HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1)

by Lexie Ray

  “Do you remember your mommy, baby?” I asked. “Can you say mommy?”

  “Mommy,” he said confidently. He’d had this lesson before.

  “Good boy,” I said. “That’s right. I’m your mommy.”

  I held him close and squeezed my eyes shut, not opening them until I felt a light peck on my cheek.

  I opened my eyes to see Jasmine, and hugged her to me, crushing my baby between us. He squawked a little and giggled in protest.

  “How is this possible?” I asked, staring at her as she took a few steps to the side and melted back against Nate. He looked good—lots of color, and well rested.

  “Tyler offered us a free vacation,” she said, shrugging. “How could we say no? Plus, we needed a little time off.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “No, I mean this.” I lifted my son in my arms, wanting to hear his sweet little chortle. He didn’t disappoint me, laughing for all he was worth.

  “Why don’t you ask Tyler?” Jasmine suggested. “I think he’s been dying to tell you.”

  I hung my head. “I haven’t been very nice to Tyler,” I said, glancing over to where he stood, still at a distance.

  “You just didn’t understand before,” Jasmine said. “Now you do. He explained what happened. Said you were in a little bit of shock.”

  The message was clear. Now that you get it, girl, you better go make good with the man who made this all possible.

  Still carrying Trevor—and promising myself that I wouldn’t let him out of my arms until I was too physically tired to carry him—I approached Tyler.

  “This was all the plan?” I asked. “All of this?”

  “I tried to tell you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Tyler. Please tell me. I’m listening now.”

  So he did. Me getting caught at the house wasn’t a part of the plan. But the tickets to Indonesia had been—several months prior, when Tyler discovered the cartel was involved with the Paxton’s. He knew that he might have to get me out at a moment’s notice if things turned south, and get me to safety far beyond the reach of the cartel.

  He’d turned over all of the evidence to Ben, but Tyler had been sending pieces of evidence to Fitch, the police officer who’d taken me from Mama’s nightclub, at the NYPD throughout his investigation.

  “I knew it was too big just for me,” he said. “I knew that we’d probably need the help of something with a little more clout than a private investigator.”

  And Fitch had waited, sat on each piece of salacious evidence, until he’d gotten the final pieces of the puzzle. The camera I was using to snap photos automatically sent the pictures to an online program that Fitch had access to. Fitch had taken the whole wealth of evidence—our bomb—and set it off.

  As Tyler and I fled the cartels, Chuck Bloom swooped in with Child Protective Services, taking conservatorship of my son until the investigation was complete. At the same time that Jasmine arrived to hold my son, NYPD investigators were hauling one of the biggest cocaine seizures the city had seen in recent history from the Paxton’s basement. They had cartel members in handcuffs right alongside all three of the Paxton’s. There was hardly an investigation. Ben was declared unfit, and sole guardianship over Trevor was granted to me.

  “From that point, it was just the logistics of getting him here,” Tyler said, giving my son a high five as Trevor giggled and offered his tiny palm again. “Jasmine and Nate graciously agreed, and that’s where we are.”

  “I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” I said, tears stinging my eyes. “You’ve given me everything I ever wanted, everything I’ve been working toward all these years. Name your price for helping me in this case, Tyler, but I can never repay you.”

  “There was one price I had in mind,” he said, kissing me softly and running his fingers through my curls.

  I smiled against his lips. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them.

  “My body’s not for sale anymore,” I joked. “Sorry. But you’ve had my heart from the beginning.”

  “And you’ve had mine,” he said. “Shimmy, I love you. It just scared me to death and if we’re being perfectly honest, it still does.”

  “I think it’s okay to be a little scared,” I said.

  “And I’m sorry that I knocked you out in the car,” he said, making me wince at that dark and desperate memory. “You wouldn’t calm down and we had to board a plane in a hurry.”

  “Just don’t let it happen again, Mr. Marlowe,” I said, only half teasing.

  “I would never hurt you willingly,” he said. “And I want to protect you and Trevor for the rest of your lives.”

  It was strange to think of the fact that everything I’d been working for up until now was mine. I was successful and well-adjusted and I was going to raise my baby from here on out. It was all I ever wanted, but now that I had it, I didn’t know what to work toward anymore.

  The answer came to me as I watched Tyler playing peekaboo with Trevor—serious, ex-FBI Tyler, the Tyler who I’d seen brandish a gun and punch a man and seethe, monkeying around to get a smile out of my son.

  Maybe, now, I’d work toward a family. Yes, a family sounded nice.

  ~ END ~

  BOUNDLESS

  Chapter One

  You know the saying, “it’s not over till the fat lady sings?”

  It’s not true. The fat lady doesn’t have to sing if she doesn’t want to. If there are enough other people who sing, the fat lady never has to sing.

  I was proud of it, in a twisted way. Of course, I was always good at keeping my mouth buttoned shut, closed tight. In my business—my former business—I had to be discreet or face getting run out of town.

  But sitting at that table in the courtroom and seeing some of my girls come back to testify against me was something of a reunion. There were some that I’d just seen a couple of weeks ago, when the nightclub got raided. And there were others who I hadn’t seen in years, talking about times I could barely remember.

  If it hadn’t been in court, and I hadn’t been wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles, maybe it would’ve even been pleasant to see all of them again. I would’ve liked to have headphones on, though. They all were witnesses for the prosecution, and they all said the same thing.

  “Mama gave us a place to live and food to eat, but she always kept our money.”

  “Mama let us have our money—a little bit at a time—at first.”

  “After a while, we started stealing bits of the money we were supposed to be giving her, hiding it in our rooms because we were afraid of her.”

  “She tried to kill a girl because she tried to get her money from Mama. Mama came in there shooting a gun at the girl, and the girl jumped out the window.”

  “You always had to do what Mama said. If she wanted you to sleep with someone, you had to. If you didn’t want to, you were out on the streets again or worse.”

  “All Mama cared about was money. She didn’t care about any of us girls. She pretended she did, but we were just a way for her to get her precious money.”

  I couldn’t access any of that precious money to get a good defense attorney for my trial. All of that money I’d worked so hard to save was tied up in the justice system. Instead, I got a court-appointed lawyer. He met with me all of two times before the start of the trial.

  “Tell me what you’d like me to do, Wanda,” he said, staring hard at the blank pad of paper in front of him. He never once looked me in my eyes.

  “I’d like you to help me,” I said, fighting to make eye contact. Why wasn’t he looking at me?

  “It seems to be everyone’s opinion, Wanda, that you’re beyond help,” he said, fidgeting with his pen.

  “My lawyer’s opinion, too?” I asked clasping my hands to keep them from shaking. I wouldn’t give this man the pleasure of knowing I was upset.

  “Have you heard what the media is already saying about you?” he asked. “That you were in charge of a brothel in the heart of New York. That you exploited d
esperate young women. That you’re basically the scum of the earth.”

  I didn’t hear anything in my holding cell at the jail. All I got were dirty looks from the cops who shoved trays of food at me or happened to walk by the cell. After all, I had accused the police chief of frequenting a brothel. Oh, the stories I could tell them about Johnny French if they’d simply asked.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” I said. “Even the scum of the earth has a story. I could tell it in court.”

  “You mean testify?” The lawyer finally looked up from his pad of paper, but he stared at some point around my left ear. I tried to shift my head to make him meet my eyes, but he stubbornly avoided them.

  “Yes. I could testify.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” the lawyer said. “Everyone is eager for this trial to be over as quickly as possible. Everyone except the media, of course. No, Wanda, I think it would be in your best interests not to testify. You’d be ripped apart by the prosecution. Everyone is out to get you here. Don’t forget that.”

  I was swiftly taking that to heart. Not even my own lawyer was in my corner.

  So all I did was sit still and keep quiet at my own hanging.

  I probably shouldn’t have fought the cops when they raided the nightclub. I’d been sleeping—drinking, before that—and they’d surprised me in my office. I thought they were gangsters, some mob-hired heavies sent to shake me down. It’d happened before, back when I was still trying to get the nightclub on its feet and fell into debt with the wrong people.

  I’ll be perfectly honest. Even when I realized they were cops and not mobsters, I still kept fighting. I’d put everything into that nightclub. Everything. I couldn’t just watch it go under without trying to do something.

  And when the nightclub was exposed for what it actually was—a prostitution hub—all my powerful friends deserted me. Particularly the ones who had tasted some of the sweetness the nightclub had to offer. They ran as fast and as far away as they could possibly get.

  Like the police chief, for one. Back at the beginning, when I was younger and Johnny French was a promising young detective rising through the ranks, he’d even paid for the pleasure of my personal companionship. As we both got older, he continued coming to the nightclub, but his tastes ran younger. I had several girls who always made him a very happy customer.

  I treated Johnny right, but he ran screaming away from me when I really needed him. Of course, I might or might not have shouted at the cops shoving me into the back of a patrol car to get their boss for me. Forget professional courtesy. I was a drowning woman and flailing for anything that might save me.

  I was drowning. I had been drowning for a long time, but it took that holding cell in the jail to show me just how far gone I was.

  By the second night in the holding cell, after they’d raided my nightclub, I was hearing things, seeing things that couldn’t possibly be there.

  “Suck my cock, Mama,” Johnny French would wheedle, stroking my hair like he liked to do. “I’ll get you out of here for just one more blow job. That’s the cost of your freedom.”

  “Pay us what you owe us,” my girls would say, clambering at the bars of my cell. There were so many of them, so many faces both dark and pale, featureless beyond the steel bars. “You owe us.”

  “Where are you going?” A little boy, standing there at the edge of the crowd, one slender hand wrapped around the bars. “Why did you leave me?”

  My son. My heart wrenched in my chest and I clutched at the orange jumpsuit covering it.

  “Leave me!” I screamed, ripping off one of my slip-on shoes and heaving it at the crowd. “I can’t take it! Leave me!”

  “What is she hollering about?”

  “Maybe she’s really gone crazy.”

  I couldn’t tell if the two figures standing outside my cell were real or not. My jumpsuit was soaked through with cold sweat, and I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “Please,” I said, my teeth chattering. “Please help me.”

  “I think you’re beyond help,” one of the figures volunteered.

  “I’m not,” I said, starting to sob. “Please help me.”

  “Why’s she shaking like that?”

  “Who cares? Let’s go.”

  “Please,” I said again, shaking so hard that I couldn’t stand up. “Please, something’s wrong. A doctor.”

  “A miracle, you mean.”

  I didn’t know who was talking to me anymore, whether they were real or in my dreams. What was real? Maybe tomorrow I’d wake up in my nightclub to find that this was all just an alcohol-driven nightmare.

  I heaved myself toward the toilet and managed to land most of the vomit in the bowl. It was mostly bile. I’d been having trouble eating.

  “Maybe we should get a doctor.”

  “It’s probably just DTs.”

  “Just DTs? Those can kill a person, you know. What if she’s dead in the morning, when dayside starts working? You know who’ll be blamed, right?”

  “I think a lot of people would like it if she just disappeared. Think of how many lives she’s ruined. I say we let fate decide.”

  Lying on the floor of my cell, my world spinning, my reality in shambles, and I might die. With the way I was feeling, I was ready for it. I would welcome it. And if I really deserved it, well, then all the more reason. Still, it was unbearable to listen to two strangers judge me so harshly.

  “If you’re not getting a doctor, then get the fuck out!” I roared, throwing my other shoe at the figures. I still didn’t know whether they were real or not.

  One of them laughed a little incredulously. “I guess we really will let fate decide.”

  When they left, the others crowded back in.

  “You sold us. You sold our bodies. You sold our souls.”

  “C’mon, Mama. Suck me off. It’s for the best. It’s what’ll help you the most.”

  “You left me. You left me. Why did you leave me?”

  “Enough!” I screamed, covering my face in my hands.

  This wasn’t a dream or a nightmare. This was hell. This was my own personal hell, one that I had created through my own choice and actions, and maybe I even deserved it.

  Chapter Two

  “We the jury find the defendant guilty.”

  I had wondered if there would be cheering. With my lawyer’s attitude from the beginning of the trial, I knew there was no chance of any other verdict. And from what I could separate as fact from hallucination from my terrible detox in the holding cell, everyone wanted to see me burn.

  But there wasn’t any sort of applause. There weren’t any sounds at all.

  It was as if all of the people in the courtroom had already anticipated this outcome, just as I had. There was an air of acceptance, of resignation, even. Yes, of course she’s guilty. We knew it all along.

  There were a litany of charges against me, all of them having to do with promoting prostitution and compelling prostitution. The real feather in the prosecution’s hat was the sex trafficking conviction. That meant real time.

  Time. It was a funny thing. At night, it dragged by, the darkness absolute in my holding cell. I was left alone and it gave me so many long hours to think about my life. What I’d done. What I hadn’t.

  The day after the verdict, I’d met with my lawyer.

  “We could always appeal,” he said, not looking at me.

  “And how do you think that would go?” I asked, just to see what he’d say.

  “It’d only put off the inevitable, Wanda,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you.”

  “I’ve appreciated your honesty from the beginning,” I said sardonically. I’d never even bothered asking for my lawyer’s name.

  Time passed—several months’ worth. After the verdict came the sentencing. The judge made sure that all my girls were compensated. I didn’t know how I felt about it anymore. I used to think all the money that the nightclub was earning was mine. I’d started the nig
htclub, after all, and I’d done it to make enough money to build a life for my family.

  Now it was all gone.

  Time was the only thing I had left, miserable time, and the judge gave me a whole twenty years of it in prison. I was rich with time.

  I don’t know what I expected to happen with the sentencing. If I knew that the verdict was already set in stone before I went to trial, then it was the sentencing that was the mystery. Twenty years in prison and not a cent to my name. By the time I got out, I’d nearly be seventy years old. An old woman, and most of her prime spent locked up.

  “Don’t despair,” my lawyer told me as he almost cheerfully packed up his blank pad of paper in his briefcase.

  “What should I be doing?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him. Twenty years and no money? Life was pretty much over for me.

  “With good behavior, you could be paroled in about six or seven years,” he said, putting his pen in his jacket pocket.

  Six or seven years? That didn’t sound nearly as bad as twenty.

  “How does that work?” I asked as the bailiff approached.

  “Adhere to the rules of the facility,” my lawyer said, looking at some spot around my nose. Was the man incapable of making eye contact with me?

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Follow the rules?”

  “Show that you’re willing to change and ready to do so,” he said. “Let no good deed go unnoticed. Don’t waste the time you were sentenced to. Think of it as a gift.”

  “A gift? Prison? Really?”

  “A chance to get your life put back together,” the lawyer said. “Did you really think that you were going to run a brothel for the rest of your life? Learn a skill. Figure things out. Get yourself together again. Move on.”

  It was funny, in a way, that the most valuable advice my lawyer had given me came after the trial and the sentencing—neither of which outcome he’d even attempted to influence.

  “Thanks, I guess,” I said, looking at his wan face, his overpriced suit. I still didn’t know his name, and I still didn’t care to know it. The bailiff led me away, out of the courtroom, away from the spectators and the cameras and everything that had happened.