Chapter 11 Colby #2
“We need to go there and figure out who was there fourteen months ago.” I’m ready to go now too, just sprint out of here and—
“Good thing we keep the books in order,” Rory says, and the predatory smile that stretches her cheeks tells me she already knows how she’s going to torture whoever that poor shmuck is.
Turns out Rory—who gave Duffy’s pout some competition this morning—and her plan will have to wait.
“Remember, we’re not here to talk to anyone but Cillian, all right?” Only two blocks away from the brothel I didn’t know existed, I can tell Eian’s trying to hide his nerves, but I don’t know if that’s because he’s about to look for a spy in his business or if it has something to do with me.
“Got it,” I say, just like I did the last three times he said a variation of the same thing.
I decide to give him silence as we wait at a traffic light. He needs to get into the mindset of the boss, and I doubt the morning where he was playing with Maggie again was any help.
I wanted to ask if he’d slept as well as I did the second time we shared a bed—and I refuse to admit I’m disappointed we did nothing more than kiss—but I could see from the dark circles under his eyes he didn’t.
I don’t know if that’s normal for him or not, and I don’t know if his twitchiness as he turns the car into an alley is his usual MO, because there are still so many things about him I don’t know.
At least now I can admit—even if only to myself—that I do want to find all those things out about him.
If I’ve learned anything since I came to live at his house, it’s that Eian will do anything and everything to punish those who hurt innocents. In fact, he’ll inconvenience himself for it, and that’s more than I ever thought anyone in the mafia was capable of.
Today isn’t about that, though, or about my growing feelings for Eian. Today we have to find a spy, and though I was excited for a moment about getting to be in the thick of it again, Eian’s mood kinda ruined that.
“Let’s go,” he murmurs, sounding deadly as he climbs out of the muscle car I didn’t know he had. Blake took us to a garage in the city where we left him then grabbed this ride, and I’m not sure why, but I doubt asking right now would lead to any real answers.
The first thing I notice about the inside of the nondescript building is that it looks and smells clean.
Personally, I’ve never been inside a brothel before, but this sure as shit isn’t what I was expecting.
We walk down a long hallway lined with black doors that contrast well with the light-gray walls, and almost at the end, there’s an opening I suspect is for the stairs.
A man walks down just before we get there, and when he sees us walking side by side, it’s like I don’t even exist.
An infuriatingly perfect smile grows on his stupidly handsome face—carved jaw, straight nose, perfectly sized dark-brown eyebrows, and only about three wrinkles that make him look even better. He stares right at Eian and I can practically hear him start to salivate.
The closer we get, the less flaws I find, and now I guess we’re both in a foul mood.
“Always nice to see you in the morning, Boss,” the freaking David come to life says, with a smirk that speaks for itself.
So they’ve fucked.
Eian has fucked this perfect specimen of a man who’s about a foot taller than me and at least a hundred pounds of pure muscle heavier.
That’s just fucking fantastic.
“Here to see Cillian,” Eian says in that same dark tone, and the bastard actually smiles wider.
Sure, the statement is borderline dismissive, but that doesn’t seem to bother the gorgeous asshole at all. Trailing his gaze down Eian’s body he bites down on his bottom lip before sighing like a stupid fucking idiot who has no brain cells and is stupid.
“Let me know if you wanna book an hour soon, Boss.”
“I won’t,” Eian says simply. “Now if you’ll excuse us.”
I’ve been keeping pace with Eian, but it’s only when he puts his hand on my lower back and gently pushes me forward that the asshole looks at me. I can guess what he must see on my face—even if I hate myself just a tiny bit for it—because he drops the coy act and gets out of our fucking way.
Good.
The worst part is, I can’t even be mad at Eian because he acted perfectly, and I can’t begrudge him having a past . . . We all have a past. Still, I’m not asking him to go see a certain play on Broadway so we can come face-to-face with my piece of shit ex. He could’ve warned me.
It dawns on me then . . . maybe that’s why he was so unsettled on our way over here? Was he nervous about us running into that Adonis?
Eian opens the door at the end of the hallway with enough force to snap me out of it, and we step into a reasonably sized office. There’s two locked cabinets and a wide desk with a blond man sitting behind it.
I walk through and Eian closes the door quickly behind me.
“Boss.” The man, who I assume is Cillian, quickly stands up. “I didn’t know you were stopping by today.” He doesn’t seem mad about that, more concerned, and he seems to be around my age, maybe early forties.
“I hadn’t planned on it. Sit.” Eian nods almost distractedly at Cillian, then pushes me gently into one of the two chairs in front of the desk and takes the other one for himself. “Call Sara in, would you?”
Without question, Cillian picks up the receiver and talks after the press of a button.
“The boss is here.” Whoever Sara is must know the drill, because the call ends quickly after, and less than a minute later the door opens and a gorgeous woman walks in.
Long black hair, perfect face, wearing a short blue dress that shows off her even longer and more perfect legs.
I don’t know why, but what surprises me the most is that she’s barefoot, and how fondly she smiles at Eian and Cillian.
“Colby, this is Sara and Cillian, they take care of the brothel. This is Colby, he’s helping me deal with some scum.”
I get nods and brief smiles as a greeting, and try to reciprocate, but I’m once more surprised when Cillian stands and offers Sara his big chair, then gets a foldable chair from between the cabinets and places it next to her.
“We’re looking for someone who started working here, or asked for a job here.” Eian takes the receipt out of his pocket and puts it on the desk in front of them. “On this date.”
Cillian gets up quickly after looking at the date and grabs a key out of his pants, opens the second drawer of the left cabinet, and starts sorting through files.
He passes Sara two files and grabs two more before sitting back down. They both look through the papers, discarding them until Sara looks up.
“Here. Luisa, she came in looking for a job on that exact day.”
She passes the file to Eian, and I lean in next to him to read it.
“Call her in,” Eian murmurs while we both read. Age, name, height, weight, likes and dislikes . . . it’s a pretty standard list for a brothel, I guess, but it doesn’t tell us much. It could all technically be fake.
The next pages are all a log, I suppose, of clients, and she’s pretty popular, or maybe not. How the hell would I know? The clients all have numbers and letters as names, I guess to keep it all more anonymous?
I’m just starting to look for patterns in the clients when a knock on the door sounds.
“Come in,” Cillian says, and the way his demeanor changes is impressive. Before he was easygoing, accommodating even, and now he’s . . . hard somehow, a no-nonsense type.
“You wanted to see me?” A sweet voice, and another beautiful woman, but I can tell how nervous she is. Scared too, when she notices Eian and me.
“Cillian, Sara, step outside,” Eian says, his eyes locked on the young woman, unrelenting. “Sit,” Eian says as he stands, and points at his chair then goes around the desk and sits in the big one.
“Is something wrong?” she asks as she follows orders. Her accent is pronounced—I’d say she’s Latina but couldn’t tell you the country—and shit, she’s about to start crying already.
“Luisa, you came here looking for a job on this date.” I point to her file. “Why did you do that?”
That’s all it takes.
She crumbles in her seat, sharp cries bursting out of her in waves as she covers her mouth with so much strength I’m afraid she’ll suffocate herself. Instinct takes over and I place a hand gently on her back and rub soft circles.
“It’s okay, just tell us the truth.”
When she looks up, I see she doesn’t believe me, and who could blame her?
I look at Eian and open my eyes wider, telling him to back me up here.
“If you tell the truth, I won’t hurt you,” he says after a long moment. There’s no hiding how fucking angry he is, but that’s not something I need to worry about now.
“See? Just tell us how you got here, why you’ve stayed, and what they asked you to do.” She nods but she’s still sobbing, so even if it’ll make Eian even angrier . . . “Take your time.”
She nods, and after a few minutes her breaths start to even out a little.
“They came to my village,” she says at last. “They promised good work here in the States and brought us here, but—” She breaks off on another sob. “They put us in cages. I just wanted to work, help my family.”
“I know you did, Luisa,” I murmur and keep petting her back, even as I feel this urgency to have her get to the point. I know I can’t know what she’s been through, and that the least she deserves is kindness and patience.
“They took me away from everyone else and two men came. I don’t know their names, but they told me I would work here and earn the money I was promised, that all I had to do was tell the people here that I really wanted this work and to stay here for-forever,” she stutters, and I see the heartbreak.
“Can you tell us anything about these men? How do they know you’re still here?” Eian’s sharp voice barely seems to penetrate her despair.
“O-one of the m-m-men, he comes here.”
“What does he look like?” I can’t stop myself from asking urgently.
“He looks d-different than before. He has a beard and different hair. Every week he comes and he—”
“You don’t have to tell us that if you don’t want to,” I murmur, and offer her my other hand. When she takes it, I know it’s not enough, that it will likely never be enough, but . . .
“He’s the boss of the other one,” she says urgently. “I know he’s in charge from how they talked, and the other man, he called him something, but he has a ring on a chain that says something else.”
I can barely keep up with her, the way she stops and starts so quickly.
“What does the ring say?” If it’s a class ring then maybe I can cross-reference people in power in the city with a class year.
“Brett,” she says simply, and my brain halts to a full stop. There’s no Brett University, is there?
“Brett?” Eian asks sharply.
“Yes.” She nods rapidly. “B-R-E-T-T. The letters are all a little apart, some more than others, but his name is different. Almost the same. Brent I think, with the N.” My lungs collapse on themselves and I can’t move fast enough to grab my phone.
My stupid, trembling fingers make it harder to spell right, so it takes way too fucking long, but finally the online search shows results. I click on images as soon as the option appears and then choose the first one before thrusting the phone in front of Luisa.
“Is this the man? The one who’s the boss? The one who comes to see you every week?”
“Y-yes, that’s him.”
She burst into tears again and this time I can’t comfort her. I show Eian the picture, knowing damn well he’ll know who it is.
“Motherfucker,” he spits out and shoves away from the desk.
That’s an appropriate reaction, I suppose.
Finding out who the leader of this fucking organization is should’ve made things easier, gotten us closer to ending them, but Carl Brent is the mayor of New York City, and the only way we’re getting rid of him is if we put ourselves on the line of fire. And if he finds out we know—
“When was the last time he came here?” Eian asks, voice even rougher than before.
“T-two days ago.” Luisa barely manages to answer.
“So we have five days before he comes back.” I breathe out the words, knowing no amount of information will help us now, and the ticking clock will help even less.