Chapter 4 #2
"The woman with the broken arm is Sloane Whitmore.
" Rowan's voice cuts through the quiet with facts.
"Regular at Scarlet Thorn. Old money, no criminal ties.
She's at Northwestern Memorial now. Concussion, broken arm, and some badly bruised ribs, but she'll live.
She's been talking to our people. So far we've kept the badges out of it, but the police captain is telling us she can't hold back her men for long. "
"And the other one?" I ask, even though something in my gut already knows the answer isn't going to be simple.
"That's where it gets complicated." Luca's fingers scroll through his phone, pulling data from whatever dark corners of the internet he calls home. "Give me a second. I'm running her face through our systems."
The police have theirs and then we have ours. It took nearly eight years to get the system in place, but it's been worth every late night Luca and Rowan have spent building the extensive database.
"Got a hit." Luca looks up from his phone. "Onyx Malone. Seamus's niece." His fingers keep moving. "Running the men from the footage now. Three of them are flagged in our system. All confirmed Malone muscle."
I sit forward. “The van they stuffed the Malone woman in, can you run those tags?”
Luca nods, his fingers flying over his keyboard.
Thirty-five seconds and he’s giving more details.
"Plates trace back to a shell company we've already linked to Malone operations."
The room goes very still.
"Sloane say anything else?" Drake asks, his eyes still fixed on the frozen image on screen. "She know why Malone's men grabbed the girl?"
"She confirmed they're friends. Said Onyx showed up terrified, talking about her family trying to sell her." Rowan pulls up another file. "Sloane didn't know the details. Just that Onyx was running from something bad."
"Seamus's niece was here," Massimo repeats and I can see him mentally moving pieces of information around.
"She was here in our club. Attacked in our alley.
Taken by men who work for her own uncle.
" He steeples his fingers. "Someone want to explain to me why Seamus Malone is kidnapping his own family members? "
“Good question, moy brat. In my family it was to silence them.”
“Good point." Rafael walks to the head of the table and puts his mug down.
"Got it." Luca's voice cuts through, sharp with discovery. "Onyx Rose Malone. Twenty-five years old. Journalism degree from Columbia, graduated top of her class. Applied to every major publication in the country over the past three years. Rejected from all of them."
"Rejected?" Cristian speaks for the first time, his voice soft, that faint Russian accent smoothed by years of international circles. "With those credentials?"
"Blacklisted." Luca's jaw tightens. "Someone made calls, is my guess and with the last name Malone the safest bet is her family doesn’t like the idea of a family tell-all.
Know what I mean? It had to be someone with enough pull to shut every door in the industry, too.
Three guesses who, and the first two don't count. "
Seamus. The bastard sabotaged his own niece's career. “Where’s her father?”
"There's more," Luca cuts in. He turns from his laptop and picks up his phone.
He scrolls through his phone, his expression darkening.
"My people just got back to me. Word through the underground moves fast. Seamus has put out feelers for a premium sale to Society 69's auction this Saturday.
Virgin. High-value. Family connection to make it extra spicy for the sick fucks who attend those things. "
My blood goes cold. Then hot. A roaring fills my ears, drowning out everything except the sudden violent pounding of my heart.
Society 69. The name alone makes my jaw tighten.
It's human trafficking dressed up in a tuxedo, an underground auction house where the wealthy and depraved bid on human beings like they're rare art or vintage wine.
They specialize in virgins, in the young and desperate, in women who have no one left to look for them when they disappear.
The Syndicate doesn't participate. And we sure the fuck do not condone the nefarious secret society.
We've been looking for a way to burn them to the ground for years, but they're slippery bastards with powerful clients and deeper pockets than even we can trace.
We've passed it off to the men of Genesis and trust them to deal with that particular depth of depravity.
Club Genesis. The other power in Chicago's underworld.
Harlon, Cassius, Santi, and their crew run things differently than we do, but we've carved out a mutual respect over the years that takes some exchange of money from us to them.
Part of doing business in the same city.
They don't touch our operations. We don't touch theirs.
And when someone needs to vanish into a hole so deep they'll never see daylight again, we sometimes trade favors.
The enemy of my enemy isn't always my friend, but he can be useful.
I sit back and slip my hands to my lap. "Seamus Malone is selling her." The words come out flat, barely human, scraped raw from somewhere deep in my chest. "His own niece. At a virgin auction."
Rafael gives a curt nod, eyes narrowed at the paused vision of violence on the large monitor. "Looks that way, brother."
My jaw clenches. I know what I just watched. My eyes work fine even if my brain isn't ready to process it. My fingers curl into fists and my eyes close.
The tremor starts in my chest and within seconds it’s moved down my arms. My hands start to shake and there’s nothing I can do about the incoming assault to my senses but let my brain ride it out and take my body along for the hellish ride.
The smell hits me first. Blood and sweat and fear, thick enough to choke on.
A room with no windows fills my mind's eye.
The concrete floor is stained with things I learned not to look at.
Wire bites into my wrists, my ankles, my throat, while men with dead eyes watched and laughed and placed bets on how long the boy would last.
Twelve years old. Sold by my own mother for the price of her next fix.
I blink, and the memory fractures, shatters, retreats back to the dark corner where I keep it locked away. But the phantom pain lingers, a ghost of agony wrapped around my forearms where the scars still live beneath the ink covering my skin.
"Kon." Rafael's voice is steady, a lifeline thrown into dark water. He knows most of my dark past and has witnessed its claws dig at my soul. "Brother. You here with us?”
I latch onto the sound of his voice and pull myself back to the present.
I open my eyes to find him staring down at me from the head of the table with nothing but patience on his face.
“You good?” he asks me in my native tongue.
I give a curt nod and inhale sharply through my nostrils and let it out slowly. Another brother moves a fresh cup of coffee in front of me and I mumble something close to a thanks.
I push the loose strands of hair back from my face and force every clenched muscle in my body to relax.
Next, I force my hands flat against the cool mahogany of the table, grounding myself in the present.
Force my breathing to slow, counting each inhale the way I taught myself to do in the years after I killed Volkov and clawed my way back to something resembling human.
"Damaris brought the weekly wishes in this morning." Rafael gestures to the bundle of red envelopes sitting untouched at the center of the table. "We were going to handle them after this meeting, but given what we've just learned, I think we should look through them now."
I follow his train of thought. “You think she put something in the box?”
Rafael cocks a brow. “Worth looking.”
“Da.”
If Onyx was at Scarlet Thorn last night, if she made it past the VIP floor, if she found the wish room...
I reach for the bundle. Break the wax seal Damaris secures the wish package with, the brittle snap loud in the quiet room.
While the other brothers talk through security details, I sift through the envelopes with hands that are steadier now that they have a task.
The wishes blur together after a while. Money problems. Cheating husbands.
A woman who wants her mother's nursing home bills to disappear.
Standard fare. I sort them into piles, yes and no and maybe, while the others watch and wait.
I pause when I come to an envelope slightly crumpled, like it was written in a hurry by hands that weren't entirely steady. I pull out the paper inside and something in my chest goes still.
The handwriting is shaky, the letters pressed hard into the paper like the writer was afraid they might disappear if she didn't carve them deep enough.
The paper itself is heavy, expensive, the cream-colored stock we provide in the wish room.
I can smell the faint ghost of perfume clinging to the fibers, something light and clean beneath the heavier scent of fear.
I read the words once. Read them again. Feel something crack open in my chest, a fissure running through ice I didn't know was there.
Take my virginity and grant me protection from my uncle, Seamus Malone. In exchange, I will give you one secret about the Malones for every day you keep me alive.
The signature at the bottom: Onyx Rose Malone.
My hands tighten on the paper. "Rowan." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Too rough. Too raw. "Pull up the wish room cameras from last night. Show me everyone who dropped an envelope."
He doesn't ask why. Just pulls up the footage while doing something else on his phone.
He hands it to me a few seconds later and says, “So you know the face to look for.”
I look at his phone to see a candid shot of Onyx Malone taken by some reporter for an article that reads: DAUGHTER OF CRIME LORD DINING ON BLOOD MONEY