by Sophia Reed
Or many others. I hadn't seen my parents since my father and ex-fiancé had me committed "For my own good." But I had family. My sisters were a pack of unpleasant women who didn't understand why I didn't want to get married five years ago when I was twenty and start producing a shit load of kids. My mother had never seemed to like her tomboy daughter and we'd had a cold relationship until Mark was the one to tell me my mother depended on me. She might not understand my strength and self-reliance or my need to be a cop and work undercover with no contact with my family, but apparently she depended on it. If my father the career policeman wasn't around for her to depend on, I was her rock.
I owed Mark something for that. I'd never have known. Those people would be hurt if I vanished forever, not an undercover assignment but something from which I never returned. They deserved better.
For the first time I thought I did, too. Not better as in I wanted to do something else. This "assignment" was completely voluntary, off the charts, and borderline illegal. I'd keep fighting the good fight even if I never wore a badge again.
I just deserved better than this.
What I deserved would have to wait.
Theo looked more like he'd like to be filled in on where we were going and when, but deferred to Chad, who didn't ask.
Surprisingly, it was Evie who asked. Because she needed to know how to gild the lily and get me ready to travel.
I got lucky. Raven, having proved me to herself by proving what I could withstand, and having proved herself to me by showing me what she could dish out, was now finished with me. In my opinion, her little show of ugliness and force was pointless. It was too short to show what I could endure, and there'd been no point in enduring it. Not that I wanted a contest of wills, or to be forced to remain unshackled and on my feet while enduring Evie's assault, but it would have been a better idea of who I was. When ordered to submit, did I drop and take whatever punishment was coming for not enduring the right way? Or did I idiotically hope that obeying would get me a lighter hand? Did I look like I was enjoying it secretly? If I were Raven the sick fuck, that's what I'd be looking for, and I'd look for it somewhere farther along than five minutes after unpackaging my latest acquisition.
But maybe the display we'd just gone through was enough for her to decide who to sell me to. I found that hideous and terrifying, because I didn't know which part of what had just happened was the most important. That I fell apart? Or that afterwards I came back together? That I screamed or that I endured?
I didn't think that was a great measure. What kind of beating can you take? Didn't seem like the most promising of interview questions. But it filled me with dread as I thought about what kind of monster she'd deliver me to.
Where I got lucky was that once they dropped me to the floor and had their little Q and A about the car, they were done with me. I'd just become nothing.
It's dangerous to do that. Underestimating your opponent can get you hurt.
Another piece of luck was that Evie needed direction. Apparently as well as being in charge of beating she was in charge of makeup and wardrobe. That thought was so bizarre I could have broken into hysterics if I didn't have a lot of training. Going undercover was always more scary for the sudden kindnesses in the midst of the worst possible human behavior.
Or, equally freakish, a logical corporate twist to things. And this is Evie, Vice President in charge of Makeup, Wardrobe and Test Beatings in our little enterprise.
Lucky for me Evie was vp and the buyer was a new account. That meant there had to be some consultation of where I was going and what he was expecting. And since I'd just been delegated commodity and relegated to deaf and dumb bystander, they spoke as if I wasn't there.
The client was in the U.S. apparently he was in Los Angeles, which meant a shorter transport than I might have expected. He was rich and he was building a harem.
Sunlight fell across me where I sat on the floor in the warehouse, dressed in a t-shirt and nothing else. Instead of feeling vulnerable, I found anger growing. This was why I was doing this. To stop the client 3837's of the world. That's all Raven called him. That's all Evie needed. Apparently the information Evie needed would be released through the client number. I wondered how much Raven even knew about him. He had a type. He liked underage.
That made me see red and explained a few more details. Because I'd just hit twenty-five and it wouldn't be much longer I'd be able to go deep cover as a teen, but for ]now, Erin Trace and her history of arrests? She was on the cusp of eighteen. Still had three months to go.
They were buying it.
He was buying me. Whether or not 3837 would fall for my being seventeen and three-quarters remained to be seen.
I had a good idea where I was in Arizona. The trackers should be sending back information that would allow investigators to sift through and find some link to Raven even if there were dummy corporations and a handful of people between her and this weirdly bedazzled warehouse with its fluffy curtains.
The new client was in Los Angeles. Evie still held me by the arm, ready to march me to wherever it was she was going to do whatever it was to get me ready. I'd become nothing more than a package she was getting ready for shipment, and for the first time I did feel like a woman in this group was betraying her own kind.
The idea of them talking about the client only seemed careless. They could be excused for not thinking a late teens not that smart girl with an impressive rap sheet couldn't do anything with the information that she was going to Los Angeles.
So I listened and listed in my head, the various ways I could get back at them for treating me as if I were nothing more than an animate sex doll.
Once Raven and Evie were in custody, maybe the investigators would find their way to whoever 3837 was. I'd hopefully be there to provide whatever information I could. Because a harem of underage girls was sick. And because even if he was buying them just on that borderline between under eighteen and over, he needed to pay.
Hopefully he'd lead us to more. I thought Raven was near the top of this organization. There was hired muscle around the shadowy edges of the warehouse. I'd slowly become aware of them. That they were armed I didn't even have to wonder. This was a full fledged operation that was probably better put together than any number of entrepreneurial startups. Imagine if she put that business brain to something legitimate. Something that built instead of tearing down.
Chad and Theo would have the information of where I'd been taken. They were deferential as one is with a tough boss or a good paying job they want to keep, but it was obvious they'd been working for Raven for a while. That familiarity would also help.
I was getting somewhere, squirreling away information in my brain, pretending to write it on a notebook that I could always access, repeating salient bits to myself and biting the tip of my tongue for a mnemonic.
This is what I'd come for. Being sold to Raven's client sucked.
Exposing Raven's secret, client-number-protected client and having him arrested? Seeing charges brought against him for interstate human sex trafficking and the girls if they were honestly under eighteen?
That would be worth it. Seeing Raven and Evie brought down? Worth it. Because my life turned so differently now, because I was working my way toward my college degree and applying to DEA, there was a chance I might even get to be there when they were brought down.
That would be amazing.
Evie offered me a hand up. A little weird coming from someone who less than twenty minutes earlier had caned me into oblivion.
Whatever. I took it.
Six hour drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Evie dressed me up and made me up until I wondered if she'd ever traveled on a hot fall day for a six hour road trip through largely desert. I'd be rumpled by the time we arrived. AC might mean I didn't sweat into a puddle, but I'd still be wrinkled and my makeup would be coming off.
"Are you paying attention?" she snarled midway through and I suddenly realized this was as much tutorial as
her getting me ready. This was all innocent makeup and candy pink lip gloss and teased hair.
"Why do I care how you do it?" I demanded. Evie had dragged me to the large restrooms with their banks of stalls and sinks, set up a stool in front of one of the long counters with six sinks and started work.
Her claws sank into the back of my neck as she shook me. "Stupid girl!"
The stool tipped over and went flying back. Before I could think to stop it, I'd slugged her. The shaking was too close to my brain, too scary a threat. But the instant I reacted I knew I might have tipped my hand.
Evie was still dazed from the blow. I took that time to start slapping, ineffectual and untrained. Unbidden and not because I was acting, a torrent of tears poured out of my eyes, soaking the short sleeved idiotic white shirt she'd put on me so far.
For a couple seconds Evie responded the same way I'd attacked: Like hissing cats we went at each other, slapping and screaming, until out of nowhere she pinned my arms to my sides. The move was amazingly intimate, putting us face to face. I swallowed and tried to pull away from her but she kept me tight.
"I know what you think of me." Her breath was appalling. I hadn't seen her light a cigarette but she reeked of it.
I just glared, unable to flail as Erin or punch as Annie.
"Not everyone has a choice, Erin." Her eyes searched mine as if she was honestly trying to tell me something. "You don't have a choice anymore."
Now she was definitely telling me something. I didn't relax in her forced embrace but I stopped struggling. She might tell more to a naïve girl than to Annie Knox. On the other hand, she was so close I was afraid she'd see the incipient crows feet that most teens didn't have.
If she did, she didn't bother saying anything about them. "It doesn't matter to me what you think of me, but understand this: I'm in a safer spot than you are and I could still get killed for botching this job." She nodded at me as if I couldn't understand I was the job. Her forehead hit mine and we both blinked in unexpected pain.
It didn't make us anything but enemies but along with what she was doing, it slowed down my panic and fury enough to concentrate on what she was saying.
"You've been requested by someone I've never done anything for but take a look at what you're wearing."
My answering nod was more cautious and subdued. I was wearing a school girl uniform I wasn't sure school girls in our country wore anymore. White short sleeved button down with a strange little half bowtie made of the same plaid as the skirt. Knee socks that itched in the overwarm warehouse. No shoes so far. Under the skirt and shirt I wore black lace everything, pushup bra, thong, a garter belt that held up stockings the socks were pulled on over. My makeup was – well, ruined, but before that, extreme.
To me it felt like a very sick fetish. Like maybe the client would prefer me to be eighteen but would pretend I was younger as he played whatever sick games were waiting for me.
That smacked of My kink is kinky and healthy, your kink is weird and wrong. But my kink didn't traffic humans. My kink was, at the very core, under all my protests and screaming, consensual.
Funny time to figure that out.
"I won't do anything for you," she said. "And I will save myself by doing what I'm told to you."
My backside was very familiar with what she was willing to do. "Why are you telling me this?"
She let go of me so fast I staggered back and stood uncertainly, not moving toward her or away. Just waiting.
"Because you can at least mitigate some of what's going to happen." She stopped and stared at me. "You do get the basics, right?"
I snorted. "Yeah, I get it."
She didn't even blink at that. "The new client has tastes in make up. we're using the same makeup on you now so you show up the way he wants you, already ready." She shrugged and spread her hands. "I don't give a fuck if you want to learn to do make up or not, it's not the point. The point is if knowing how to make yourself look the way he wants you to look spares you one beating?" She looked hard at me, clearly meaning the cane and all at once I knew that I had been tested with the cane because that was the favorite implement of 3837 and maybe he was tired of breaking his toys and having to start over with a new one.
Nausea nearly doubled me over. Instead of curling up with it, I put one hand on my stomach and leaned into it. I kept my feet. I looked up at her. "Then… thank you."
She was never going to be an ally. But at least she could stop me from being quite so beaten. That might allow me to do whatever I needed to do to bring down 3837 and Raven a little faster.
Our détente was over. She waited as I picked up the stool and used a makeup wipe on my face so we could start over. This time I watched her every move and paid attention to every product and color. It seemed stupid, but protective coloration was as much a part of going undercover as anything else. She had a point and I needed all the pointers I could get.
16
Annie
Six hours from wherever we were in Arizona, across Southern Nevada and into Southern California. Six hours and Chad and Theo switched off driving two times. Now that I knew that until we reached our destination I'd have to do something truly stupid in order for them to hurt me, I was out of my mind with boredom. I've never been a road trip kind of gal. I'm more a Let me know when they invent transporters kind of gal. I offered to trade off in the driving rotation. They laughed at me. I told them I was serious. They stopped laughing and Chad told me to shut up. There were cacti and more abandoned cars along the side of the road than made sense. If I were to drive this way alone at night I'd be halfway to believing in alien abduction. Because I had two thugs for questionable company, I got to hear how cars overheated in the desert. It wasn't particularly warm out but I wasn't going to argue with Chad. Partly because he didn't like me and would look menacingly into the rearview at me, and partly because I didn't care. There were convenience store pitstops and pizza in Vegas. My captors were neither kind nor cruel. They had a job to do and they were doing it.
I was the job.
Being in Vegas was frustrating. To be that close to Cole and not be able to reach out for him, even if it was only to let him know I was still all right. Even with the GPS, he had to be going crazy by now. Especially if it was showing him I was in the same city he was. Cole was something of a control freak…
When we finally crawled into Los Angeles, it was late night, the semi-dark that city has, and disorienting to be arriving there so late. I've always felt somewhat lost when arriving somewhere late at night, like there's something magical about being up and out and doing things when most people are asleep. Or like there's something slightly illicit about a drive that, during the day, would be ordinary.
Chad drove us directly to Raven's client's house. Beautiful canyon outside the city, long, winding road through the foothills of Southern California. The property was expansive. It looked like we were being buzzed through wrought iron security gates into some weird enclave like a drive through zoo. I could hear crickets in the underbrush, and the darker night sky away from the city was maintained. Out here there was actually a sprinkling of stars in the sky.
A few lights came on as the SUV passed, then instantly winked out again. The air smelled of salt water and the heavy foliage of the area. A mockingbird sang, freaky birds that sing after dark. It gave out with a short melody, followed by a series of sounds caused by humans: Car alarms. Car doors slamming.
A human female screaming.
It gave me the shudders.
"Jesus," Theo said. "That's fucking creepy."
"That's nothing," Chad said. "If the moon's full, those fucking peacocks scream."
I filed that away. Because Chad had been here at least once when the moon was full but Theo hadn't. Because he'd come only so far and no farther? Or not at all? Were they newly partners or was Theo new to the whole enterprise?
"Time to go," Chad said. There was an audible leer in his voice, delight at what I was going through. No doubt he'd happily
hurt me himself if given the opportunity, but the Chads of the world are good at following instructions until their rage gets the better of them.
I thought I'd like to be in a position to let my own rage get the better of me when I was equipped to do something about it. Chad was a flunky, on demand for a gig economy independent contractor type thing.
In between jobs I had no doubt he left a number of women shattered in his wake. If they were still alive. I'd say I'd run into his type when I was undercover, but to be honest, most women have run into his type and if they have any kind of survival skills, they felt it even if all they did was pass him in the grocery store.
Theo stood well back from the door and on the far side where it couldn't slam into him when he ordered me out. The doors locked from the outside, at least the middle compartment where I'd ridden they did. But for one crazy second I forgot that. The jingle of the keys in the ignition as Chad had slammed the door made me think what if I slammed the door again, yanking it closed because Theo wasn't holding on to it. I could slam it shut and lock all the doors. My hands were left uncuffed on this ride and there was a thin open space between the front seats and the mesh – it was a home job, not something done for a police department. Theo was close but if I slammed the door closed and hit the lock button, then hit the passenger's side where he'd been sitting? I could move that fast because his out-of-range stance took him closer to the rear quarter panel of the SUV, not the cab. And then if I moved fast and hit the two on the driver's side? Because Chad was taking a leak on some oleander bushes and Theo was standing back so I couldn't drop him again. If I did that –
I'd have wasted the worst beating of my life. By the time I got somewhere and found authorities to tell and they started poking around the edges of Arizona, Raven and Evie would be in the wind and Chad and Theo long gone.