouldn’t burden them with my own twisted vendetta.

Marty, my assistant and confidante, had earned my trust and respect one thousand times over, but I would never drag him into the darkness of this world. His high-power lawyer husband made it even riskier to share my underground deeds. Marty was likely not to approve, anyway. At his core, he was too good.

Aaron knew I tread the line between black and white, preferring to keep shelter within the layers of gray, but I was sure my path of vengeance was as discreet as my stealth team. His dirty needs were far less hidden than mine.

I had discovered the Rodriguez house of sex clubs’ years before, after completing an audit of Daddy’s more illicit expenditures. Camden Lane was a particularly high paying client of Club 7.

To say I’d been surprised to learn Aaron ran all seven clubs in the Carlisle city district was an understatement, but learning his family paid a tithe to the Carlos Cartel for weapons and drug running had been a vase over the head. The Carlos family and their activities were a deathly plague that continued to infect every person I touched.

One Carlos man in particular continued to infect me with his touch.

Kellan had secured the building where we were headed this evening, but until I had last seen him at Sammy’s gym, I hadn’t realized how much he knew. Layers of security, dozens of countermeasures, and false paper trails covered my tracks, but Kellan had somehow gotten through them.

The man was ruthless in his delivery and swift with his own justice, sharply observant and stealthily strategic. He wasn’t someone to underestimate, and he’d proven time and time again he got what he wanted, whether or not I was willing to part with it.

If only I could harness that energy for my gain. I could use a king on my board.

Beyond the vehicle, I stared through the shadows shifting into smoking silhouettes as steam rose from the grates within the pavement.

“The Palace tonight, Joey. Please take the back entrance.”

She nodded and flicked on her signal light to move into the next lane as I mulled over my strategy for tonight’s discussion.

I’d been working to rid this town of sexual predators for the better part of two years. When one was swiftly brought to their knees, another popped up in its place; a continuous cycle of deeply disturbing Whack-A-Mole.

I was playing the long game; men like Judge Cowan were now in my pocket through carefully crafted blackmail, with the expectation these powerful people would use their influence to help remove the most disgusting portion of our society. Those who couldn’t further my agenda—the men and women who defiled children and youth for their own pleasure—received a quick defilement in return, and a tracker chip under their skin. Then they were sent home to contemplate their futures.

Tha t they were still alive was the extent of my mercy.

A predator couldn’t hunt without its weapon, so I took away their weapon. I didn’t bargain with the corrupted for the lives of innocents.

Despite the years in the boardroom and leading companies through crisis, this task had become my greatest challenge. I buried the sharp pangs of frustration before they blossomed and shifted my focus to tonight’s activities.

Alec Turner was one of the few I hadn’t returned to society with his dick-less tail tucked between his legs. His deplorable actions required a different approach, and he was currently being held in a secured facility a few miles outside of Carlisle’s city boundary.

I needed answers. Since Judge Cowan’s admission, Alvarez was the name I couldn’t get off my tongue. My most trusted ears to the ground were on it, but nothing was coming up as a solid gold lead.

Marco Alvarez was the obvious household name in Carlisle. He and his two brothers owned a few different companies in the area and his family riches were just a few billions less than mine. Their squeaky-clean ‘Christian family values’ image didn’t particularly scream ‘underground criminal,’ but media alone had shown that outward appearances could be crisp covers for the worst in society.

I didn’t know the man very well, but I could bet I’d be seeing more of him in the near future. A boorish invitation sat on my countertop for an upcoming gala of the wealthiest movers and shakers in our circles. I was sure the host, Jediah, would have invited him. The elaborate parties were a chore to attend, but useful; I always left with the most valuable commodity: information.

I would get information from Alec tonight.

Josephine pulled onto a hidden gravel road, cutting the taillights as she approached the warehouse a half mile down t he overgrown lane. The building looked abandoned from the outside; the dense trees and rocky terrain a proper deterrent for wandering hikers in these parts. Inside, however, was a state-of-the-art facility that rivaled a maximum-security prison.

In Alec’s case, it was.

We slowed as we approached an electric fence gateway that immediately retracted, sensing the vehicle’s presence. Muted solar lights lit the path and Josephine drove into the single parking space sheltered on the north side of the building.

“Plan?”

I couldn’t see Joey in the dark cab of the vehicle, but I could picture her fierce expression as we took on another criminal. If I allowed it, she would happily torture the deviant herself, breaking his fingers one by one with her little bone hammer. I’d seen her do it a few times; it was fascinating to watch a bone crush under the perfect precision of a well-calculated blow.

“Interrogation, and then we’ll improvise.” I grinned into the blackness of the vehicle, unafraid of the tingle in my blood at the thought of hurting a thoroughly guilty man. The system was broken, in disrepair beyond saving—so I had built a better one. I wouldn’t lose sleep over one less rapist in the world.

My haunted dreams suffered far greater losses.

We slipped out of the vehicle on silent feet, redundant in the stillness of the late night, but I took all precautions with this side of my businesses. I had no plans to get caught until the work was done. And the work would never be done.

I unlocked the steel door with an eye scan and thumb print while Joey stood guard behind me. I had checked the site cameras before we’d left, and while I was confident Alec didn’t have the brains or the brawn to break out, Joey didn’t waste a second as the door swung open, moving around me to clear the perimeter before I could walk down the lightless hallway.

The building held five cells, each equipped with a shower head and toilet and a twin-sized bedroll in the corner. Painted white walls with a washable reflective coating, and bright LEDs flooded the space with bright light twenty-four-hours a day. Instead of metal bars, each room had a front facing wall of tempered bullet-proof glass, three layers thick.

An automated food dispenser released a protein bar and bottle of water three times a day, and my guests received a single roll of toilet paper expected to last them a week.

The rooms were soundproof, impact-proof, and designed for easy cleanup. A polished palace for torture.

A massive storage basement lay beneath the main level, containing a simple, windowless two-bedroom apartment hidden behind a wall of storage shelves. Until this point, I’d not had need of it, but I had only gotten this far in my activities through thorough preparation and patience.

Brilliant white light seared my eyes when Joey opened the next door. Into the prison wing.

Our body language shifted in tandem—we were now performers; good-cop, bad-cop interrogators from a bad nineties drama. Except my hatred wasn’t acting, and Joey’s thirst for violence wasn’t part of a script.

I stopped in front of the large glass window of Alec’s cell with Joey firmly planted on my right. Alec lay face-down on his bedroll, in an apparent attempt to shield his eyes long enough to fall asleep.

I pressed the blue button adjacent to the food dispenser unit. Shrill screams of a siren blared through the hollow interior of the sound-proofed booth and Alec bolted upright with a muted string of curses.

I k illed the siren, then pressed another button. A small glass hatch opened on the wall in front of me.

“Fuck you, you stupid fucking cunt. I was sleeping!” Alec’s voice was gruff from lack of use, but the rough tone couldn’t cover the timbre of visceral hate.

“Fuck you, back,” I returned calmly, used to his raging barks after all this time.

I once gave in to his taunts, releasing the wrath that lived in my veins like an infectious parasite. I pounded my fists into his face and kidneys until he was unconscious. Joey had silently stood guard behind me. Beating him to near death had been cathartic—for a little while—until I realized I would likely slip one day; I would truly snap his spine or burst an organ, and death would release Alec from my torture.

I had sworn he would never get the luxury of leaving this world free from his sins in the nothingness of an afterlife. I then created an environment specifically for him, so that every day he would wish for death, and yet every day, I would not grant it.

I assessed his frail frame and frantic eyes, searching for any signs of his strength returning since my last visit a few months ago. It hadn’t. A year of 800 calories a day had not been kind.

When I had first been introduced to Alec Turner, he was handsome; pale, pearly skin with red lips and dark brown eyes, coal-black hair framed his face in tousled curls. He had been tall and lean, and powerful.

Now he was gaunt; greasy hair lay in matted clumps down his back, and his eyes held a half-crazed glaze from his time in captivity.

“I’m here with a few questions for you.” I folded my arms and leaned forward so my voice carried better into the small space. “Answer well, and I’ll up your food rations. Answer poorly, and I’ll take a meal away. Understood?”

He tried to spit at the glass in protest, but the puny dribble of spittle didn’t even make it past his chin.

“Fuck you.”

When he loped to the side of his cot, I noticed for the first time his ankle was raw. I would check over the footage when I got home to see what he was up to.

“You said that already,” I replied dryly. “When you were a part of the network”—I steeled myself for the flood of memories sure to come—“who was the person running the girls in this state?”

“I don’t even know where the fuck we are, bitch.” Alec had laid back down, folding his scrawny arms over his eyes to shield them from the light.

When I had finally tracked him down in New York, my teams smuggled him across state lines in a transport truck with an IV drip filled with a sedative strong enough for an elephant. I filled his living hours with light and kept him in the dark on everything else.

“Sequoia. Who was running the delivery service?”

I was kicking myself for not asking this question sooner. I was used to knowing every part of my domain, down to the most minute details, but my concern at the time hadn’t been the West Coast; my focus had been honed in on the entire Eastern Seaboard in my vengeful search for justice.

That had been the birth of my crusade, the death of many perpetrators. Years later, here I stood.

My scouring search had been successful—it brought many to me before I finally found Alec, but my vengeful yearning remained. No amount of wrath-filled punishment on the scourge of our society ever took away the pain.

He remained mute. His sorry attempt at insubordination was a very unwise choice, given his position.

“Do you know why I haven’t killed you, Alec?”

I d ropped my voice, pressing against the glass hole and my venomous whisper carried over the vast emptiness of the clinical space.

“Death is too easy—too final. You will remain here until you fade away into nothingness. Your life will mean nothing. Your death will mean nothing. You. Are. Nothing.”

I stood and tapped my red gloved fingers against the glass in veiled apathy. “But,”—I stared at my pretty red hands, the color mimicking the crimson palette of fresh blood—“I can make the nothingness easier. Perhaps I dim the lights one evening. I give you an extra bar another. Perhaps I get bored and put a bullet into your brain to end your suffering early.”

My stare left my dancing fingers and zoomed in on Alec’s pallid face as he watched me with cautious, sunken eyes. “I will give you the opportunity to choose your fate—the one thing you stole from her .”

When the bitter word touched my tongue, I refused to taste it. Instead, I spat it out into the bright hallway and glared at my prisoner for forcing it into my mouth.

“The West Coast was owned by the Carlos Cartel,” my captive admitted in a scratchy, hesitant drawl. “But the Midwest was Alvarez’s territory.”

“Which Alvarez?” My tone was sharp, viciously hungry for the truth of my situation. Each one of Alejandro’s sons was his own brand of repulsive.

“Marco’s.”

The oldest brother. Marco appeared a white-collar family man; he ran two tech firms. How disgustingly fitting he’d trade tech by day and people by night.

“How long did he own the territory?”

A shrug of skin and bone. “As long as I was in the business. The trafficking was split up into four different zones, and whether the girls were international or domestic. He preferred to ship his girls in. I only dealt with domestic.”

The vileness of this man, speaking of human beings as if they were products to be used and abused. If I wasn’t so set on his suffering, I would kill him tonight.

“How many?” I swallowed my fear at the question, knowing the answer wouldn’t be one I wanted to hear. But I had to hear it.

Alec’s black eyes peered up into mine, their depths filled with an evil I’d never be able to name. His pink lips pouted upwards in an attempt at a smirk.

“Girls? A few thousand a year, maybe. Have to restock—not much of a lifespan in this line of work, is there?”

Remain calm, remain … calm.

“You’ve chosen your fate.”

I nodded to Joey, who moved aside, and input a passcode to unlock the tiny cupboard behind her. I removed a small slew of torture devices. An electric cattle prod, a bone saw, a handy pair of pliers. She’d get to choose her preferred method of torture tonight.

I would kill him in seconds if I conducted the torture session. I wasn’t willing to let him go just yet.

“Make him bleed, but keep him alive. It’ll have to be quick tonight. I’ll be outside.”

I forced my body to move at an unhurried pace, through the lit hallway and into the still-dark one, before stepping outside into the still night air of September.

I made it to my passenger door of the vehicle before my rage bubbled over into a spewing mass of pure hate. I couldn’t contain it any longer; the acidic scream crept up from the roiling in my guts, and I slapped the metal skeleton with my open palm in bitter anguish.

My sobs dissipated into the dense tree line; immediately I clamped my mouth shut, and chastised myself for my lack of self-control in an area where avalanches were common.

I forced filling breaths of air down my throat and into my belly as I waited for Joey to return. All of my pretense was ou t the window – I needed to get a hold of myself before I made a crucial mistake.

I counted down from one thousand to clear my mind from the plaguing spiral of sorrow and got to 323 by the time Joey came out of the building. I walked over to the panel and reset the code using my slew of biometric software. Then we slipped back into the night, driving the dark, twisted road back toward home.

The next day came and went in a blur and my preplanned evening to myself was not going well. A few hours of trash television and a particularly back-breaking workout did nothing to assuage my feelings of guilt. Nor had an entire bottle of Champagne.

A visit with the demons of my past always made me restless and hungry for a distraction. I’d wallowed enough; I needed something in the present to ground me. To take me away from thoughts of her .

Sex was the perfect antidote.

Sex required no thought, no emotion, only action .

Sex had stopped being a connection of souls a decade ago; instead, I had molded the act into the perfect escape—a delicious release of pleasure and pain, an untethered bliss of in-the-moment relief.

It was a give-and-take of power and control. A mutually subscribed understanding—and occasionally, a subtle and effective weapon.

And, of course, I liked to come. Who didn’t?

Kellan was still on my shit list, and I wouldn’t be the one to grovel with Aaron. When he was ready to be tamed by a wanting woman and stone cold sober, he could come to me.

He ’d left the next morning, just as I knew he would. I wouldn’t be entertaining the whims of a sloppy man who couldn’t commit to any path.

Not Aaron—not with the history we had.

Which left only one other man on my list. Marty had forwarded Lauchlan’s contact information last week; I hadn’t yet bothered to reach out.

Now that I knew the playing field, I was ready to play the game. How far would Lucky go to keep up the ruse? It was time for a little test.

I scrolled through my phone and typed a quick message with my name and my address. If Lauchlan was too stupid to recognize the booty call, then he certainly wouldn’t be the man to satisfy me tonight, and I would have to find another way to test his resolve.

I was done feeling sorry for myself. Tomorrow, I would continue my quest to rid the world of despicable fucks like Marco Alvarez and Antonio Carlos. Tonight, I would indulge in the best escape known to woman.

I rose from my slump on the couch. From my walk-in closet, I selected the perfect set of lingerie.

It was time to get lucky.