Chapter 5
Angel
“You need to calm down or you’re going to be asked to leave,” a guy snaps as he holds a Cerberus member back.
If I had to guess, the pissed-off man has staked a claim on that crying woman.
I recognize her from a job a while back. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to find out that she ended up here after I sold her.
She wasn’t part of my job, and sometimes I have to play the role I’m given.
Selling women, being uncertain of what will happen after they’re gone, doesn’t normally bother me, but the angry man looks like he’d give his life for her, and that makes me feel a little guilty in the role I played in her demise.
“That man—” he snarls.
“Didn’t fucking touch her,” I hiss back.
I hate nothing more than wasting fucking time, and if we don’t get to the point quickly, I’m liable to lose my fucking cool.
“Maybe not, but you watched her fucking shower after abducting her,” he rages. “You did nothing to help her. Fucking sold her to some fucking creep and just went on about your fucking day.”
“Someone better start fucking explaining,” another man yells, seemingly just as angry as the first guy.
“He’s a mercenary,” Kincaid says.
My eyes snap in his direction. I don’t like being on anyone’s radar, much less the president of some desert do-gooder club.
“I was working a case. What I do isn’t any different from what—”
“That’s not going to help your case,” Thumper interrupts.
“We’re nothing like you,” someone else spits. “Cash doesn’t control what cases we take. We don’t hurt others to get the job done.”
“Angel,” Thumper says. “Why are you here?”
I take a deep breath. Being hated isn’t a new thing for me. I seldomly meet a person who walks away much less walks away with a good opinion of me.
“I was working in Telluride,” I explain, wishing I’d just dropped that little girl off on their front doorstep and drove away. But if she died because of the temperatures outside, that would be on me. I don’t like blame. It makes my skin itch.
The atmosphere in the room changes some, but I continue. I don’t know how long these men will let me explain before all hell breaks loose and one of them tries to put an end to me.
“I thought your man was there for the same reason, but he left before getting anything done.”
“I thought you were dead,” Thumper says, digging up shit that has long been buried.
But how is he to know that the Angel he thought he knew is dead?
I can’t think of El Salvador, or the way my heart jumped at seeing Lauren Vos in the fucking living room.
I don’t often let betrayal seep into my bones, but that fucking woman makes me see red.
Had Thumper not been taken, I know he never would’ve left me bleeding out on the floor like she did.
He wouldn’t have left me for the cleanup crew to discover. It took me eight months to get away from that group of deranged assholes.
“I saw you go down. Lauren said you were still on the floor when she left with Cara, Penny, and Amanda,” Thumper continues.
His words confirm what I already knew, but they still somehow have the power to anger me.
Lauren said.
I bet Lauren said a lot of fucking things.
But I’m not here for Lauren.
“Everyone, sit the fuck down!” Kincaid roars, and the men in the room move like the robots that they are, pulling out chairs and dropping their asses down.
It seems Kincaid is a good teacher as well. I respect the man for it.
Wielding such power over a group of testosterone-riddled men can’t be easy.
Even the pissed man who feels the need to defend what happened in his woman’s past takes a seat, but he never drops the rage from his eyes. He’s twitchy with it. I know without question if we were left in a room alone, he’d try everything in his power to rip my throat out.
Good for him. Having goals is important.
“What’s your full name?” a guy in the corner asks, his fingers hovering over a keyboard.
“You’re not going to find shit on me, techie,” I say, smirking when the man lifts an eyebrow in challenge.
“Angel Guerra.” The man I became the day my mother was taught her final lesson.
His fingers fly over the keyboard, and it only takes a second for his eyes to lift back to mine, brow scrunched.
“As I was say—”
I clamp my jaw closed, and I take a deep breath to calm the irritation forming in my gut when a knock at the door echoes in the room.
The door is opened by the same guy who held the man back who wants my head on a spike.
“This is club business,” Kincaid hisses, and the door is immediately snapped closed.
Without even seeing her, I know it was Lauren Vos who knocked on that fucking door. The woman plays her parts very well.
In El Salvador, she was the perfect victim, acting scared around the men, assuring the women they would be fine when no one was watching.
She didn’t hesitate to insert herself in both mine and Thumper’s way once it was disclosed that she was also working a case and the house in El Salvador was her way of getting to whatever location she was ultimately aiming for.
I am surprised that another knock doesn’t sound throughout the room, that she doesn’t barge in here and demand to be involved.
Her presence here throws me off a little, but I do my best to remain stoic.
I’m the cat walking along the fence that’s keeping a pack of wild dogs at bay.
I’d be a fool to think any different. I’m good at my job but being cocky and overconfident will cause problems. I knew I wouldn’t be welcome here, but I have a problem in my truck I’m not going to deal with on my own.
“You were dead,” Thumper says again as if he can’t believe that I’m in the room with him.
He hugged me when I first arrived, but as he looks at me now, it’s not with relief.
That job wasn’t my last job, and his teammate glaring at me right now, sucking in rapid breaths, is proof of that. I doubt he can reconcile the two.
I fucking blame Lauren for that as well.
I was a dark and dangerous man before El Salvador, but being left for dead and subsequently held captive myself because she couldn’t be bothered to press her fingers to my throat to check for a pulse turned me into the monster I am today.
Before, I’d make sure that undue stress wasn’t suffered by the women in my care.
Before Lauren Vos discarded me like trash, I was ready to kill Thumper for what I thought he did to her.
I operated under the guise that broken women don’t bring as much money before finding out he was FBI. I knew I couldn’t always stop the abuse. I knew they’d endure more once they were sold, but I never wanted to bear witness to it. Out of sight, out of mind kept me from fucking up my own jobs.
I’m different now.
Now the paycheck is all that matters.
I no longer look out for others because there’s no one looking out for me.
I’m not some goddamned martyr.
I shove all that shit down and lift my chin another inch, my dark eyes scanning the room.
I knew what coming here meant. I knew Cerberus thought I was dead. I knew Lauren thought the same thing. I just never thought she’d be here.
I pictured her dead herself, carved up by some sick fuck, because as much as she liked to pretend to be the victim, that fucking mouth of hers always got the best of her.
“Takes more than two to the chest to get rid of me,” I tell Thumper before turning my attention back to the leader of the group.
It’s a warning for all of them. I’m not easy to kill, and I’ll pop up and invade at any given fucking time.
Be warned, motherfuckers.
“Can someone start from the top for those of us who have no fucking clue what’s going on?” a guy to my right asks.
The club president runs both hands over his slick bald head before answering.
“Angel is a mercenary that was on the same job that Thumper was on when he worked for the FBI. Traffickers showed up, shot Angel, and took Thumper. It was revenge for the death of another trafficker. Thumper killed one of the guys who raped one of the women in his care. The brother wasn’t happy about it. ”
That has to be the simplest explanation to so much tragedy, bloodshed, and torture I’ve ever heard.
It’s succinct. I like it.
“I’m working a case,” I say.
“Earning a paycheck,” the angry man counters, making me wonder just how much control this man has over the group.
I don’t even bother looking toward the other man. He isn’t wrong. Money is the only thing that feeds me. It’s the only thing that keeps the real demons at bay.
“Enough,” Kincaid snaps.
“That job took me to Telluride. When I saw your man there and his cut…” I point to the man I researched and discovered as Spade.
“I figured maybe we were working the same case. I know better than to get in Cerberus’s way, so I stayed back, waiting for the dust to settle, only it didn’t.
He left and didn’t take the woman with him. ”
“What woman,” Spade hisses.
“Greta Murphy,” I answer. “She was abducted from Wyoming fourteen months ago. I tracked her to Will Varon’s house in Telluride.”
Kincaid’s eyes dart to the man on the computer, and I can instantly tell someone fucked up. The club president drops into his seat at the front of the table as if he’s been shoved.
A chill settles over several people in the room, and I take an easier breath for the first time since arriving.
“You guys won’t find shit on him either,” I inform them.
On paper, William Varon is picture-fucking-perfect. I only know different from what I observed for the two weeks I was watching and waiting to make my move to get Greta back to her husband in Wyoming.
I had time to dig a little deeper after leaving Greta looking like a fallen angel on the stairs, and the information I discovered was only by chance after coming across an old news article about a missing woman from years and years ago. It took hours to link the disappearance to Will’s family.
“Varon is a third-generation trafficker, running his family’s business out of Telluride, although they keep their abductions a couple of hours away in neighboring states,” I explain.