Chapter 4
Charlotte
F or the record, I didn’t want a bodyguard.
A bodyguard would only get in the way of me finishing this story and now, get justice for Ruth.
I needed to move quietly, meet sources alone, and convince frightened people to trust me to give me facts and truths.
That was hard enough to accomplish before Ruth’s murder.
It would be impossible with some hulking ex-military type looming over my shoulder.
Unfortunately, my colleague Angelica had opinions about my welfare. Loud ones.
Angelica was a photojournalist to my investigative reporting—pictures versus words—which was probably the only reason we’d become friends in the first place.
We were two women in a cutthroat industry who couldn’t afford friendship, even with other women in our field, not when we were constantly competing for the same assignments and going up against men who called us patronizing things like plucky and spunky and made antiquated Lois Lane jokes they thought were hilarious.
I wasn’t really inclined toward friends anyway.
Sometimes it felt like literally everyone in my life that I’d ever tried to get close to had turned out to be some kind of crook.
Growing up with my criminal/conman father had taught me that lesson early and often.
But Angelica had wormed her way past my defenses through sheer persistence.
She’d literally drag me out to lunch, or show up at my desk with my favorite chai latte I hadn’t asked for, and chatter at me until I was forced to give in and talk to her just to make her stop.
Some people were like that and were genuinely annoying—the kind you tolerated rather than enjoyed being around. But Angelica was funny, sharp, and authentic, and she’d seen me as someone who was wearing herself thin and decided an intervention was required.
Usually, that meant reminding me to eat something that wasn’t vending machine garbage or ordering me to go home before the late-night cleaning crew kicked me out of the newsroom.
Not hauling me to a security company and making me spill the details of the biggest story of my career to a complete stranger.
“Ruth was murdered,” Angelica had argued when I’d tried to initially refuse.
“Viciously. They didn’t just kill her, Charlotte—they made sure she suffered first. This isn’t like the movies,” she’d insisted, her voice sharp with fear.
“People don’t stoically endure torture. They break.
They know she was talking to someone, and you cannot possibly believe they didn’t get your name out of Ruth before they killed her and they’ll come for you next to squash the story.
You know it and I know it. You need protection, Charlotte. Real protection.”
She wasn’t wrong, and I had to admit despite my determination to gather the rest of the evidence I needed to break this story, the thought of Calloway’s men targeting me next did spark a bit of fear in me.
Ruth had gone by the name Ruby at the strip club where she worked, and she hadn’t chosen that life.
I would never judge any woman who made the choice to dance or strip for a living.
You could make good money as a dancer, and in Vegas, that industry was as legitimate as any other.
But the clubs owned by Vincent Calloway were different.
A lot of them were staffed with women who had no choice in the matter.
Women who’d been trafficked, their documents taken, their freedom stripped away until they had nothing left but their bodies and the men who profited from them.
I’d suspected Calloway was dirty for years.
His rise had been meteoric—a powerful real estate mogul who’d appeared seemingly out of nowhere with enough capital to buy chunks of the Strip almost overnight.
But there was nothing to account for where that startup money had come from.
No family wealth, no early investors, no trail of legitimate business dealings.
He’d just... appeared about seven years ago, flush with cash and ready to spend it.
In trying to trace the source of his fortune, I’d stumbled across a shell company that owned a series of strip clubs and gentlemen’s establishments throughout Las Vegas.
If everything was legitimate, why hide the ownership?
Sure, a man in his position might claim he wanted to protect his philanthropic image, but my instincts had told me there was something more.
I’d suspected money laundering at first. So I’d gone undercover, getting hired on as a cocktail waitress in one of his clubs, making friends with some of the women and listening to the girls talk in the dressing room.
Most of the dancers were there by choice—making money to pay tuition, funding custody battles, or building savings accounts—completely unaware that anything was wrong.
But then I noticed the other girls who worked there—the quiet ones with a look of desperation about them that made money laundering seem like the lesser crime.
These young girls rarely spoke unless spoken to by someone of authority.
They flinched when certain men came too close.
They never seemed to have phones, cash, or car keys of their own.
Their smiles looked practiced, their makeup too carefully painted over bruises they claimed came from clumsy customers or bad luck.
They watched the exits the way trapped animals did, measuring distance and possibility.
And when security staff walked by, their shoulders would go rigid in a way that told me they weren’t the typical hired strippers who wanted to be there.
It had taken months to get anyone to open up to me.
Months of building trust and proving I wasn’t a threat, of convincing terrified women that I could help them out of this situation.
In the end, only Ruth had been willing to go on record.
She’d been snatched off the streets where she lived in El Paso, and had been sold through three different men before ending up in Vegas, enslaved in a life she was desperate to escape.
She had a young son back home, a family who missed her, and I’d promised her I would help her get back to them.
Now she was dead. Beaten beyond recognition, her face destroyed so thoroughly that I’d only been able to identify her by the small tattoo on her ankle.
The guilt was crippling, a weight that sat heavily on my conscience.
I’d asked her to trust me and risk everything on the promise that I could save her.
Instead, someone found out about her willingness to talk, and it had cost her life.
And Angelica was convinced I was next.
I’d tried explaining that I couldn’t possibly afford a place like Noble and Associates.
Their client list read like a who’s who of celebrities and executives—people with actual money, not journalists scraping by on freelance rates and the occasional staff position.
But Angelica had done her research, as she always did.
“The paper can cover it as a business expense,” she’d pointed out as she’d literally dragged me to her car.
“And I read an article that Noble and Associates takes pro bono cases all the time. Why do you think they work with so many A-listers? The celebrity details and concert contracts pay for them to help people like you—the ones who actually need it but can’t afford it. ”
So now here I was, assigned a bodyguard. I waited in a conference room with Angelica to meet him, since Sutton, the guy in charge, strongly suggested that I not go home alone after hearing all the details and seeing the evidence I’d already compiled.
Angelica sat at the table, sipping one of the complimentary waters the secretary had offered us, while I paced anxiously.
“I still think you should get out of town,” she said, not for the first time.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Ruth’s death hadn’t scared me into submission.
It had only sharpened something in me. Grief.
Rage. Resolve. I wasn’t going to cut and run.
I was going to make sure she hadn’t died in vain.
“Ruth had a son, Angelica. She had family who loved her, who’ve been waiting years to see her again.
They deserve justice. They deserve to know the truth. ”
“Of course they do. But you can’t help anyone if you’re—” She cut herself off abruptly, her eyes widening at something over my shoulder. “Oh, hello .”
I turned, expecting to see Sutton returning with whatever security professional had drawn the short straw of babysitting a stubborn journalist.
What I saw instead made my heart stop dead in my chest.
Kane Adair walked through the conference room door, followed by Sutton.
The air left my lungs in a rush of shock and disbelief, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but stare at the man I’d never expected to see again.
He looked... God, he looked almost the same.
Tall and broad-shouldered, his dark blond hair slightly longer than it had been, his jaw shadowed with stubble that hadn’t been there before.
Those dark brown eyes that I remembered so vividly—the ones that had watched me with such intensity, such focus, such hunger —were on me again now, colder than I remembered and stripped of every trace of softness I’d once been on the receiving end of.
My mouth went dry. My pulse hammered against my throat. And beneath the shock and confusion there was something else. Something I had no right to feel and absolutely refused to acknowledge.