Chapter 26 #2
“And more than I have left. With the team here, I have eleven. The rest of my men are at my second safe house and they only make up another ten.”
“You don’t have them here because you don’t trust them.” Greyson met my sight.
“Correct. Their crew all have a tattoo of a snake on them in different spots on their bodies. Damn copycats trying to replicate what I’ve built.
” Crimson slashed my vision, and I fisted my hand.
“We checked all our guys and only found one, which we eliminated, but the rest of my team is new, replacements brought in to cover the losses and I won’t risk one of them betraying me while I’m trying to get to Ava. ”
“So that makes twenty with our men, not counting the three of us,” Brinks said.
“Numbers that could work.” It was Casey who spoke this time.
“If you play it right and time it right. They’ll have their guard up, especially if this is a trap to lure you in.
” She sat on the corner of a chair, pulling her curls into a knot on her head as she talked.
“Ava is a valuable commodity and if they’re smart enough to pull off all the shit they pulled in Armina and at home, they’ll have double the security. ”
“But they messed up in Armina,” Angie said.
“Who runs your family, Brinks? You or your women?”
He glared at me, but it was Riley who said, “I wouldn’t let Ava hear that. She’d surely lecture you about how insulting that was.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “All while standing with her hands on her hips.”
“Exactly,” she said, giving me another smile. I suddenly knew why my brother loved her. The warmth of that smile bled through layers of ice that only Ava had ever melted.
“Does the warehouse shut down for the day?” Raines asked, his finger moving between the warehouse and the home that was marked on the map.
“No. Twenty-four-seven, so we have to contend with civilians. Although they run on a skeleton crew at night.”
“Smart,” Greyson observed. “What do they make?”
I rubbed my head. “Furniture. Mostly tables and chairs. Some overly ornate bed frames specialty made. All their furniture is oversized and almost gaudy. They call the beds princess frames so you can tell the clientele they cater to.”
“Oh! I have one of those!” Angie Donelli had a pitch to her voice that reminded me of nails on a chalkboard when she hit the right tone.
She was a true mafia princess. Spoiled by her father.
Beautiful by any standard, with freckles that splashed over her cheeks and a distinct birthmark that gave her character.
But as beautiful as any of these women were, they weren’t Ava and didn’t hold a candle to her in my eyes.
The thought had that ache in my chest growing. I wanted her back so badly it was almost debilitating.
“You do?” Raines asked her.
“Yeah, Daddy bought it for me years ago. I told him I didn’t want that style because it was too frumpy, but he insisted, saying I needed it because of what it did. I had to get a pink bed skirt to cover it so no one would know it was so ugly on the bottom.”
“Focus, Angela,” he said to her. “What do you mean, what it did?”
“The bottom is a hiding place.” She looked at us like we should have known that, but we all just stared at her.
“He said if anyone ever stormed the house, I was to run to my room and hide in it. There’s a tiny hole at the end of the frame to slip your finger in and slide it open.
He had me try it over and over until I could do it in under two minutes. But it’s tiny and so cramped.”
My heart pounded, my skin getting clammy. “That’s how they’ve been shipping the girls out.” Ava was terrified of enclosed, dark spaces. The thought of her in one had me gripping the table so I didn’t stumble.
“The perfect hiding spot,” Mason mused as Greyson held my gaze, keen to my emotions.
“Ensure the truck is temperature regulated, there’s enough air for breathing, and you’re doing nothing more than delivering furniture.
No questions from the authorities. No suspicion turned to the buyer if there are any witnesses. ”
Riley moved closer to Greyson, whose sight was still on me.
“If we don’t get to her in time, they’ll put her in one of those,” I told him. “It will kill her.” The need to get to her spiraled, climbing through my limbs and causing the blood to thrum through my veins.
“I know. We’ll get her in time, Mer.”
I couldn’t answer.
Mason flipped through the pictures Rudy had given me. Pulling out one of the tables being loaded into a delivery truck, he said, “The compartments are in the tables, too.”
He tilted the picture, studying it before he put it down and pointed to the space where the tabletop extended down in thick pieces of wood.
To the untrained eye, they looked like expensive maple tables with an inside lip with decorative engravings on it.
But in reality, that space contained one, maybe two women, cramped into the box until they could get them to the buyer.
I rubbed my hand over my chin. Light was fading, and the warehouse was an hour from our location.
“What’s the plan?” Mason asked, looking up at me.
“One they won’t expect,” I answered, shaking off the fear and remembering who I was, who we were dealing with, and what was at stake.