Chapter 17 Wesley #2
“You didn’t rely on me, Ro. You didn’t come to me with your concerns.” I smacked his right cheek, drawing a hiss of pain out of him.
“O-oh,” he breathed, shifting his hips. “You want me to do that?”
“You—” I took a breath, calming my rising frustration. Softening my tone, I started again, “Yes, I want you to rely on me. I was hoping you understood that since you called me over the other day.”
“I just… I…”
“Listen to me, doll. I love you. You said you love me too. People who love each other—well, they go to each other for support, for comfort.” Another spank.
Ro’s breath hitched. “Are we dating then?” he asked quietly, sounding unsure.
I gave him two lighter swats and drew him up into my arms. He folded into me. I buried my face in his hair and inhaled—salt, soap, him—and the smell steadied the growl in my ribs.
“We can be whatever you want us to be, Ronan,” I murmured softly. “I guess I hadn’t thought about what actually to call this.”
“If you were my boyfriend, then I’d never hide stuff from you again,” he said too sweetly, making me huff out a laugh.
“Oh, is that so?” He nodded, grinning as he looked up at me. I rolled my eyes, but kissed the top of his head.
“I want you to be mine,” he said.
“Ro, I’ve been yours.”
He bit his lip, mischief and hope warring in his eyes. “So say it. Say you’re my boyfriend, Wesley Cohen.”
I tilted my head, watching him. The look on his face was so unguarded it made something in my chest ache. He’d gone from trembling to bratty to almost shy in seconds, and I was watching it happen in my lap like a time-lapse.
“Say it,” he whispered again. “Say you’re my boyfriend.”
My thumb brushed his jaw, a slow stroke to keep him grounded. “Yeah, Ro. I’m your boyfriend,” I said quietly, the words coming out steadier than I felt.
His smile cracked wide and quick, like sunlight through a break in the clouds. “You’re my boyfriend.”
I tipped forward and kissed him, soft and slow, a lover’s kiss. His hands came up around my neck and clung there, and I felt him melt against me.
When I pulled back, he was blinking up at me with that same shy light in his eyes. “You mean it?” he asked, like he needed to hear it again, just to be sure.
“I mean it.” I traced a thumb over the bruised, blooming color on his hip. “I’m not going anywhere. But,” I added, letting a faint smile tug at my mouth, “don’t think I’ve forgotten about your punishment.”
He tilted his head, pretending to be innocently confused. “What do you mean?”
I let my palm slide back down, cupping his ass. “You still owe me ten more, babydoll. Over my lap.”
* * *
The vibe in the warehouse was tense, to say the least. Harsh fluorescent lights hummed from above us.
Monitors lined one wall in the conference room we’d taken over, Ichabod manning the displays.
My nephews—Hayes, Hudson, and the oldest, Greyson—sat around the long table like soldiers called in for battle.
Ich had already walked them through the basics. He kept the dossier open on the tablet at the center of the table; Ro’s photos were locked in a folder, cataloged by date. I didn’t need to look at them again. I’d seen enough in the bathroom to haunt me for years to come.
“You all saw what I sent,” I said, starting without preamble. “Ro found files on Elias’s home computer. There are names, ages, and locations going back as far as twenty-six years ago.”
Greyson drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, appearing lost in thought, which was odd for him.
“Ichabod?” I prompted. He tapped the screen, and the three location names glowed larger: Fulton, Belmont, and Truman.
“These are district names,” Ichabod said.
“We cross-referenced addresses and shipping manifests. Fulton is a converted warehouse on the riverfront, with limited access and heavy loading docks. Belongs to a logistics shell company. Truman is a storage complex—a former industrial park, a lot of private units with one main office.”
Hayes leaned in. “What’s the inventory look like for each?”
Ichabod’s eyes flicked to the ledger thumbnails.
“Fulton shows a preponderance of entries marked with ages listed as single digits, but also includes some victims as old as twelve.” He grimaced, looking sick to his stomach.
“Belmont runs a wider age range—thirteen to late twenties. Truman skews older—thirties and up. That’s not a clean line, but it’s explicit enough in the manifests to tell us there’s segmentation of stock by demographics and market. ”
The room went cold. “Out of curiosity,” Greyson asked, his jaw ticking, “do we know what the stock is being used for? Once it… sells.”
Hudson replied, “It probably depends on the specific victim—their looks, strengths, health, everything. Why? Are you interested in buying your pet a playmate?”
Greyson went still before tilting his head toward his younger brother, his eyes flashing with murderous intent. He spoke softly, calmly even, “If you so dare to joke about that again, I will take your ‘little pet’ and put him in goddamn witness protection away from you.”
Hudson growled from across the table, but before he could say anything, Hayes leveled him with a stare. “You can’t joke about things like this. If Ollie heard you say that, he’d get upset. Actually… Never mind, please continue. I’ll take him on a nice, long vacation to Tokyo, just the two of us.”
I frowned at the twins, then addressed my eldest. “We have reason to believe that the younger ones are almost all sold into sexual slavery. The rest are a mix of labor and organ trafficking.”
Greyson nodded, lips thin. “You understand that this is just a small pocket of a global problem?”
“I know. It might not make the slightest difference in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t sit here knowing that,” I looked at the most recent list, “these are people in the depths of fucking hell, and if I don’t try to help—if we don’t—there’s a significant chance that they will never be able to escape. ”
Ichabod added, “If we do one location at a time, Elias will change his routing, move people fast. We hit them simultaneously, we remove his ability to react. We secure victims in place and we secure exits.”
Greyson still frowned. “But what about after that? Are we just dropping these people off at hospitals? They’ll need a lot of care. You’re talking about three warehouses of victims, many underage. This isn’t just a hit that we can walk away from.”
“Law enforcement?” Hayes asked before I could answer.
Ichabod’s expression tightened. “We could try to get a task force in—if we do that, it buys us legal cover for evidence collection and victim care, but for all we know, Elias could have cops on payroll that will tip him off. If we go in and call them after, they could get us on homicide charges for the guys working with Elias.”
“I don’t trust PD with this,” I said flatly.
“But Grey’s right, the victims will need more than just being freed.
The issue is that by helping them with medical costs, transport, we’d be putting a target on our backs.
I have no doubt that law enforcement would love to get their fucking hands on us. ”
Hudson’s jaw worked. “So then what’s the plan?”
“It’s far from perfect, but the most important thing is to get these people out of there.
Each of you will take one of the facilities.
From what Ich’s found so far, it appears there are typically only two to three guards at each.
I want Grey to handle Fulton, Hayes with Belmont, and Hudson with Truman.
You’ll each take a partner with you to ensure you’re able to dispatch the guards as quickly as possible, with minimal to no damage to the victims. It has to be an in-and-out deal.
Maybe you can instruct the victims to call 911 after you leave, but we can’t get much more involved than that. ”
Ichabod pulled up a grid and zoomed the Fulton building into the center of the largest screen. “Fulton has two loading bays—one main entrance and a service door on the north side. Cameras are present but go blind between 0200 and 0300. If we move at 0220, we take advantage of reduced visibility.”
“Belmont?” Hayes asked.
“Belmont is harder,” Ichabod said. “It’s urban, mixed-use.
Multiple entry points to the warehouse area, crowded alleyways.
They keep people below ground—basements, mezzanines.
There’s also more foot traffic nearby. We’ll need diversionary distraction—something to pull attention away from our ingress points.
” He changed the screen to show the Truman building.
“Truman’s biggest asset is that it’s a dead zone,” he continued. “Isolated, climate-controlled units. Once you’re in, you’re surrounded by metal doors and narrow corridors.”
I drew a breath and let the scope of it settle in.
“While the facilities are being handled, I’ll be dealing with Elias. I’ll be taking a small team of our operatives as Ro’s mentioned there’s a fairly large number of staff at the house at any given time.”
There was a long silence as everyone absorbed the logistics. It was clinical—the kind of talk that made the horror manageable because it put it into boxes you could check off.
Of course, that silence had to be broken by one of my incorrigible nephews.
“Now, who is this Ro you keep mentioning?” Hudson asked with a shark-like smile. Before I could reiterate what I’d told them at the start of the meeting—that he was a victim on the inside, coming to us for help, he continued, “He wouldn’t happen to have white hair, would he?”
Greyson looked mildly irritated at the turn in the conversation. He pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering something under his breath about the twins never taking anything seriously.
Hudson leaned forward, smirking. “No, really. White, shoulder-length hair, pale as a ghost, kind of looks like he wandered out of a Tim Burton movie?”
Hayes’s grin matched his brother’s. “Because our husband’s best friend’s brother—” he gestured vaguely, “—saw him at a coffee shop downtown last week. Said he practically screamed potential threat. Creepy little fox, everyone was staring at him, but he clocked Dorian immediately, smiled at him.”
I grunted, glaring at both of them. “Because smiling at someone is so very threatening.”
“You’re a cradle robber,” Hayes shot back immediately, grin widening.
“Uncle Wes, really,” Hudson chimed in, shaking his head in mock disapproval. “You keep telling us to make responsible choices, and then you go and pick up a—what? An albino twink that asks you to dismantle a trafficking ring for him?”
“He’s twenty-nine,” I repeated, voice flat as stone.
Hayes arched a brow. “Which makes him, what, twenty years younger than you?”
“Twenty-one,” Hudson corrected smoothly.
My jaw worked. “He’s a goddamn survivor who’s risked more than any of you know to get us this fucking intel. So shut the hell up, or get the fuck out of my building.”
Greyson lifted his head finally, fixing his brothers with a look sharp enough to cut glass.
“You two ever stop to think that maybe he looked like a potential threat because he’s lived his whole life surrounded by predators?
Because maybe you’re looking at someone who’s learned survival in the worst possible ways? ”
The twins sobered a little, but not enough to keep Hudson from muttering, “Fucking therapist.”
I let out a sound that was half growl, half sigh. “You two are lucky you’re family. And, as a matter of fact, he is a threat. Could disembowel you in your sleep.”
“Sounds like you have hands-on experience with that, Uncle,” Hudson quipped.
“I never took you as the pretty-boy type,” Hayes teased. “Guess Grey gets it from you.”
Grey snarled at him, “Stop fucking talking about Lane.”
Both twins smirked at him, but turned their attention back toward me. “So, is it serious? Must be since you’re going through this all for him,” Hayes said.
“It’s not any of your goddamn business,” I shot back, voice sharp enough to put an end to the teasing. “But yes, he’s mine. That’s all you need to know.”
Greyson, mercifully, cleared his throat and steered us back. “Focus. We’re talking about trafficking victims, not who Wes is or isn’t with. Let’s get the op solidified before you two make him walk out of here.”
The twins exchanged one last mischievous glance, then leaned back in their chairs, quieting down.
I let out a slow breath, rubbing at my temple, and glanced over to Ich, who looked like he was going to combust from the awkwardness of observing our bickering.
“Let’s go over it again from the top.”