Chapter 17 Brooks
Brooks
The room is everything you’d expect from a smuggling ring, and yet the opposite of what I’ve experienced up to this point.
For the last twenty-four hours—from what I can tell—we’ve been held in dark, dank cells that I believe must be underground.
Under a lake or river, potentially, given how much moisture there is down there.
My skin is sticky and saturated, my lungs heavy, and I feel like I’ve been underwater for the last day. Without adequate oxygen.
But it’s easier to breathe.
Or it would be if I didn’t feel like this was some sort of escalation. I just didn’t know what we were staging for. Yet.
“What do you think this place is?” Kate asks from her place next to me against the wall.
“I have absolutely no idea,” I answer. “But I don’t like it.”
“Right,” Kate murmurs.
She eyes the crowd of girls in front of us, all of them milling around with hopeless, vacant looks on their faces, and shakes her head. “They look like zombies.”
“Hard to blame them,” I reply. “They’ve been through hell and back already, and don’t have any way out. And these aren’t exactly girls who’ve been taught to fend for themselves.”
It’s one of the things I noticed right away, and something that makes me think the organizers of this ring are even smarter than we realized.
These aren’t just rich, entitled girls, being sold to the highest bidder and then dangled out in public so their family has to see them being used as toys.
These are girls who’ve never had to do anything for themselves.
They don’t know how to shop or clean the house on their own, and they sure as hell don’t know how to defend themselves.
In short, when kidnapped and put into a stressful situation, they don’t know how to react because they don’t have the right tools. Instead, they shut down and become pliant. And that plays right into their kidnappers’ hands.
A man walks by and shoves two paper cups at Kate and me, barking that it’s time to take our medicine, and this has become nearly as routine as the rest of the girls wandering aimlessly through whatever room we’re in.
Kate and I don’t fit the mold. We’re not walking around like we’ve already died, nor are we following orders as seamlessly as the girls. We’re talking back. Telling them no.
Actively planning a rebellion.
And as such, they’ve started trying to drug us.
It’s not working, of course.
Kate and I both tip the cups to look like we’re taking the meds, and I quickly hide the pills under my tongue.
You know, that trick you learned in school when you didn’t want the teacher to know you were chewing gum.
It’s harder with pills because they taste terrible and are solid, and therefore harder to hide, but these guards don’t seem to have much interest in actually checking to make sure we’ve swallowed.
Given their industry, you’d think they would be more concerned with swallowing, but what do I know.
The problem with this process is that we have to get the pills back out of our mouths before they start to dissolve.
We watch the man intently as he walks along the wall, checking the other girls to make sure they’re adequately docile.
As soon as he turns the corner, we both spit the pills back into our hands and put them in the pockets of the trousers we’ve been given.
As soon as we have a moment alone, we’ll use the brick we found to crush the pills into dust.
Right now, though, I’m intent on watching the changing of the guards and trying to figure out what we’re going to do.
“So let me get this straight,” Kate suddenly says, like her mind is moving along the same path as mine. “Your friend went missing and Lucien happened to be in New York, and happened to have information on said friend.”
“Not her specifically,” I correct, my eyes on the guard that just came into the room. He’s heading for the office that’s attached to this space, and I want to see how he gets in there.
“Right,” Kate says wryly. “But still, Lucien has information. He says he thinks it’s all going down in New Orleans and that you need to come home with him.”
“Not with him. I mean, not specifically.”
“Of course, not specifically.”
She’s grinning, but I ignore it. The guard is close to the office, now.
“And then he tries to lock you in his house to protect you. Instead, you break out, do a bunch of research, and then head to your dad’s house to try to corner him into telling you something.
You end up at this ball, where you meet Colonel Sanders, and you decide it’s a good idea to get caught yourself so you can figure out… ”
“Where this all leads,” I say, finally turning my eyes to her. “We can’t find an exact ship date or where they’re sending girls or who’s running it. And we need to know that if we’re going to stop it.”
She bites her lip. “And yet you came in here without a fucking plan to get back out again. Even if you get that information. And Lucien has no idea where you are or how to save you.”
My blood freezes at hearing it laid out so plainly, but she’s not saying anything I don’t already know.
I made a mistake coming in here without a plan, and an even bigger mistake not discussing it with Lucien first. I thought I could handle it, but now that I’m here, without my weapons or any way to communicate with anyone, I’m thinking I was beyond stupid.
I didn’t even realize I expected Lucien to be my safety net until I cut him out of the picture. And now that he’s absent, I feel like the ground has disappeared from under my feet. Like the world has turned sideways on me and I don’t know how to fix it.
And I’m sure there’s some deeper meaning there, if I want to look for it.
Something that says ‘Brooks, you’ve always been able to do whatever you wanted because you knew that at the end of the day, you could run home to Lucien and he’d help you out of the jam.
” The problem is, I’m starting to think that’s the truth.
Just look at how he reacted when I asked him for men to take to New York with me.
He barely even blinked an eye. Simply made the deal for how we were going to get his guys up north.
To fight my battles.
Just like I knew he would.
It brings a surge of emotion crawling up the back of my throat, and I swallow hard.
I haven’t thought deeply about my feelings for Lucien in a very long time.
Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought deeply about them.
He’s just the guy who’s had his hand on my lower back, supporting me, since I was twelve.
Now that hand is gone and I’m not even sure it’s still available. What if he hasn’t come because something has happened to him? What if he came after me but my father’s men caught him and he’s now dead?
What if the last thing I said to him was that he needed to stay out of my way while I conducted a plan I hadn’t bothered to tell him about?
I gulp… and push the thought aside. I don’t know how I feel about Lucien, and this is not the time to sort that out. I’m sure he’s fine. I’m just stressed and overreacting.
I’ve never experienced that before, but I’ve heard it happens.
And in the meantime…
I come back into reality just in time to see the guard I’ve been watching get to the office.
He puts his palm on the pad to the side of the door—this ring is evidently a big fan of tech—and the door unlocks.
Shit. That’s going to be hard to replicate without a guard’s hand, and I don’t have time to replicate that sort of thing.
I also don’t want to kill someone and chop their hand off.
Pretty sure that would draw the attention of the other guards.
But I’ve been watching these guys long enough to know they’re sloppy, and the guy who just went into the office is one of the worst offenders.
I watch, my breath catching in my lungs, and wait a few seconds, and for possibly the first time in my life I send a prayer out to universe. Please let something go right for me, please let something go right for me.
It does. When he leaves the office a few seconds later, he doesn’t close the door all the way. It’s still on the latch, and that means it didn’t lock.
Go time.
“All that aside,” I mutter to Kate, who’s watching me, waiting for a response. “How do you feel about a little recon?”
Her face goes from judgmental to impressed to suspicious in half a second. “What do you mean?”
I nod toward the office. “Any room that has a hand scanner is bound to have interesting things in it, don’t you think?”
She turns and looks, and a grin spreads over her face. “You mean like computers with things like ship dates and possible destinations?”
“And buyers and investors and even high-level owners of the ring,” I confirm. “You interested?”
She huffs out a low, sinister laugh. “Brooks, you’ve known me a long time. Have I ever said no to a little bit of good trouble?”
“A girl after my own heart,” I murmur. “Let’s go.”
We move toward the office, keeping our motions slow and as subtle as possible, and when we get there, I motion for Kate to wait outside while I go in and see what I can find.
She nods once and then turns her back, moving in front of me to give me some cover while I slip through the door.
It’s so easy I wonder for a moment if we’ve been set up, and glance up into the corners of the room to see whether there are cameras in here.
There aren’t. Of course there aren’t. They would never expect those poor, defeated girls out there to do something like break into an office.
Of course, they also aren’t expecting people like Kate and me.
I glance around the room, wondering where to start, and see that it’s very plain. One desk. One computer. One chair.