Chapter 15
Brooks
It’s raining the next morning when I wake up, and that matches my mood so well that for a moment, I wonder if Heaven itself can see right into my black heart.
I mean, of course Heaven can see into my heart.
In theory.
If you believe in that kind of shit.
As I walk into the warehouse where my father houses many of his victims, though, I’m not sure I do.
Because what sort of fucking god would allow things like this to happen?
We walk out onto the catwalk and I look over the holding rooms below, my eyes jumping from one to the next and cataloging the girls inside.
There are just as many now as there were before, which means no one has shipped out yet–or, in theory, been sent to the auctions at the dance halls–but that doesn’t make me feel any sunnier.
Because there are hundreds of girls down there, and I don’t know where they came from or how they got here.
I just know that they’ve found themselves in a situation no girl should be in, and the worst of humanity are now holding their strings, deciding where they’re going to go and what’s going to happen to them.
It’s wrong on so many levels, and I can feel the boundaries I usually maintain melting away.
I’ve spent so much of my life working to hold the world at a distance, finding ways to skate through situations without being affected by them, but these girls are taking my defenses down brick by bloody brick until I feel every sling and arrow as a hit directly to my heart.
When Lucien told me he thought there was a sex trafficking ring in New Orleans, I heard it as a fact.
Another enemy to take down. Another operation to destroy, from the inside if I could.
I heard numbers and names and locations, and I didn’t connect them with real people.
When I was stuck inside the ring myself, it got a little bit more real.
I wanted to save the girls I could see in there with me.
I wanted to kill the men who were abusing them and get them all home to their families again.
But walking above them now, finding myself in a position to actually make decisions that will affect their futures, and facing a father who expects me to treat them as nothing more than cattle, ripe for slaughter...
I don’t know when it happened, but it’s destroyed my ability to remain disconnected.
A lifetime spent learning how to not care, and one day of watching over these girls and seeing other people decide on their fate and I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about how to stay cold and uncaring.
I’m exposed, now. A beating, bleeding heart who can’t stand to even think about the girls below me being hurt.
And I’ve never felt more vulnerable.
I fucking hate it.
So I do the thing I’ve been doing for my entire life. I draw myself up, tip my chin up, and start to build my armor again, sliver by sliver. Once I have something that feels like it might hold up for more than a day, I turn my mind to the next most important thing: a plan.
Because I might be a walking, talking set of emotions right now, and I might be dying inside at the thought of any of these girls being shipped out to unknown shores, but that doesn’t change the fact that I might be the one and only hope they have.
And once I adopt people, I don’t let them down.
I see my father watching me, and force myself to keep walking, a mask over my face and my eyes devoid of emotion. If I’m lucky, he thinks I’m just perusing the merchandise. Thinking about where they’re going and how we can make the process smoother and more efficient.
Because if he realizes what I’m actually thinking, I’ll find myself down there with them.
And no one will be able to save us, because no one else has a way in.
I get across the catwalk and head downstairs, looking for anything that looks like it might be an office.
I’m worried about the girls in this warehouse, but I still have other things I need to figure out, like where the fuck Aislyn Brennan is and what my father has planned for her.
She may never have passed through this particular warehouse, but surely if I can find an office with records for the entire ring, those records will include all the girls who’ve passed through.
I pound down the stairs, pausing only when Samantha comes across my path and shoots me a look that says she doesn’t believe I should be anywhere near this warehouse. I draw myself up to my full height and stare her down, honestly hoping she’ll say something.
Because I’m dying to shout at someone, and that bitch has been getting on my nerves since fucking met her.
She narrows her eyes at me and doesn’t say anything, though–more’s the pity–and passes me with her face turned to the ground.
“Coward,” I mutter.
Then I keep moving. I need a shipping office or something like it, and then at least fifteen minutes to go through every record I can find.
***
These people really need to take a class on computer security.
I mean they probably don’t expect anyone to be able to break into their offices and get to their computers in person, and that’s valid. But once I’m sitting in front of a computer, I find exactly no safeguards to keep me from getting into every single record they have.
And Christ, the records.
Hundreds of girls have come through here. Thousands, maybe. And they’ve kept records of every single one. Their names, their families, where they were stolen from, and then where they went. The names of the clients who bought them.
The amount they paid.
The moment I start looking, I want to bleach my eyes.
And my brain. I’ve seen a lot of bad things, but I don’t want any of this information in my head.
I know it’ll haunt me until the day I die, unless I can find a way to save the girls.
I manage to gloss over it at first, focused on looking for specific names, but when I continually fail to find those names, it starts to get to me.
There’s no mention of Aislyn in here.
And nothing about Corinne Boudreaux.
That has me confused, because I’m positive that I saw her in the basement last night.
I wanted to go back and search, but once I was out of the basement I didn’t think I could risk going back.
The last thing I needed was for my father or any of his men to find me down there–and worse, find me there when the girls were missing.
But now I was starting to question my sanity. I’ve searched every way I can think of for her name in the database, and there’s nothing in here. Has she been kidnapped, or was she there by accident? Did I hallucinate the whole thing?
No, my brain tells me.
Because you don’t hallucinate a door locking and not letting you back in.
And the person who locked the door was my brother, which brings up a whole other set of questions.
What the fuck was Corinne doing in that basement, and why was Beau with her?
I haven’t seen my brother since the night of that first party–not that I would have, as I wasn’t at my dad’s house until yesterday–but he’s been pretty obviously MIA since my dad re-kidnapped me.
Until last night. When I saw him in a basement that had been holding girls caught in the smuggling ring.
Where the fuck did he go after he locked me out?
Is he still alive?
Oh God, is he part of all of this?
The thought makes me so sick that I almost throw up.
I haven’t spoken to my brother in years but when I was a kid, he was one of the only solid people in my life.
When I was scared, I would run to his bedroom and climb into bed with him, and he’d hold me until I was feeling better.
Once I got older, he protected me in other ways, sending me proud smiles whenever we got out of a scrape together.
Granted, he’d never been able to protect me from my father, but I’d never been certain he even knew that my father was hitting me.
If he’d known, he would have gone into battle for me. I never doubted that.
But my father would have killed him, and I would never have been able to live with that.
The idea that he’s involved in my father’s smuggling ring now...
No. He knew of it, for certain. He said as much at that party where I saw him. But there’s no way he’s involved I won’t believe it. I can’t.
At that moment the door to the office swings open and jump to my feet. A man stands in the doorway.
A huge man.
“What are you doing in here?” he asks, in Russian-flavored English.
Russian.
Another Russian.
I remember the one from the poker table last night, and immediately feel the mantle of Brooks Peterson fall back over my face.
Because he might be Russian, but I’m Brooks Landry, heir apparent. And it’s none of his fucking business what I’m doing in here.
“I’m doing research,” I say coldly. “On my business. What the fuck are you doing in here?”
Instead of answering, he stares at me like he’s trying to decide whether I’m worth killing or not.
I stare back and pull my jacket to the side, revealing the gun in its holster.
If this man thinks he can intimidate me with just a stare, he’s got another thing coming.
I might not like being my father’s daughter, but it does give me some standing in this room, and I’m going to use that for every piece of power it’s worth.
“Do you have something to say?” I ask coldly.
He pauses for one more moment, and I watch the emotions chase each other across his face. Shock at a woman speaking to him like that, then anger. Disgust. Disapproval.
His eyes snap to my gun and back up, and I see it the moment he realizes he can’t do anything about the way I’ve just spoken to him.
He turns and leaves without another word, and I move to slam the door behind him.
This time, I lock it.
And then I get to the computer and start researching again, because I don’t want to still be here if he sends someone else.
I’m already in deeper than I want to be, and I don’t trust those fucking Russians.
I don’t know them and I don’t like them, and I know from experience that they won’t follow the rules everyone else follows.
Hell, I don’t even know what their position is here. Are they my father’s partners, or his bosses? Because if they’re his bosses, it means I don’t have the protection I think I have. Not even my father will be able to protect me if they come for me.
I don’t have any real allies, here.
Except Lucien, and he’s out there somewhere, doing fuck knows what. I don’t know if he knows what’s going on inside the ring, or if he even knows where I am. I have no way of contacting him, and even if I did–
Wait. I could contact him, I realize, though not directly. I could call Camille and have her find him, though. Get him on the phone. Give him my number.
And what then? If he knows what’s going on–what I’ve seen–I know exactly what he’ll do. He’ll get angry, decide he needs to throw his weight around, go all Boudreaux Big Man In The City and come charging in.
And he’ll get himself killed.
No. I refuse to put him in danger just because I’m a little bit scared. I won’t do it.
But I don’t like that there are Russians involved in this situation. Italians, I can handle. Creoles, I can handle. French? No problem.
But Russians are brutes who don’t know how to follow the rules, and the fact that they’re in my city–and dealing with my father–is a big, big problem.
Even worse if they somehow connect me to the girls who went missing from the basement. No one has said anything to me about that yet, but I assume it’s only a matter of time.
And I have yet to come up with a plausible cover for when they do.