Chapter 8 Lucien
Lucien
I’m going to kill the man.
And not nicely. It’s going to be messy. Bloody. And incredibly dramatic.
“You’re not even fucking listening to me,” I growl.
“And you don’t have any respect, boy,” my father snaps back.
“You take off for New York at the drop of a hat without giving me any reason. Then you come home with that girl in tow and go right back to your house like you don’t have any responsibilities.
Do I need to remind you that we have a fucking family to run? ”
I clench my hands into fists, ready to punch something. “Of course you don’t. I know my job.”
“And yet you’re still not doing it. If you want to take over, Lucien, you have to play the game. You know what you have to do. Either you get it done, or you’re out.”
He hangs up before I can answer, and a part of me is glad.
Because that conversation wasn’t going to end well, no matter how long we stayed on the phone.
I slam my phone down on the table in front of me and glare at the wall, trying to get my emotions under control.
I almost never lose my handle on my temper—I’m famous for it—but talking to my father is uniquely frustrating.
The man never saw a guy he didn’t want to fight with, and for some reason, I’m his favorite partner when it comes to confrontation.
It’s always been that way. My mother died when I was ten, courtesy of a rival family’s bullet, and the day we buried her, my dad started in on me.
He must have thought he was building character or something.
For me, it just felt like he’d decided he hated me as soon as my mom was gone.
Devils, maybe he hated me when she was alive, too, and my mother had just protected me from it.
That makes more sense than I like. She was an angel on earth, all blond hair and blue eyes, sparkling laughter and a heart too good for this world.
When she died, my world went dark, like the sun disappeared or all the light bulbs had been snuffed out.
I’d never thought I was a mama’s boy, but life without her was the worst thing I ever experienced.
Even worse when my father started treating me like his biggest rival.
I wondered for a long time whether he actually blamed me for her death. I didn’t know how he could have, when it was his enemies that killed her. I hadn’t even been there. But the ties between my father and I broke the day she left us, and we never managed to rebuild them.
These days, he’s trying to threaten my future in the family.
Tomorrow it will be something else.
Even if I give him what he wants—which is what he called about—it won’t be enough. He’ll just find something else to demand. Some other way to prove that I don’t live up to his expectations.
And I never will, as long as he refuses to see what I’m doing.
The truth is, he has no idea how seriously I take the family business, mostly because I don’t bother to tell him.
Why would I? How could I explain what’s going on right now?
The girls disappearing are bad for business.
No, we don’t trade in girls, obviously, but we do count on the city to run the way it should, and instead, girls are being snatched off the street.
Our girls. Our sisters and cousins and girlfriends.
And eventually, the kidnappings will bring the feds down on us.
New Orleans already walks a fine line between heaven and hell, with an underworld that puts New York to shame.
We’ve got gamblers and hustlers and smugglers, not to mention the dance halls and meat markets.
All of it unregulated, and not controlled by anything like New York’s Cosa Nostra.
No one has control down here, and we like it that way.
The last thing we need is the FBI in our town poking around. But kidnappings draw the wrong sort of attention, and it’s only a matter of time before they catch wind of it.
Then there’s the deal I made with Brooks.
And the deal I made separately with my father, which I haven’t told anyone about yet. Not even Brooks.
I push all thoughts of my father to the side, frustrated that he’s managed to get under my skin again, and turn back to my work. Daniel and I are in my office, going through the security footage my contacts have sent me. Looking for the girls we have in our files.
For the moment they disappeared, and who might have taken them.
“What do you have for me?” I ask sharply, counting on Daniel to know what I’m talking about and what I need.
He glances away from the laptop he’s been working on, then spins it toward me and comes to stand behind me. One finger on the mouse and two clicks, and we’re watching a video. It’s grainy and black and white, obviously not from any high-quality camera, but I can see the people clearly.
I can see the girl walking through the parking lot.
“Gods, she’s young,” I breathe.
“Polly Swift,” Daniel agrees. “Related to Crow Lafayette, though it’s not a close relation. Blond, with green eyes. Very pretty. Young.”
“How old?” I whisper, hating that I have to know the answer.
“Seventeen.”
Satan alive. She’s not even allowed to vote yet, and nowhere near close enough to drink alcohol. Though I’m sure she’s done the latter. New Orleans starts them young. Still. Only seventeen. She has the rest of her life ahead of her, and instead…
If my suspicions are right, she’s been kidnapped by a trafficking ring, and there’s only one reason a girl like that gets kidnapped. Well, two: One, for blackmail or money, and since there haven’t been any demands for ransom, that we can find, it’s not that.
The other answer: sex slavery. Girls and boys taken from their homes and shoved into a world where they’re auctioned off to the highest bidder or kept in a harem, forced to serve whoever pays enough for an hour. Slavery. Degradation. Humiliation. The worst betrayal one human can impose on another.
It’s disgusting and horrifying and words I don’t even have, and I try very hard not to think too much about it.
I live on the dark side of the world, my days taken up with gambling, plotting, and murder, but the idea of trading in flesh chills me to my very bones.
It’s so depraved I can hardly hold it in my head.
Every instinct in my body is screaming to save the girls who have been caught, starting with Brooks’ friend. Aislyn Brennan. We don’t have any tape on her yet, partially because she was taken in a city where I don’t have any contacts, but we’re searching.
We just don’t have much time.
If we can use some of this footage to identify who’s taking them, though, it might lead us to where they’re being held. And we might be able to stop them.
“I can’t believe we can’t get anything better than this,” I growl, leaning closer to the monitor. I’m used to being able to pull the best possible information. My contacts are airtight, and I’ve never had so much trouble getting information.
But this ring is bigger and sloppier than anything I’ve ever dealt with.
I don’t even know if anyone specific is in charge, or if it’s just a loose coalition of individuals.
It must be organized, to have this much consistency in terms of the victims, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out who’s at the head of it.
Suddenly Daniel’s finger jabs the screen in front of us, and he pauses the video.
“There,” he says, pointing.
I look, wondering what he’s seeing, and it takes a moment for it to register.
The girl is still in the parking lot, but she’s walking toward a van, now, as if someone in that van is calling her.
Or she knows the person driving it. This is the last-known location for this girl, so we suspect she was kidnapped from this spot.
We don’t have it on camera. But this is where they got her.
And the van she’s walking toward has a logo I know on it.
“Under the City,” I say quickly.
“We should have known,” Daniel mutters, shoving away from the table and gathering up his things.
I stand and follow him, gathering my guns, knives, and cane just as quickly.
Yes, we should have known. Under the City is a bar that sits in the catacombs nears the ocean.
It’s a swanky place, full of high-end drinks and people with too much money, and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way.
First of all, they have a gambling den, and gambling is a Boudreaux racket in this town.
Second, they’ve built the place in the catacombs. Also our territory. We’ve never been able to kick them out because we don’t technically own the catacombs, but we’ve controlled them since the Civil War, when our family took them as part of a smuggling operation.
No, we don’t smuggle.
Yes, at that time we used the tunnels to get slaves out of the area and to freedom before they could be sold.
So I lied. Sue me.
If there’s a ring smuggling people again, it makes sense that it’s happening out of Under the City. It’s a where all the wrong people go to gamble and drink. They have access to the ocean and a small pier right outside their door.
Most importantly, the joint is owned by fucking Dominick Landry.
***
I forgot how cold the catacombs are this close to the ocean.
They’re always dark and damp, of course, even when you’re in the brightest sections.
Old beyond measure, their walls have seen far too much.
In theory, the tunnels and levees down here were built for flood control, to keep a city caught between the Atlantic and the Mississippi from flooding.
New Orleans, you see, shouldn’t exist. This is swampland, and sits below ocean level in most places.
It was a bad idea from the start, as far as construction went.