Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
CADE
There’s no one outside the center. Why would there be? The alarm system in place is high tech, which is stupid. We have it down and out without anyone even noticing before we’re inside.
The cameras are out and being looped, and the real action is two floors down, just like we surmised on the blueprints Enzo got.
We get in the door after I let Enzo break the code.
There’s a lift, according to the schematics. And Enzo grins, as he takes in the back, then goes straight to a door.
Gino positions men at the now open cleaning supply door where the elevator lives.
“Anyone not us, not the girls, take prisoner or put them the fuck down if they resist. Capisce?” he says to one of his goons that look like extras from a mafia movie.
The car is already on the top floor, and Gino motions to two of his men as Enzo makes short work of the code.
“Are there stairs?” I ask.
“Fuck the stairs,” mutters Enzo. “We ride in style.”
The two men take the position at the door, ready to take out any nasty surprises.
“The main area that sees the most action is this floor here.” Enzo says. “But I’m thinking she’ll be on the bottom one. Because that’s the floor that had the locked camera feeds.”
“And if she’s not there?” I ask.
“My men will take the other floors.” Gino says, a note of pleasure in his voice. “They’ll secure any and all people they come across.”
Enzo turns to me and his uncle. “You can press any button now and it’ll take you to each of the four floors. But we’ll go straight to the bottom first.”
Gino pulls one of the biggest motherfucking guns I’ve seen and more men swarm in behind us.
“Don’t worry,” Gino says. “We’ll take care of any other surprises up here.”
The doors shut.
I don’t even breathe as the car drops to the lowest floor.
The two men leap out first, but I push through, my own gun drawn, Enzo hot on my heels.
I need to find Vi. I need to. I’m hot, cold, sweating. My chest is so tight I might just implode. And I fucking run, not even caring or knowing where I’m going. But I know Enzo. He’ll have the blueprints memorized.
There’s a door to my right, and I kick it open, and a girl screams as three of Gino’s men storm in. A guard has a gun raised, but he drops it immediately.
Not one of the girls is Vi.
I turn and run out and kick open door after door.
No fucking Vi.
Where’s my girl?
Then I kick open one more and come face to face with a guard who doesn’t look inclined to drop his weapon.
I know him. I—
“Don’t shoot him, please!” Macy. Vi’s friend. She was blowing him earlier.
There are four other girls in there, girls who continue not to be the one I need to find.
“Where the fuck is she?” I demand as Enzo comes up, taking the gun from the guard.
“You’re Vi’s friend?”
The girl looks at us both, and the guard says, “I didn’t sign up for any of this bullshit.”
She gives him a sharp look, but he walks off.
I kind of want to shoot him because I need to do something, but I’m pretty fucking sure she knows something.
“Where’s Violet?” I ask.
“You’re her boyfriend, aren’t you?” she asks. “She’s training—”
“That’s fucking bullshit and you know it.
Enzo, take the guard up to talk to your uncle Gino.
” My eyes don’t leave the girl. “She’s in trouble.
As in tied up in a fucking cell trouble.
With what looks like the body of another girl.
We hacked the entire system, cameras included. So, where the fuck are the cells?”
“Cells? What are you on about? This is the final training area and we’re… She didn’t come back with the swipe card, so I had to finish the training.” Her eyes practically bug out, and she starts to hyperventilate. “What…are…you…? A body?”
I grab her shoulders. “Calm the fuck down. Vi needs your help right now, not hysterics.”
The guard comes over, and I throw Enzo a disgusted look for letting him go but Enzo just shrugs.
The guard puts an arm around her and talks softly to her, and gets her calm in seconds flat, but he doesn’t let her go.
“Macy borrowed the swipe card for upstairs. We came down here for the training, I was meant to go off duty, but I got a bad feeling, so I followed her here. In here.”
“To fuck the girls?” I snarl, lip curling.
“No, asshole, to protect them. This is more going over scenarios with them, working out how to get out of trouble and not upsetting the club members and that kind of crap. I don’t know.
I’m a guard. This—” He swing a free hand in the air.
“Is new to me. But she’s right, I didn’t get the card back. Maybe she just left.”
“I saw her.” I look at her but ask him. “Do you work down in this part?”
“No.”
I nod. “Macy, you do, though, don’t you? You come down here?”
She nods against the guard.
“Okay. Now, this is very fucking important. Violet needs your help, okay? There must be some rooms you’re not allowed in down here?”
Enzo sends me a sharp look. “Are you thinking there’s some off blueprint places?”
“What the fuck do you think?” I ask him.
“It could be any of these rooms, though,” Enzo says. “A lot of this was build prohibition times, so there are areas that were closed and could have been reopened.”
I don’t have time to kick down every fucking door in this place. We get too close, and they might kill her if they hear us.
If she’s still here.
But…she’s got to be here, right? Because otherwise, Macy and her guard friend would have heard something.
It’s not much, it’s thinner than thread, and it’s all I’ve got, so I cling to it.
Suddenly, I think of something.
What if they had some insulated rooms. For human kind of storage. For rape, torture, who the fuck knows? The things they don’t want the girls who train here to know about, the stuff they don’t want the guards to know about.
If they knocked Vi out, it’d be easy to get her down here, and who knows where old stairways are.
“Macy, think. If they wanted to take someone somewhere private, maybe someone freaks out and needs alone time, where would they take them?”
She shakes her head. “Upstairs, there’s a nice room with a sofa, where someone can calm down.”
Fuck. “What about somewhere off limits. Have you…any of you…” Now I look at the guard because I find it hard to believe he doesn’t know. “Have you seen anywhere where they take shipments to. Anything they don’t want you to know about?”
He scratches his head. “Not my paygrade. Most of us here work security at other clubs owned by Mr. Allistair. I rarely come down here.”
“But…you’re not here sometimes when I am. There’s a part down here where I once was sent to see Thomas. I was only allowed in the room for a second, and he sent me out, but…there looked like a bigger area…if…if I wanted to do something on the downlow, it’d be there.”
“Show me? Please?” I ask.
She doesn’t move. And it takes me a few moments to realize she’s terrified and that sends pricks of cold lighting all over my skin.
“I-it’s a secret area, like I said. It’s off limits to everyone, including me. Except for that one time. And-and I don’t think I saw more than just the room he was sitting in.” She looks like she wants to cry, but she’s calmer now.
And I’m running pretty fucking empty on my patience. Because this is Vi. Every second in here is every second something might happen to her, or—if something has happened—I’m not there to help.
“Please? Take me there.”
She nods, and she heads off her guard with her, and it takes everything I am not to have him forced to stay behind.
The door takes three of Gino’s men to kick down, and it’s a sitting room, sparse, empty with another door beyond, and suddenly someone runs out, opening fire. I push the girl down, firing back as her guard jumps in front of her, taking a bullet.
Enzo and his uncle’s men shoot the two men dead, and we swarm in, leaving Macy and her guard behind. He looks like he’s still breathing, but I don’t care.
There’s only one person on my mind. Vi.
The room, the rows of cells beyond?
Empty.
“This way,” shouts one of Gino’s men. Stairs. We race up them, someone radioing in to Gino.
I push my way to the front.
If she’s dead, I’ll burn the place down. I’ll hunt down and kill every last motherfucker involved.
We come up, out, onto a floor? An area? I don’t know where we are. We’re in the boroughs of New York, but it feels like we’re in a hangar.
No. Not a hangar. There are crates.
And there, as we round the corner, are chained naked women.
I zero in on one. My heart wants to burst as my stomach twists.
Vi. My Vi. Naked. Chained. It should be by rights a fantasy. It’s a nightmare. There’s a bruise starting on her face and tear tracks.
Two more men come running, but Gino’s men shoot one dead and maim the other. Ten women. All naked. All beautiful, but Vi, my beautiful Violet, she’s alive.
My knees give way, and I stumble, hitting the ground, but I get up and run.
Next to her is Gianna.
All around me is shouting, but I drown them out, looking around for a key to undo the locks.
Fuck it.
I drop my pack, not caring about my computer and dig past my lockpicks for my keys and a certain small key I keep there.
It’s generic. Police and law enforcement issued. Something every kinky bastard should own.
Handcuff key. I unlock all the girls, and then I rip off my jacket and throw it around Vi. Pulling her close. Enzo appears and wraps Gianna in his. One by one, Gino’s men strip shirts and jackets and wrap them around the naked girls. And then Enzo sits as someone talks on a phone to Gino.
Again, I don’t care. I don’t care if he owns me. I hold Violet as she shivers and cries in my arms. I just whisper sweet words to her, tell her how much I love her, tell her she’s fine, tell her nonsensical things. And I’m not sure if I’m calming her or myself or both.
“Cade.”
I stop talking and look over at Enzo who has his computer open.
“Fuck, the information your little Ghost got us? Gold, fucking gold.”
“Cade, he…he… said we were being sold to the highest bidder,” she says to me. They stripped us, chained us, and left us here. He’s coming back. I know it. A-and Walsh was here, too…”
Thomas is the ‘he’ she’s talking about. But I look to Enzo again because this sure looks like a trafficking point.
Chain them, leave them, and then put them in a crate for delivery to a site to sell.
We must be a few buildings down from the fishing store, and the back opens up, I’m betting to an area trucks can be driven down here and loaded up.
I have an inkling what Enzo found. “Trafficking?”
“Man, it’s not just trafficking, this is an international ring, and we’ve just cracked it open. It’s all on the files, and your virus will infect anything else they touch from these files. Copy them and destroy the computer upstairs, and your virus hitches a ride?”
I kick my bag to him. “You can do it remotely. It’ll upload in seconds. They shouldn’t know we’re here yet.”
He nods and gets to work.
Then he makes a call. “Zayne, got something for you…”
I tune Enzo out as I tilt Vi’s face to mine. It’s the most beautiful sight in the world.
A thousand things run through my head, like did he touch you, rape you, hurt you?
But I don’t like the aggression because my Violet is delicate right now, and they all feel wrong.
She’ll tell me and the only difference is if she answers yes to any of those is what I’ll do to Allistair and every other fucker who dared lay a hand on her, and how long and hard I’ll make them suffer.
I’m usually the one who causes pain and suffering and retribution from behind the keyboard. But for Violet, I’ll step out and hand it in the real world. I’ll be Gino’s right hand man if he lets me torture any motherfucker who touched her.
And she’ll tell me.
So, I settle on what feels right. “Are you okay?”
She nods. “I knew you’d come for me.”
“Christ, nothing could stop me.” I kiss her softly, and she clings, kissing me back and opening up for me the way that she’s always done, right from the first time I ever touched her.
She’s a fucking marvel, and I’m so head over heels in love it’s not even funny.
When the soft, sweet, long kiss ends, she looks up at me. “I’m sorry for going behind your back.”
I put a finger to her lips, silencing her. “It doesn’t matter right now. The only thing I care about is you’re okay.”
She nods. “I was so scared, Cade. There was a moment where I realized how badly things just might go. And…”
I tilt her face back up to mine and brush my lips over hers. “Just promise to come to me next time. I was doing it, and no matter how urgent it feels, you can trust me to listen to you, okay? No running off on your own. We’re a team.”
“I thought you were taking too long, I thought…” She swallows.
And I nod. “Maybe I was. But only because I wanted to do it right. We had to hit hard and get manpower. But, Vi? How about this? You don’t run off, and I absolutely promise to listen and really consider what you’re saying. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Because if I lost you…” I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment. “I couldn’t bear it. I love you more than anything in this world.”
Violet smiles through her tears, and it’s like the sun coming out. “I love you, too. More than I ever thought possible. Who knew having a stranger fulfill my dirty fantasy would lead me to finding my soulmate?”
“I’m your soulmate?” My heart soars.
“Yeah.”
“Good, because you’re mine, Vi.”
After that, I just hold her.
When Zayne arrives to help get the other girls to a safehouse he has, the still living guard cuffed is taken, and Zayne comes up to us.
He glances at me and Violet and then at Enzo. “This Ivan. Is he still causing problems?”
“Ivan’s been taken care of,” Enzo says.
Zayne nods and then takes a step closer. “Enquiring minds…mine, wants to know if the cast of a mafia movie in here are for show, or…was that really your uncle Gino I saw skulking around outside, keeping to the shadows?”
Enzo shrugs.
Then he zeroes in on me. “Please tell me you’re not mixed up with Gino?”
Vi’s hands tighten on me.
“I had no choice,” I mutter. “It was the only way I could rescue Vi.”
Zayne sighs. “Fine. I’ll take care of it. Go home. The lot of you.” He raises his voice so everyone can hear. “You can’t be here when the authorities arrive.”
Then he lowers his voice again. “I’ll take care of everything.”