14. Leona
LEONA
A s soon as we docked, Max disappeared. He slipped off the boat without saying goodbye, or thanking us for the transport, or letting me return his torn and filthy suit jacket, or even washing his hands of the blood that covered both of us from head to toe.
I didn’t care.
He’d slipped through my fingers long ago, and the only thing that remained between us was the bones of a fulfilled truce.
All bets were off now.
Comforting in a way. To see how easily we could forget everything that happened and go back to the way things were before.
The women we’d taken off the boat with us waited in the main salon, huddling around one another in a state of fear and disbelief. I felt the same.
What we’d been through in that cargo hold…I swallowed and pushed the memories down even further. It was behind us. It was at the bottom of the ocean, in a pile of wreckage. It was over.
I’d spoken to them briefly in the hours it took us to sail back to New York, but they weren’t too keen on speaking and neither was I. To be honest, ever since seeing my men, all I’d wanted to do was fall asleep. I was running on adrenaline, and even that was long gone.
But in our time speaking, I had learned a little about them.
They were all American. They’d been taken from different points along the East Coast. Two from Boston, one from a college town in Connecticut, one from Maine, one from Virginia, and one from as far south as Florida.
They were all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three.
Some were taken within the last two weeks; the Albanians had held some for months.
Six women. I watched them while they stood at the windows of the yacht.
There had been eight in the cargo hold.
No .
We were home now. It was fine. We’d done our best to get everyone out, and that was all that mattered.
Now, they seemed frozen in stasis, unsure what to do. While we waited for Willow’s crew to arrive, I tried to ease them by gathering at least a little more information.
From what I could gather through their brief answers and stories, they’d been kept together and moved together from location to location, and were being taken to Dürres for final sale. None of them had known each other, but they’d formed an intense bond and were protective of one another.
After another ten minutes, Ciel caught my attention, and I stepped away to speak with him at the door to the exterior deck.
“They’re here,” he whispered. “Should they come on board, or can the women walk off?”
I glanced behind me for a second. “Let me ask what they want to do.”
He rested his palm on the top of my shoulder. “We’ll be home soon. Are you sure you don’t need anything? Do you want them to take a look at you, too?”
I shook my head no, avoiding the kindness in his gaze. The only way I was dealing with things right now was to stomp them down into that tiny little box. If I didn’t think about it, it didn’t exist.
I was positive everything would burst from that box as soon as we got home, but for now, I had to deal with what was in front of me.
“Okay. We’re giving you some space, but we’re right outside if you need us.”
I squeezed his hand on my cheek before turning back to the survivors. “There is a group of women waiting to give you medical attention and safety. They can meet you outside or come in here.”
A woman with jagged-cut brown hair that hung in limp bangs over her eyes spoke first. Her name was Penny, and she’d been their natural leader since Max and I broke them out of their cages. “And then take us where?”
“Wherever you want to go,” I answered. Willow’s crew would take care of them, just like they had for that woman I’d met in Philadelphia, Claire, and all the other women that Wynn had saved.
My heart clenched inside my chest. Wynn . I wanted to get home. I needed to see that he was still alive.
“What if we want to go home?” a younger girl asked.
“They’ll make sure you get home, or give you enough money to get firm on your feet, or you can go stay at their compound.”
“Their compound?”
I nodded. “This is what they do. They provide safe homes for other women who have been hurt like you.”
“Like us,” Penny responded while she stared at her clasped hands.
Bile coated the back of my throat. I pressed my lips together to hold it in. I hadn’t been through near as much as they had. “You’re free. Just tell them what you want to do, and they’ll make it happen. ”
“What about money?” another woman asked.
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about the money. We have plenty of it.”
Wynn and Willow used their own money to fund this group, but so would I. So would the Shadows. We’d pour as much of our money into this as necessary to get these women to safety. They deserved that.
They deserved so much more than what happened to them.
Penny eyed me. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and all these guys, but…they came for you, right? Not for us?”
I nodded, trying my hardest to choke down the tears building in my chest again. “They’re my men. They came for me.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Leona Vero.”
She didn’t react to my name. It’s not like she had any reason to know me, but she nodded like she was committing it to memory.
She stood, and I met her face to face. “Okay. We’ll go with them. But if anything weird goes down, we’re leaving.”
“I wouldn’t blame you,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “If all they do is give you medical attention, and then you decide to walk away on your own, that’s fine.”
We walked together toward the gangway at the stern, where my guys stood awkwardly around the railing of the boat. Obi stood on the other side of the gangplank talking with Willow’s crew.
“Ryu,” I called. He instantly turned in my direction. I held out my hand. “Can I have one of your knives?”
His face went hard, questioning, before he pulled one free and handed it to me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I responded before I turned to Penny. I pressed the hilt of the knife into her palm. “Take this. Use it when you need it. ”
Penny clasped the weapon, turning it from side to side. “Maybe you should come with us.”
The idea sounded like a recipe for emotional disaster, and I was already on the precipice of collapse. No, the only thing I wanted to do was get back to our plans and figure out how we were going to tackle the mountain of problems ahead.
“I’ll go home with my guys.”
She pursed her lips. “There were a lot more of us before the ship.”
“What?”
One of the younger girls pressed their shoulders together, and Penny looped her free arm around her.
“They had an auction, with a big group of girls. Not just us, but we saw dozens of other women. Our group didn’t sell, so that’s why they were taking us out of the country.
” Her voice went low, and she tilted forward.
“I overheard them saying they thought we might sell better somewhere else.”
My mouth went dry, and I glanced up into Ryu’s hardened face. He looked just as angry as I felt. “Where was this auction?”
“Honestly, I have no idea.”
The younger girl beside her chimed in. “They always had us drugged. It was just a day or two before they brought us on board the boat. That’s all I know.”
I nodded, thanking them for the intel as we helped them down the gangplank. Willow’s crew started introducing themselves and leading them toward waiting vans. Penny gave me a somber wave as they drove away, leaving the rest of us to disembark the ship.
My mind struggled to process everything when my feet planted back on land. The glow of sunset cast dancing shadows through the dozens of different boats, of all sizes, swaying in the soft waves of the marina.
Max was gone. The Camorra was at war. The Albanians had united under one Clan. We were inevitably going to get caught in the middle.
But it all seemed to float away in the face of what Penny said.
Dozens of women were at that auction.
Countless more could be in the same city I was stepping back into, a different woman than three days before.
My guys moved around me, but I was oblivious to what they were doing, nor did I care. Cas’s warm hand pressed against my back and led me off the boat behind them.