Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
It wasn’t meant to be this way.
She was supposed to be a means to an end.
Nothing else.
We’d have our fun with her and hand her over. That had been the plan we discussed without Father the night we found out she was a Crowe.
Then she took our hearts.
All of them.
Even our father developed a softness for her. But still, the plan didn’t waiver.
Not until we learned who she really is.
We’ve been wondering how Crowe has managed to keep Eriksen under his thumb and now we know.
Bailey.
What we don’t know is how Crowe managed to get his hands on her.
Bridgett is still pulling the pieces together.
None of us could have known that Crowe wasn’t her real father or that he already had plans in motion to sell her.
His original plan had been to hand her over to be groomed before being put on the auction block.
Us involving her in our scheme and then outing her moved up his timeline.
Something that made her ex-fiancé, Drew, livid.
Ex-fiancé.
That word doesn’t fit when she was fucking sold to him.
“Goddamn it!”
We’d been lucky that Crowe believed us when we informed him that we were looking at backing his presidential bid.
He’d been skeptical at first, especially since getting in bed with him means putting our hands into the skin trade.
Something we’ve always been fiercely against. However, Kiernan has managed to sell him on the fact that we are looking at expanding the business once our father hands over the reins to the kingdom next year.
And the greedy sucker bought it.
“Calm down, brother,” Kiernan huffs from across the room.
“Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down,” I roar at him from my seat. “It’s your fault she is in this position in the first place. If you hadn’t insisted we go through with the fucking plan, she would be here and not God knows where.”
Kiernan looks thoroughly chastised. “We’ll find her,” he assures me with a confidence I don’t have. Because we haven’t found her yet.
Everything is coming up empty.
I scoff. “And if we don’t?” I ask. “Crowe is watching us closely. Too closely. If he thinks we’re going after Bailey, it’s over. We need to take him down, or else he could easily give the order to Lina before we can get to her.”
“Vas has men on both Crowe and Lina,” Kiernan assures me. “We just need one of them to slip up enough to get the information we need. Bridgett is putting together everything we need to ruin Crowe at the speech he is giving next week, announcing his presidential bid.”
“Are we sure it’s going to work? He has a lot of powerful people backing him. Including this mysterious financier and whoever is running the flesh trade through the city. I’m starting to wonder if they’re one and the same.”
My brother shrugs. “We always assumed it was Ward who ran the trafficking ring because he ran the stables. None of us bothered to think that there was someone higher up.”
“If we had, shit might have gone down better.”
“Yeah.” Kiernan sighs. He’d been depressed since his confrontation with Bailey at the auction.
He said some hurtful shit, and it’s weighing on him.
Kiernan hadn’t meant a word, but our girl doesn’t know that.
She doesn’t know any of this because we’d been the ones to turn her over to Crowe in the first place.
The look of hope she wore when she saw Kiernan’s face in the crowd of lustful men and women ready to buy her flesh nearly broke me.
She believed we came to save her, even after everything that happened.
Her screams still haunt my sleep.
“All right.” My father strides into the room with three tankards of beer in his hands. “Let’s get this all sorted out.”
Kiernan and I exchange a look.
Why does he want to help? Bailey’s father is his enemy. He’d been more upset with the fact that Toph Eriksen is her true father than when he thought it was Crowe. Then again, it hasn’t been Crowe pulling the trigger on our men, filling the streets with their blood.
“Don’t start with the twin ESP shit,” he scolds, setting the tankards down on the table in the middle of the room.
“Look.” He runs a hand through his graying hair.
“With everything that is going on with Ava, I’ve come to realize some things.
You can’t choose who you love. I also know that I would do anything for my family.
Eriksen hasn’t been killing our men because he enjoys it, or even because he wants to.
” Hopefully. “He is no doubt doing it because it is the only way to keep Bailey safe. I realize that we could have rescued her earlier, and if maybe I hadn’t been so stubborn and distracted, she might not be in the predicament she is in now. ”
Isn’t that the truth.
All hell broke loose at the gala just after Kiernan handed over Bailey to Crowe. A sniper took a shot at our sister from one of the balconies concealed by heavy curtains that are only used during performances.
We’d been so caught up in the aftermath of the gala that we completely missed every red flag regarding Crowe and his involvement with the information we’d found on Bailey.
For days now, I’ve been going over the audio from Kiernan’s comm device dozens of times. Trying to pick up anything I can, but all I hear are her screams and the sound of her heart breaking. It took several times before I could get through the audio without the urge to vomit.
“I’ve been going over things.” My father tilts his chin toward the board we’ve set up with all the new information we have. “We didn’t know all the players before, and now we do. Bailey said something at the gala that has me wondering a bit.”
“What was that?” I ask.
“Bailey mentioned that she recognized the tattoo on one of her father’s guards,” he says.
I remember that. I could hear her over the comm line.
She mentioned it idly, but I could hear it in her voice that it bothered her.
“I managed to locate the one she was talking about. Wasn’t hard since he was the only one with a fucking tattoo on his neck. Then I found this.”
He pins a photo of Lina wearing a black leather jacket with a logo on the back to the board.
An Iron Horsemen logo.
“Up until twenty-three years ago, Eriksen was never seeking any kind of expansion,” my father continues. “We’ve never had an issue with one another. Then, out of nowhere, he starts killing our men in the streets.”
“We know that is most likely because Crowe was directing him to.” Kiernan points out what we already know. “Using Bailey as a tool to get him to do his dirty work.”
“Except that Crowe would never have wanted the Iron Horsemen to expand.”
I trade a look with my brother.
“You know…” I bite my lower lip. “That Horsemen we roughed up a few nights before the gala, he was adamant that Eriksen isn’t expanding and that there is no way in hell they’d even try.”
“Look here.” Kiernan points to the board we set the map up on. “Every red dot is a hit that we believed was done by the Iron Horsemen.”
“They’re all concentrated in the lower district.” My father steps up to the map, surveying what we’ve laid out so far. “Near the shipping ports.”
“Why would Eriksen need the shipping ports?” Kiernan asks. “He does all his shipments by ground. The only things done by sea are drugs and humans.”
“And we know that Eriksen doesn’t ship drugs by sea, either.”
“So why would he be trying to run us out of the port?”
“He wouldn’t,” my father notes. He turns his attention to another board. I’ve strung up every picture Mark, Ava’s hacker friend, could pull off their network from that night. “This is everyone who was there?”
I nod. “There are only a few people we can’t identify.”
“This one of them?” my father asks, pointing to a tall woman seen talking with Kiernan. My brother nods. “You can’t tell much because of how grainy the footage is, but that is Sarah Crowe.”
“That is Bailey’s ‘stepmother?’” Kiernan asks in disbelief.
“The old witch herself,” my father mutters darkly. “Quite the social climber, that one.” He points to another woman whose back is turned toward the camera. “That is Lina.”
I squint at the photo.
“How can you tell?” I ask. “You can’t see her face.”
“The jacket.” He points to the other photo. “It is the same as the one Lina is wearing in this photo. Look at the patch.”
Peering closer, I am able to just make out the patch of the Iron Horsemen. Underneath the main symbol is something I don’t expect.
“She’s Eriksen’s old lady?”
My father nods. “You can’t see it as easily in the other photo because the back of her jacket is more obscured, but you can see that both jackets have matching symbols that have the president’s moniker on them.”
Well, fuck.
“All this time, she pretended to be Bailey’s best friend,” I hiss darkly. “Her mentor. But really, she was just keeping an eye on her investment.”
“So who works for whom?” Kiernan asks, puzzled. “I think Lina works for Sarah, but now I’m beginning to think Sarah works for Lina.”
“She does.” Ava’s quiet voice sneaks up behind us. She is stealthy that way. Years of being invisible and having to sneak around gave her some pretty neat ninja skills. “So does her ex-fiancé, Drew.”
“And you know this because…” Kiernan lets the question hang in the air. Ava smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Well, we know Drew works for Christian. His logo is on the side of the containers he is using to ship his cargo. Bailey confirmed that.”
“All right, that is a gimme,” I joke. Ava chuckles, the sound full of sorrow. She will be hurting for a while. Two weeks is just a drop in a pond when you compare it to an eternity of grieving. But she will never be alone. We will always be right beside her. We are family.
“That woman”—Ava points at the picture of Lina—“is the one Elias placed in charge of the strip clubs and brothels.” She moves her finger to point at the photo of Sarah Crowe. “She is an investor. One of his top investors, in fact. They are the only two women he lets in on his business dealings.”