Chapter 5 Brooks
Brooks
The world outside is dark. Fathomless. Full of secrets. I don’t know who’s out there or what they want, and I’m not even sure what any of it has to do with me.
And I hate it. I’ve spent most of my adult life knowing exactly what I’m doing and who I’m dealing with, and on the rare times when I don’t know, I always have one thing: I’m Brooks fucking Peterson, and I’ll figure it out. I always have plan.
I always have a way out.
My eyes slide from the window, which shows nothing but darkness, to the man sitting across the aisle from me, and I cringe. I always have a way out until it comes to Lucien Boudreaux and the hold he’s had on me since I was twelve.
He still has that hold on my soul, his sticky fingers reaching inside me and finding their way into my most private spaces.
And gods, do I hate him for it.
He’s staring at me now, his dark eyes shuttered to keep me from seeing his thoughts, and it’s all I can do to keep from jumping up and strangling him.
First he shows up at the bar, saying he has business with me, then he virtually kidnaps me, gets me into a gunfight, and brings me to the airport rather than the Rossi mansion, which was where I wanted to go.
Within half an hour of him picking me up, I found myself on his private plane at JFK, my head spinning at how quickly it happened.
Is that how it goes for all girls when they’re kidnapped?
I wonder.
I’ve never been kidnapped myself, and though I have friends who have–Sloane and Dante both found themselves on the wrong side of a ketamine-soaked cloth in the last month–I haven’t asked them if it happened so quickly they could hardly remember the details of it.
I certainly haven’t asked if they spent the entire journey fighting between burning love and ice cold hatred for the man kidnapping them.
My eyes go to Lucien again, and when I find him still staring at me, a slight smirk on that pirate’s mouth of his, I drop my gaze to the file in my lap and start reading, determined to take my mind off the man.
Research. Research is a good way to distract myself from the man who was once the love of my life.
Especially when that research might lead me to my current mark.
The world falls away from me at the thought, and my brain finally decides to get down to business.
The folder in front of me holds thirty files, at least, and on top is a sheet labeled ‘Aislyn Brennan.’ A glance at the picture shows me what I expected: A pretty girl, delicately blond and flushed.
Freckles across her nose and bright blue eyes.
The text to the side tells me her age–only twenty-three–and her family relations.
Irish Brennan’s niece. In graduate school for an English degree, with the dream of becoming a teacher.
No boyfriend. Decent credit. One car and a flat that her parents bought her.
Nothing that stands out except that relationship with Irish, and her striking beauty.
And if I was a sex trafficker, the fact that she’s young and looks untouched.
My stomach turns at that and I flip to the next file, and then the next.
They’re much the same. Girls that look young and pure, with an innocent beauty that sets your teeth on edge.
None of them stand out as anything special or different, but they’re all attached to prominent families.
The Brennans in New York. The Boudreaux and Landry clans in New Orleans.
A de la Roca, which means she may or may not be related to Duca.
A Lafayette from New Orleans. Some names that I recognize as the Irish mob leaders in Boston. A few that say they’re from Atlanta.
All related to mafia or mob families.
All young girls.
I slam the folder closed and shut my eyes, trying to get my brain to work.
It doesn’t make sense. Is there a collector out there, looking for girls who all fit this same mold?
If there is, it doesn’t follow that they’ve all been pulled from our world.
There are plenty of pretty girls out there that don’t come with the dangers of mafioso friends and relatives.
Is someone specifically collecting girls from the underworld?
I pause and tip my head at that, wondering. It makes a certain sick sense. Men have eclectic tastes, particularly when they have too much money, and I can imagine someone wanting to collect girls who have mafia in their veins.
The bigger problem is the timeline. I know enough about trafficking rings like this to know they can’t afford to hold girls for long.
The longer they have them, the better the chances that they’ll be discovered or killed.
Two weeks, I think, horrified. And based on my surface-level knowledge, that’s an outside figure.
If we’re lucky, they keep the girls for two weeks before they ship them out. If we’re unlucky, they only keep them a week.
And Aislyn has already been missing for three days.
“Found anything yet?”
I open my eyes to find that Lucien has moved into the seat across from me, gliding so silently that I didn’t hear him coming. Made of smoke and shadows, that one. And mirrors that only show you what he wants you to see.
I don’t trust him.
But I need to know what he knows.
“Why are they all the same?” I ask bluntly. “Young, pretty, untouched. There’s nothing unique or interesting about any of them.”
His mouth quirks. “They’d probably take offense to that, love.”
“Don’t call me ‘love,’” I say, my stomach turning. “You lost that right a long time ago.”
He presses his lips together and narrows his eyes at me, like he’s weighing a number of possible responses to that, and I watch him warily.
I’ve known Lucien Boudreaux since I was twelve.
My mother and I had already escaped New Orleans by that time, moving to her family in the Irish enclave in New York, where we found shelter and sunshine after living in my father’s dark, abusive world for too long.
My mother, however, in her somewhat scattered version of wisdom, had thought it was a good idea to take me back to the Big Easy twice a year to visit my father.
I’ve never understood why she did it, and she’s never been able to give me a good reason.
Maybe it was some misbegotten idea that I should still know my father, even after she kidnapped me to get me away from him.
Maybe she just needed him to keep giving her a monthly check, and saw me as a sacrifice to keep him sweet.
Whatever the answer, I regularly found myself in New Orleans over my winter and summer breaks from school, always terrified of my father and counting the moments until I could return to New York.
Until I was out shopping with my mother and cousin one day and saw the most beautiful boy I’d ever experienced.
Dark hair and even darker eyes, tall and gangly in that way teenage boys are before they grow into their bodies, and yet somehow graceful, as if he knew exactly how to use himself.
He was conning other kids at the park, cheating them out of their lunch money, and I watched him, fascinated at how quick his hands were, and how brilliant his smile.
When he turned and caught my eye, we spent several moments staring at each other, our gazes clashing in a way that should have felt terrifying but was instead heavy with importance.
I know a lot of people don’t believe in love at first sight, but when Lucien and I first laid eyes on each other, the world rearranged itself around us and laid a path that meant we would walk through life together.
We began finding ways to meet again and again, and two years after I first saw him I was leaning up against the wall of the library, his arms caging me in and his lips brushing against mine.
Three years after that, I found out that my father and his had brokered a deal for an alliance, and the knot that tied it all, pun intended, was my marriage to Lucien.
I’d been brutally in love with him by that time, head over heels, and we’d been happier than I thought possible. I’d been looking forward to a future as the queen of the Boudreaux enterprise, and had spent more and more time in New Orleans just to be with Lucien.
Then I found out that my father had only brokered the deal to get a mole into the Boudreaux world so he could steal their rackets, and my world came crashing down.
Moments after my father told me as much, I started to wonder whether Lucien was involved as well, and if he knew exactly what was going on.
If it was a deal he’d agreed to for business reasons rather than the love I thought we had.
I’d already known I couldn’t trust my father.
My mother might have been empty-headed, but she taught me to recognize a man for what he was, and my father was my first test dummy.
But when I started to doubt Lucien, my entire world had come crashing down and that had been the end of the engagement.
I turned eighteen and started using my brain, and could see a range of potential reasons for Lucien to be lying to me about how much he knew.
Power. Money. The alliance his father and mine wanted so badly.
It had taken no time for me to start seeing everything he did as suspicious, and within a month I skipped New Orleans and never returned.
I didn’t say goodbye.
And he didn’t come looking for me.
I swallow the sob that wants to emerge with that thought, the shooting pain of a knife twisting in my heart at how long I waited, certain that he was going to find me, and remind myself that the situation made me the new version of myself.
I stopped waiting for men and began figuring out how to do things for myself.
I stopped trusting people I didn’t know.
I learned to handle everything with my own hands rather than counting on someone else.
And I put my heart and all its soft, squishy feelings to the side, along with my memories of Lucien Boudreaux. Because nothing good had ever come of trusting a man like that.