12. Miles
Twelve
Miles
The line goes dead, and I place my phone face down on the desk and lean back in my chair. I watch her slowly falling asleep, she looks so beautiful, and so peaceful.
That's the word for her right now, peaceful. The tension she carries in her jaw, the slight set of her shoulders even when she thinks she's relaxed. It's gone. All of it, and I did that for her.
I need a cold shower, a very cold shower.
I’ve been looking into her brother a little more.
Well, her the whole family actually. Her parents are lowlifes who need to be shot.
What fuckers leaves their daughter with a brother like him?
Assholes, that’s who. From the medical reports I’ve found, Sadie was in hospital a lot when she was younger.
The reports said little and it said she had fallen down the stairs, or at the park and it appeared she hurt herself a lot.
But even I know that’s a load of shit. From the scans, and where the bruises are, there is only one answer. They abused her.
Then they walked out on her and her brother, and instead of being the big brother to his little sister, who was six years younger than him. She had to grow up way before she should have had to. She’s never had anyone look after her, never had someone to cook her a dinner, or make her feel loved.
I’m here now. I’m going to look after her.
Walking into the bathroom, I turn the water on cold and without thinking I stand under it with both hands flat against the tiles, my eyes close and I breathe through it. I can’t even remember the last time I was this hard over a girl.
I’ve never had problems around women, fuck I fucked my high school teacher on the last day of school. I’ve had threesomes, I’ve had girls at college fight over me. I know I can get any woman in my bed by only saying a few words to them.
Yet Sadie has put some type of fucked up spell on me, and I can’t talk to her for whatever reason.
I don't know how to talk to her.
I, who can walk into any room and read every person in it in thirty seconds, who can construct a conversation like architecture, have sat across from Sadie twice now and said a combined total of maybe forty words. Half of them were ‘Watch where you're going.’
The cold water runs down my back, and my mind goes to the coffee shop this morning. I could see her glancing over at me, trying very hard to read me. That’s one thing about me; I’m not the easy to read one.
I turn off the shower and hear the laptop beep, and the sound cuts through the quiet again.
I'm across the room, towel still in my hand, and water still on my skin. The screen has already resolved by the time I sit down. The pattern-recognition algorithm I've had running against the database has flagged something, and the flag is red, which means it isn't just a maybe.
A report filed fourteen days ago in Seattle.
Nadia Herrera, twenty-three, graduate student, international relations.
She was last seen leaving her campus library at nine in the evening.
Her roommate filed the report after forty-eight hours, the standard processing timeline explains why it didn't hit my search parameters until tonight, the system takes time to ingest new reports and run them against the existing flags.
Seattle.
New city.
New girl.
I look through the file, pulling all the information I can. Trying to find a connection. What am I missing? I’m missing something, there has to be a link somewhere.
I cross-reference against the others. The age sits within the window, nineteen to twenty-six. She’s from an academic environment. But why these girls?
I load security footage from around campus. There has to be something, one mistake, that's all I need.
The footage loads.
Nine forty-seven. There she is: dark hair, backpack on one shoulder, moving through the ground floor toward the east exit. Alone.
I check the camera coverage.
East exit. Nothing. No camera, no coverage, just a blind spot where a lens used to be before a security upgrade pulled it eleven months ago.
Eleven months.
Eight months later, Nadia Herrera is taken.
It’s the same window, and the same pattern every single time.
I add everything to the system I have, it will find anything, even the smallest little thing that makes a connection, my system will pick it up.
My laptop beeps again. This better not be another girl going missing, because this fucking case is draining me out, because I have no fucking answers to anything.
Clicking the file, my eyebrows narrow. It's a video.
It’s forty-three seconds long. There’s a dark room, it’s poor quality, and the way this group works, they’ve done it deliberately so no one can see where they are.
My fingers are moving fast over the keys, wanting it to break down the video second by second, and clean up the audio so I can hear something, fucking anything.
My fingers freeze mid-air, and a girl appears in the center.
She’s young, has dark hair. The image is too degraded to confirm who she is, but I have a feeling it’s one of the girls in my files.
I watch it twice, then a third time with the sound pulled up, stripped back, and cleared as much as the software will allow.
There’s a voice with an Eastern European accent giving a number, it’s not a phone number, it could be a map location. I quickly write them down and make a note to try and work it out what they are.
Then there’s another voice, American this time, slightly higher.
Then the first voice again.
I sit back in my chair, replaying the video over and over again, until I can make out the words better. I clean the audio as much as I can, but it’s still not clean enough to hear it. Then one word hits me.
Sold.
The girls aren’t missing; they’re being fucking sold.
I grab my phone and type my message to Cain.
Miles.
I need to show you something.
I’m on the way.
I look at the secondary monitor where Sadie's feed still runs, she’s quiet and still, her breathing the only movement in the frame. Turning my computers to sleep mode, I grab my laptop where I’ve sent the video, and leave.
Yes, it’s late, but Cain needs to see this.
***
I get to the club, send Cain a message telling him I’m here and to let me up. Cain opens the door before I knock.
He closes the door behind me and moves to the table and sits down. “And this couldn’t wait until the morning?” he asks as he watches me set up my laptop.
“No.” The video loads.
Cain brings the laptop closer to him and watches it. His face does nothing. That's normal though, Cain's face rarely does anything.
He watches it twice, then looks up.
"Where did you find this?"
"Embedded in a dark web forum thread. Encrypted, three layers, the outer two were standard but the third was custom-built." I pull up the metadata window. "Timestamp puts it fourteen months ago. Two weeks after Amber Reyes disappeared from Phoenix."
"You confirmed the identity?" Cain asks, watching the video again.
"Not yet. The image quality is degraded, but the build, the approximate age, the timeline…" I pause. "It fits."
"The bidding?" he asks.
"Two voices minimum on the audio. Possibly three. The primary voice is accented, Eastern European, I've narrowed it to Romanian or Bulgarian, but I need a cleaner sample to confirm. The secondary is American. Midwest, probably, based on the vowels."
"How many bids?" Cain asks.
"Seven. I haven’t traced the final number yet, the currency was coded. I need another day, maybe two with the audio enhancement before I can give you a reliable figure."
"And the Seattle girl." He pushes the laptop away and rubs his eyes.
"Nadia Herrera. Twenty-three. Filed fourteen days ago. There’s a camera gap it’s the same profile as Coleman in Colorado and Okafor in Austin.
" I close the metadata window. "There are three with direct library connections.
The network is running a preference pattern I hadn't identified until tonight. "
"Libraries?"
"Academic environments. Graduate students, mostly.
The age range skews older than I initially modelled, the median is twenty-two, not nineteen.
" I pull up the updated map. "Someone is selecting women for a specific profile: educated, independent.
Someone who will be filed as a missing person from friends, but not immediately escalated. "
Cain looks at the map for a long time. "You said you needed another day on the audio," he says.
"At least, maybe more."
"Then go do that." He closes the laptop and slides it back across the table toward me. Then he stands. "Come back when you have the figure and the voice confirmation."
"Cain." I pick up the laptop. "This isn't a standard kind of trafficking operation.
The selection is too specific, the execution too clean.
Whoever is running this has resources, patience and they've been doing it long enough to have a system.
" I pause. "This is organized at a level that doesn't get built overnight. "
He looks at me.
"I know," he says. There’s a lot more about this case that he knows but clearly doesn’t want to tell me.
"How long have you known?" I ask.
"Go work the audio," he says, then walks back to his bedroom, and I stand there for a moment grabbing all my things and get in the elevator.
I walk back to the car thinking about what Cain knows. Not tonight-knew, but before-knew, and the weight of those two words, I know.
Which means someone came to him. Someone with enough information to bring this to a Crawford, enough trust or enough leverage to put it in Cain's hands and say, fix this, find them, do whatever it takes.
Someone came to Cain.
Who?
I get in the car and think about whether I should go straight home or check on Sadie.
***
I stand across the street, under the shadow of an old oak tree, my hands in my pockets, my eyes fixed on her window. I sat in my car for so long fighting with myself whether or not to come see her tonight. I started the car and now I’m here.
This has become an obsession. I know that. Yet, here I am, waiting to smell her again. That sweet strawberry scent which lives around me now.
The images of her in bed after what we did, after what I helped her do, and how she looked sexy when she had her orgasm, flip through my mind on repeat. It only reinforced how much I wanted to be buried deep inside her.
My beautiful, exhausted girl. The memory of her moans through the phone still hums under my skin.
The cloned swipe card feels warm in my hand as I cross the quiet quad.
The building’s side entrance opens, the lock beeping its familiar green approval.
I move through the silent hallway. For being first-year students, I would have thought at least some of these dorm rooms would be awake even at two in the morning.
But no, they’re all asleep. They all need to have some fun.
Inside her dorm, the air is warm and sweet with the scent of her strawberry lotion and the faint trace of sex still lingering, and I smile.
I set the fresh violets on the kitchen counter first, deep purple and perfect.
Beside them I place the breakfast, an oat milk latte from Grounds, still warm in its insulated sleeve, and a warm croissant wrapped in paper from the bakery she passes every morning.
She’ll find it waiting when she wakes up, another quiet reminder that I’m thinking of her.
I move to her bedroom; her door is slightly open.
She’s lying curled on her side, facing me this time.
The thin tank top has ridden up, exposing a strip of soft skin at her waist. Her hair spills across the pillow, her lips slightly parted.
She looks so peaceful. So completely mine in this stolen moment.
I step closer and pull a small silver bracelet from my pocket, it’s delicate, with a tiny violet charm. I leave it on her nightstand, right next to her phone, where she’ll see it first thing. A gift. Something she can wear and feel me against her skin all day.
Why does the thought of me being with her all the time make me hard?
Before I go, I can’t resist, I sit carefully on the edge of the bed.
She doesn’t stir. My gaze drops to her right hand, the one she used earlier while I listened to every gasp and whimper.
I lift it gently, bringing her fingers to my face.
They still carry the faint, musky sweetness of her.
I inhale deeply, my eyes closing for a second as the scent fills my lungs.
“Fuck, Sadie,” I whisper against her skin. “You smell incredible. Sweet and desperate and all mine.”
I press my lips to her fingertips, tasting the ghost of her, then lean down and brush a slow, reverent kiss to her forehead. Her skin is warm, she makes a tiny, unconscious sound and shifts closer to me. My chest tightens with something fierce and possessive.
“Sleep well, baby,” I murmur against her temple. “I’ll always take care of you.”
I stand slowly, adjust the blanket over her shoulder, and back out of the room without a sound. The violets and breakfast wait on the counter like quiet promises. I pull the front door shut behind me, the latch clicking into place, and disappear down the empty hallway.
She’ll wake up surrounded by me, and she has no idea how deep this already goes.