Swerve Chapter 11 #3
“Yesterday, I received upsetting news. Her primary undercover identity was compromised. Electra specializes in a specific type of case. It’s one she’s been involved in and has been making significant inroads in bringing it to an end over the past five years.
In that time, she’s made very dangerous enemies.
Those who would give anything to know who she is and to eliminate her once and for all.
By exposing her, if true, which we saw was, her life is in danger.
She needs to be hidden somewhere safe until this can be resolved and a new identity established for her.
Unfortunately, it means she can never work in the field again on that type of case. It would be too dangerous.
“I met her for lunch and told her to resign immediately. She wanted to give you at least two weeks’ notice.
She hated the idea of leaving you without help.
Despite my protests, she returned to the office to submit her resignation.
Only you,” he glanced over at me and scowled, “weren’t there.
I told her to do it today. Before she could, you told her you knew about me and thought she was a spy.
I knew it was only a matter of time before you discovered she was an agent too, and that her enemy found her.
With her fired, she went home, packed, and was waiting for me to come to pick her up. You know what happened after that.”
As he concluded, I let his explanation swirl around in my head. I had questions, but I couldn’t voice them. My brothers didn’t seem to have that problem.
“Who gave you the tip?” Scorpion asked.
“It was anonymous, which isn’t unusual,” Boone replied.
“Let us guess. The money we were allegedly laundering was from drugs and guns.” Butcher snorted and rolled his eyes.
“You may be surprised to hear it, but no, it wasn’t those,” the agent said.
“If not those, then what? Prostitution?” Scorpion asked.
I watched Electra’s face. She was lying there, listening. I saw her tense a few times during his explanation. It was clear to me that whatever it was, it affected her deeply.
“No, it was something far different but in many ways, far worse,” Rhodes Boone confessed.
“What?” I asked impatiently.
“It doesn’t matter. Your club isn’t involved. Electra is positive about that. What is important is getting her out of here and to safety as fast as possible.”
“You can’t leave. You admitted that your safe house was likely compromised. Someone leaked her identity, and I’ll bet money it was someone in the FBI. Everything you try could be exposed,” I argued.
“That may be, but I can disappear with her. We’ll go underground. I can find us a safe place,” he declared gruffly.
“What’s your connection to her? It’s more than her supervisor. She denied that you’re her lover. I don’t believe it,” I added. Electra scowled at me.
“And we’re not letting anyone leave until we know what we were accused of selling that required us to launder money and to be targeted by the FBI,” Diablo growled.
“The anonymous tipster gave us information that your club has been connected to cases involving people, mainly women and young girls, who’ve been trafficked.
In addition, you were alleged to have been involved not long ago in an organ trafficking ring along with another club.
However, the other club wasn’t named.” Boone confessed.
This information got our attention. The trafficking was true, only we weren’t the culprits, and the same was true of the organ trafficking.
Our friends in Hunters Creek were the ones who’d been the main ones brushing up against that ugly business.
Mutterings and curses were coming from all four of us.
Hearing it and seeing our faces, Boone tried to get closer to Electra. I moved to put myself between them.
“We don’t fucking sell people, and we sure as hell don’t harvest organs and sell them!
We’ve known too many who have been affected by the first one.
Close friends and their old ladies, to name a few.
That’s a God-awful thing that destroys so many lives.
Do you know how many people were taken and never recovered?
” Diablo snarled. His fists were clenched.
“We would never do something that immoral and disgusting,” Butcher growled.
“I’d turn in my fucking cut and call the cops myself if anyone in this club even thought about it. And if anyone we know were to do it, we’d drop a dime on them in a heartbeat,” Scorpion added.
“Do you believe we’d do something like that, Electra?” I asked her.
“No, Swerve, I don’t. When I first met all of you, I didn’t know, and I had to be sure, but I can’t see any of you doing that,” she softly confessed.
My insides relaxed a little hearing this.
“What’s her specialty? Why make her spy on us?” Scorpion asked.
Agent Boone looked at Electra. “Ellie, do you want me to continue, or would you like to tell them?”
“I’ll do it. Rho. You’ve done enough talking.” She tried to push herself up higher on the gurney. She forgot her arm, and the pushing caused her to cry out in pain and clutch it with her good arm.
“Lie still,” I ordered as I pushed my chair to the side of her. I had more than enough upper body strength that when I slid an arm under her back and the other under her upper thighs, I easily lifted and scooted her higher.
“Thank you,” she whispered to me, squeezing my one arm. I hated to lose contact with her, so I slid them out and kept one hand on her arm.
“I graduated from Quantico five years ago. When I did, I insisted on investigating and, when necessary, going undercover to pursue a specific type of offender. I’ve done work relating to human trafficking, but that isn’t my specialty.
Mine is to apprehend and take down the bastards who traffic in human organs.
Those who sell or sometimes offer false hope, other times take advantage of people, and in some cases, the worst ones of the bunch—those who harvest organs from unwilling victims. They don’t care if what they remove kills the donor.
I want all of those fuckers to rot then burn in the fires of hell,” she hissed.
Absolute loathing was in her eyes. She truly detested those people the way we did human traffickers, rapists, pedophiles, and abusers.
“Why them?” I asked.
She locked her eyes onto mine. “To understand why them, I have to go back to before Quantico, and tell you about my best friend since I was a child. Selah and I met in kindergarten and became inseparable. Along with her, I obtained her family. Her amazing, loving, protective parents, and her much older, though loving brother, Rhodes.” She smiled over at Boone.
“Selah and I did everything together. While my home life was less than ideal, hers wasn’t.
And her dad was a big, strong man who was the epitome of protection.
He was an FBI agent. It was kind of a tradition in her family, though it was a father-to-son tradition, to become an agent.
However, Selah and I wanted to grow up and help people in the way her dad and, later, Rho did.
Luckily, they weren’t chauvinistic assholes and supported our dreams. That support got us through high school and then college.
When we graduated, we discovered that we were both accepted into the FBI Academy at Quantico. We were so damn thrilled.
“Before beginning our training, since we’d been studying and working for so long at achieving it, really, since the start of high school, we were urged to take a long vacation. Eventually, we gave in and went. We were due to return from a three-week trip and go to Quantico a few weeks later.”
Electra closed her eyes. I thought she’d stopped, but she continued, only with them closed.
“Selah and I were in Germany on our last leg of our vacation. I was tired, and one night, I told her I wasn’t feeling up to going out.
I felt like I was coming down with something.
She offered to get me medicine around the corner from where we were staying, but I told her not to.
We were always careful and never went anywhere alone.
“Some time after I fell asleep, Selah went to get the medication. The hotel didn’t have what she needed, so she went around the block to the pharmacy there.
When I woke up in the morning, she wasn’t in our room or the hotel.
I was frantic to find her, and no one seemed to know where she was.
I called Rhodes and their dad to tell them she was missing.
They told me they were coming and to sit tight.
They would contact the police and the International FBI Legal Attaché Office, or Legat, in Berlin.
Except by the time they got there and we found her, it was too late. ”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. Boone looked like he was about to cry, too.
“Do you need a break?” Diablo asked her.
She shook her head. “No, I’m almost done.
We found her forty-eight hours after she was reported missing.
She was found by a tourist in a dumpster in an alley.
She was taken to the hospital, but there was nothing they could do.
She’d turned septic, and all her organs were shutting down.
The cause was the kidney that someone illegally harvested from her in a back-alley chop shop.
She’d lost too much blood, and they panicked, is our guess, and they dumped her.
She died twelve hours later. She never regained consciousness.
We know she went to get me medicine based on the video at the pharmacy.
“We returned to the States, buried Selah, and I carried through with our dream. I refused to wait or back out. I had a promise to keep that I made as I sat next to her deathbed. I would hunt and destroy every motherfucker who was involved in that horrible business. When I graduated, I was assigned to a team that specialized in cases like hers. That’s what I’ve predominantly done since.
That’s why I was asked to take your case.
It being here in Florida and close to Gainesville placed me under Rhodes’ supervision. ”
Her eyes flew open. The fire in them took my breath away.
“And if you expect me to apologize for doing my job and going undercover in your business to ensure that wasn’t happening, then you’ll wait until the end of time.
I will never say I’m sorry for making sure your club wasn’t selling people or their organs,” she snarled.
I didn’t know what to say to comfort her.
I doubted that any words could. And I had to fight not to take her in my arms and give her solace—whether that was to hold her, kiss her, or something more.
My brothers and I exchanged looks. We knew what we had to do, but first, we’d have to talk to the rest of the club and get their approval.
We found ourselves in an ugly mess. But no matter what, I vowed to ensure Electra wasn’t harmed.