Chapter 6 Wraith #2
We descend on the house like a swarm of locusts.
Whisper kicks the front door open and we pour in, finding a group of about six men in the living room.
In the middle of the room on the coffee table is a naked woman, quietly sobbing and squeezing her eyes closed.
A man is between her legs, but he scrambles back when we startle them.
“Motherfucker.” I sneer, stomping over and slamming my fist into his face.
Men shout and scramble while I focus on the woman. “Do you have clothes?”
She shakes her head, still trembling. “I don’t know where they are.” She has a thick accent that I recognize as Ukrainian.
I pull off my coat and wrap it around her naked body while my brothers deliver punishment with their fists. “I’m gonna take you outside. You’ll be safe there, then we’ll take you to the hospital.”
She shakes her head again, this time urgently. “I cannot go there. No, erm, papers. I am here for the…” Her brow creases. “To be the wife.”
“Who? One of these guys?”
She nods, her eyes filling with tears again. She’s young, and fuck, I hope she’s at least legal. Her light brown hair is tangled and matted, his skin pale, blue eyes sunken. She doesn’t look as if she’s eaten or bathed in some time.
“How did you get here?”
She looks around, her eyes stopping on a man who is currently getting his face bashed in by Shadow. This was supposed to be a quick in and out, but my brothers and I have similar triggers. Walking in on a sexual assault definitely brought the rage to the surface.
“I was to marry that man.” She holds the coat tighter around herself. “But he did not mean it. He locked me in room and his friends—” Her voice cracks and fresh rage spreads through me.
Unfortunately, this is a common scheme. These women sign up to become wives to American men only to be trafficked once they get here.
“You have no place to stay?”
She shakes her head. “But please, I cannot go back to Ukraine. I have no family. I have nothing there.”
The Angel Shelter. We can take her there.
“Okay. I need you to sit outside on the steps, but don’t go anywhere. We’ll take you somewhere safe and they won’t send you back to Ukraine.”
She nods as more tears stream down her face.
I help her walk outside and sit down, then turn around to join in the fun.
Shadow is sitting on a guy who is clearly close to death, pummeling his face to a bloody pulp.
Billie, likely. Since everyone in this room is taken care of, I slip up the stairs to check the others.
Peeking in every room, I find no one until I get to the end of the hall, where there’s a closed door.
I kick it open, gun aimed and ready to fire, but what I find makes my stomach turn in disgust. On the bed is a guy with a needle in his arm, but he’s dead, and judging by the stench, he has been for at least a couple of days.
The odor in the room gets stronger as I turn to my left and find the bathroom. Inside, there’s a dead girl in the bathtub, bloodied and beaten. She’s been dead so long her features are unrecognizable. What kind of sick fucks were these dudes?
I’m about to leave the room when I hear rustling near the closet. Carefully, I march over and swing the door open. On the floor of the empty closet is a man. Our eyes meet and I remember those eyes. He’s the one who shot Specter. I’m fucking positive.
He’s naked and trembling, his blond hair standing up on end. “What are you doing in here?”
The man doesn’t say a word but attempts to scoot back from me in the confined space.
“I asked you a fucking question.”
He rattles off words in a language I don’t understand, and judging by his thick accent, I have to wonder if he speaks English. One way to find out.
I press the nozzle of my gun to his forehead. “Answer me,” I growl.
His eyes go wide as he mumbles more foreign words, but when I press the gun harder to his forehead, he makes a terrified noise.
“We are… erm… p-p-paid to…” His voice shakes as he attempts to speak in broken English.
“You were paid to take us out?”
He shakes his head, coughing to clear his throat. “Eng-lish hard.”
“Well you better fucking try.”
The man nods, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Not paid for you. Paid to get girls.”
“Girls? You bring girls from…?”
“Countries.”
“You bring foreign women to the United States for sex?”
He nods, eyes still wide. “We know…” He pauses, his brow creased in concentration. “My country.”
“You get women from your country to come here? You promise them husbands and a good life, yes?”
He nods, pulling his knees to his chest.
“What country?”
“Ukraine. Sometimes Russia.”
I knew it. “Who do you work for?”
His brow crinkles again as he concentrates. “Just the boss. I no…” He closes his eyes. “Name, no. Just Boss.”
“Who are these dead bodies?”
He looks surprised, like he somehow isn’t aware he’s in a room with two dead people. “Do not know. Not mine.”
“Well, I hate to be the one to break up the party.” I laugh, grabbing his arm and pulling him to his feet. He’s a skinny guy, and without a gun in his hand, he’s not so scary. “Just kidding. I’m delighted to break it up. Come along. Specter can decide your fate.”
He tries to resist me by digging his heels into the carpeted floor, but he’s no match for my strength. I maneuver him easily down the hall and the stairs to find the guys stacking bodies in the middle of the floor.
“Specter.”
He looks up at me, his face splattered with blood.
“This is the one who shot you. I remember his eyes.”
Specter’s eyes burn with rage. “Oh yeah? Where’d you find him?”
“Hiding in the closet like the fucking coward he is.”
“Where Olena?” the man asks, looking around frantically.
“Don’t fucking worry about it,” I say, smacking him in the head with the butt of my gun. “I brought him down for you. You can do the honors.”
The man’s eyes shift to the piled bodies of his gang.
At least one or two of them aren’t dead yet, based on the soft, pained grunts I hear.
That’s when I notice Carnage isn’t here.
Ah. I know what’s happening. We’re burning this fucking house to the ground.
Maybe it’ll take the whole block with it before it’s reported and we can wipe out one more eyesore in this city.
Specter studies the man, then his intense gaze shifts to me. “Did you get everything you need from this piece of shit?”
“Ja, I did. I’ll fill you all in once we’re done.”
Specter nods, raising his gun and closing the space between him and the asshole. He pushes the gun into the man’s mouth, and the dude whimpers and pisses himself, barely avoiding Specter’s boots. Specter snarls, leaning in menacingly close.
“You caused a lot of trouble. You scared the love of my life, and for that, you can rot in hell.”
The man mumbles around the nuzzle of the gun, but he only has a second before Specter pulls the trigger, splattering the man’s brains across the floor. The man collapses and Specter lets him fall.
I drag him over and add him to the pile of bodies just as Carnage comes through the front door holding a can of gasoline. “Got the girl settled in the car.”
Shadow nods. “Finish this.”
Carnage pours the gas over the bodies, then Whisper grins as he lights a match and tosses it, lighting up the pile of trash we took out tonight. We all watch for a few minutes, the sound of a few weak, pained moans filling the space around us.
“Sex trafficking ring,” I say. “He said they weren’t hired to take us out. They did that on their own when we intervened. They get the girls from Ukraine and Russia. There’s a dead girl in the bathroom upstairs and a dead man on the bed. They’ve been dead for a few days at least.”
“Jesus,” Phantom mutters. “They just hang out here with dead bodies?”
“And rape women.”
Whisper grunts in disgust. “We should go before the fire spreads.”
We walk out together. Specter claps my shoulder. “Thanks, man.”
I know why he’s thanking me. That was personal for him. “I got you.”
By the time we drop Olena at the Angel Shelter and pull into the driveway at Crestvale House, the adrenaline is wearing off and my eyes are getting tired. I can get a few more hours of sleep before I have to function again. There’s no hockey game in town tonight either, so I can just chill.
Some of the guys want a late-night snack—or early breakfast, depending on how you see it—but I excuse myself for a shower. I want the stench of that house off of me. I swear I can still smell those bodies. There’s no other scent like death.
In my room, I peel out of my clothes in the bathroom and start the shower.
My thoughts immediately return to the sexy hockey player whose cock I had in my mouth just a few hours ago.
God, he tasted good. Smelled good too. I hope to fuck he decides he wants more and calls me.
If not, maybe I can at least get another taste while I stalk my prey at his games.
My cock plumps slightly, but I’m too fucking tired to jerk it. I let the water massage some of the tension away, but it’s a quick shower, and just a few minutes later, I’m falling back into bed and drifting to sleep, visions of Bouche’s cock playing on repeat until it all falls away.