An Embarrassment of Monsters: A Dark Romantic Suspense Novel (Alace Sweets Book 3)

by MariaLisa deMora

  Powered up, it took her three screens of credentials to insert herself into the closed network she shared with Owen. Over the past four months, they’d worked several gigs together, each more rigorous than the last. After the final one had been put to its bloody bed, he’d told Alace he was going off-grid for a couple of weeks. That was two weeks ago, so she’d expected to hear from him soon. What she hadn’t expected was an out-of-the-blue SOS signal.

  The icon representing him was active, limned in green, showing he was online now.

  Before Alace could type in a greeting, a request for a video connection appeared on the screen. She grabbed her headset as she accepted, plugging it into the computer before slipping the earpieces into place.

  The image resolved into a bedraggled Owen staring at her, piney woods the backdrop to his exhausted-looking, unshaven face. Where he’d chosen to go hiking and camping was a notorious stretch of East Coast geography, often rumored to be the setting for literally dozens of body dumps.

  Wonder if he stumbled onto something unexpected.

  His first words tore that thought away.

  Chapter Two

  Owen

  When Alace appeared on the tablet, he jumped straight to business without even a greeting. “Two weeks before we shut down the pedos selling sibs, they had a successful event. You said you were able to dump everything from their systems. If it included the previous auctions, I need to know the names of the buyers.”

  Alace stared at him briefly through the camera, then dipped her chin. Over her shoulder, she added to what apparently was an ongoing discussion, “Eric, I need the extra monitors plugged in.” Then, with her gaze turned back to Owen, she promised him, “We’ve got it all. Everything we need.”

  He took in a deep breath, his eyes going beyond the tablet to where the child sat. Twenty minutes ago, the boy had stumbled into his early morning campsite, naked and unaware, bruising blooming over his torso.

  The rustling first heard in the distance intensified, and Owen held his hand low to block the fuel cube flame as best he could, cursing even that tiny bit of light to blind him. The sun wasn’t yet tinting the skyline, but whatever had been sleeping in the nearby scrub was apparently awake and headed his way. Mostly small varmints in this area, but black bears had been known to wander down from the nearby mountains to dig for grubs in the fertile ground. With a hand on the gun strapped to his thigh, he waited.

  The dim light didn’t reach far between the trees, but the sounds indicated whatever was coming, it was arrowing straight towards him and the flame. Then the light glimmered off a shape about four feet high, bipedal, and thin. A child? He had only a moment to consider before a naked boy about twelve years old stood across the small clearing.

  “Hey.” The boy didn’t react to the sound, just stared at him. Owen’s gut twisted as he took in the purple splotches along the boy’s upper arms and legs, mixed in and overlapping more bruises in green and yellow, all indicating long-term abuse. “What’s going on?” He stood, wanting to be on his feet for this encounter.

  “Mister.” The high-pitched and wavering voice backed up Owen’s gut feeling the child hadn’t hit puberty yet. He was immature physically, too, which could be racked up against long-term starvation, Owen guessed. The boy wove back and forth, clearly exhausted and virtually out on his feet.

  When he stumbled, Owen smoothly moved in time to save him a tumble. He kept the boy from going to his knees and pulled him to one side of the camp stove. Owen swept the sleeping bag from the still-hanging hammock and wrapped it around the boy as he guided him to sit.

  “You gotta save my sister.”

  “What?” Preoccupied with cataloging the injuries the boy had suffered, because Owen had seen more bruises on his back and flanks, he hadn’t quite heard anything past the echoing “mister,” which had drawn the protective instincts to the surface. The boy in the warehouse had called him mister, and been worried about his sister, too. For a moment, Owen thought maybe he’d imagined the boy’s words.

  “My sister, she’s still there. He’s got her.”

  A chill colder than the North Atlantic flowed over Owen. He got the boy situated and then crouched slightly away, next to the camp stove. The boy was so cold he wasn’t even shivering, but the flesh of his arms where Owen had gripped was chilled to the bone. Too fuckin’ cold. “Who’s got your sister?” He put the pan of water on to boil, but instead of the oatmeal he’d been planning to prepare, he dug into his food bag and pulled out a freeze-dried dinner. Food will help warm him. This kid needs to eat. He brought out his flashlight, too, and wound the handle a few times before setting it aside, pointing the stream of light off to the side to keep from blinding either of them. “Were you there, too? Did you escape somehow? Is it family or what? Foster care?” No way would he gloss over the boy’s questions or story, making nice for polite society. At this point, anything the kid said was truth, simply based on his physical condition and the fact he’d been dumped in this place, out of all the land along the East Coast. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Not fosters. That was before. Now, our owner still has her.”

  Owen’s hands stilled, and he turned his head to see the boy staring at him, an anguished expression on his face.

  Owner.

  His gorge rose, bitter bile flooding his mouth. “What can you tell me about that?”

  “He bought us a few weeks ago and I made him mad. Everything’s been…” His voice trailed off, and from the twist his features adopted, Owen thought if he’d had any spare fluid in his body, he’d be weeping. “It was hard, mister. Real hard. I made him mad, but it was just to keep Shiloh safe. I promised her I’d keep her safe.”

  “We’re going to get her out of wherever she is.” Owen didn’t hesitate to make the promise, because he’d turn over every mountain even if Alace wouldn’t help. She will, though. He had faith in her, and the realization surprised him, because faith and trust were different beasts, both earned, but through different processes. The fact Alace had impressed him enough for him to hold her up to that kind of standard was shocking but good. “I need you to tell me everything you know. Drink this.” He handed the kid his water bottle. “Pull the top up to open it.” At the boy’s troubled stare at the bottle, Owen reassured him, “It’s only water. I promise. I’ll take a drink if that puts your mind at ease.”

  “It’s just…” The kid made a face, nose scrunching in a way that had Owen lowering his estimation of the boy’s age by a couple of years. “I can’t let anything happen to her. I’m all she’s got.”

  Dumping the meal into the now-boiling water, Owen stirred it with a spork and set it aside. He used a stick to knock the still-burning fuel cube onto the sandy ground inside the fire ring. “You’re dehydrated and dangerously chilled. I want to get some water into you, and then you’ll eat that.” He was breaking small sticks into kindling as he talked, tilting the tip of his chin towards the pan of food. “And we’ll talk. I need to get the story, but know this—what’s your name?”

  The boy’s chin lifted, and Owen saw the muscles of his throat work as he swallowed hard. “Kelly.”

  “Kelly, my name’s Owen. I’m a kind of specialist. I specialize in helping people who are in exactly the kind of situation your sister is in. To do that, I’m going to need to have all the information I can to make sure when I help her, I don’t inadvertently hurt any good guys.” Kelly’s gaze didn’t waver, boring deep into Owen. “I’m not going to hurt you or her. I promise you. Swear to you the water’s safe, and so is the food. Your job is to give me the info I need. Can you do your job to help Shiloh?”

  Kelly nodded slowly and lifted the bottle. He had a fleeting wrestling match with the top, then got it open and took a deep swallow, his gaze still not leaving Owen’s face. “You’re going to hurt the bad guys?” Owen lifted one shoulder, giving Kelly the only response he’d allow himself. “Good.” Kelly swallowed again, this time seeming easier, and took another deep drink from the bottl
e. Owen tipped his head towards the pan of food. Kelly reached out and gripped the handle, dragging it close enough to lift, even that small weight stretching his limits. With the pan propped against his legs under the sleeping bag, he held the spork awkwardly in his fist and shoved the first bite into his mouth, spitting it out immediately and hissing. “Hot.” The next sporkful he put in his mouth was cooled first by blowing on it.

  Satisfied the boy would continue eating, Owen set his teeth and moved from adding kindling over the sputtering fuel cube to stacking more wood in place. He hated fire. Fortunately this would have to be a small one because they wouldn’t be here long, but while they were, Kelly needed the extra warmth. And Owen needed the light to see the boy’s face more clearly. The flashlight was nice, but if he aimed the beam at the boy’s face, any conversation would feel more like an interrogation than a debriefing. By the time he sat back on his heels, the flames had caught and were feeding from the kindling to the lower pieces of wood.

  Glancing at Kelly, he saw the pan was now empty and set to the side. Spork evidently abandoned, the boy was wiping his fingers against the ground when he caught Owen’s gaze and nodded, then lifted the bottle of water—now missing a couple of inches at the top—and drank again. Thinking ahead to walking out of the woods, Owen winced at the idea of the kid setting his bare feet on the trail. He dug through his backpack again and brought out a fresh shirt and set of socks, all he had to offer. Kelly took the clothing with a muttered, “Thank you,” and somehow managed to pull everything on under the cover of the sleeping bag.

  “Okay, now that we’ve got you on the way to being warm again, let’s hear it. Tell me everything, Kelly. What happened, how did you wind up where you were?” Owen glanced around the clearing and decided he needed some distance to clear his mind, because his instincts were to pull the boy close and reassure him, let him sleep, keep him safe, and not to stress him even more. Debriefing him would definitely be stressful, so Owen used the fire as a barrier and settled across the small space. Close enough to reassure, far enough away to allow himself to be effective. “Tell me how you came to be with your owner.”

  “We were in a big building but stuck inside a tiny room. They took us to a bigger room and there were a bunch of men. They…they touched us. Some of them in bad ways. Our owner pinched our muscles and had us get down on all fours. There was this one guy in charge, and he started shouting things, but not like he was mad. The men shouted back, but nothing made sense. Then it was over, and they took us to another tiny room, but there were plates of food waiting, cups of water.” He glanced over at the bottle of water, set aside so he could dress in the poor selections Owen’d provided. “We were so hungry. It had been days since they’d given us anything. We ate it all.”

  “It was drugged, wasn’t it?” Owen scowled at the ground, the ease with which he understood the traffickers’ methods making him nauseous. I’m not like them. “You can’t feel bad about that. I’m sure they planned everything down to the last detail. It’s what they do, Kelly. They’ve got it down to a science.”

  “Yeah. I don’t remember anything after that for a long time. When I woke up, I was a box in the back of a truck. I could hear the wheels on the highway, and we were going fast. The wind was whistling through the holes in the top of the box. I freaked out, because I didn’t see Shiloh. I…I started crying and screaming, because I’d promised her I’d find a way to save us.” He shook his head, and Owen was humbled at the idea of the loyalty that had driven this boy—a child in fact—to try to keep his sister safe, even in unbelievable conditions. “She was in a box next to me. It was really hot and the metal sides burned, but then after it got dark, the wind was so cold, I could hear her teeth chattering.”

  “What happened next? Did he stop anywhere or drive straight to where he kept you?”

  “He didn’t stop except for gas. That was when he heard us whispering to each other. I had put my fingers through the holes, trying to reach Shiloh. She was so scared, Owen. I just didn’t want her to be scared anymore. He hammered on the top of the box and shouted at me.”

  The man had probably picked the most remote fueling station, worried about the kids calling for help. Intimidation and isolation would have been effective tools in keeping the kids cowed and quiet. Fucker.

  “His house was at the end of a long road, rough because it had a bunch of holes I guess. When we got there, I saw a bunch of other kids, all like us. We weren’t supposed to talk, not to each other and not to him, but at night or when he went away, everybody did it anyway. Just whispering, you know?”

  The skin of Owen’s arms pulled into gooseflesh. “He has a bunch of kids?”

  Kelly nodded. “Uh-huh. We were numbers fifteen and sixteen. He didn’t let us use our names. We were just the pack. The dogs had names, but we were numbers.”

  “The dogs?” Owen fed another branch into the fire, gritting his teeth when the flames flared up, throwing sparks into the air. He hated fire with a passion, and here he was making this one bigger.

  “Yeah, they were part of the pack, too.”

  “When you say pack, what does that mean? Did you live with the dogs outside? With the other kids?” Every detail added onto the image Owen had in his head, every nuance of Kelly’s story a building block for this unexpected mission.

  “Yeah. There was a shed we slept in at night, in piles.” The kid gestured around him, as if indicating bodies strewn all around. “It was open on the front, so the more dogs you could talk into sleeping with you, the warmer you were. The older kids were their favorites. They’d been there so long and had slipped them so much food, the dogs loved them.”

  “How old were they? How old are you, Kelly?”

  “I’m…I don’t know. I think thirteen? Shiloh is ten. I keep track of her birthday. It’s September third. She’s always real good, Owen. The other kids were a mix. Some older and some younger. The oldest probably a couple years older than me, and the youngest was five. He did okay for himself. I think the pack might have been all he knew. He didn’t talk at all, ever.” Kelly’s expression was strained, earnest anxiety dragging furrows in his forehead.

  “When you talked at night, did the others tell their stories? How they came to be part of the pack?” It killed him to speak about the kids’ living situation in such a way. Echoing the known taxonomy was the quickest way to keep Kelly on track. “Did the man own them, too?”

  “Yeah. Everyone who told a story was kinda the same. Some of it was different, but mostly the same. One of the boys, Dominic, he really helped us out the first few days. If it wasn’t for him…I didn’t know the rules, and the man was always after me about something because I kept messing up. Dom helped a lot. The other boys were more likely to steal our food or push us out of a good sleeping spot than they were to help with anything.”

  “Was Shiloh the only little girl?” He didn’t have a good feeling about this. At ten, if she were as underweight as Kelly she would appear asexual in nature, but if all the children were kept naked, then her physical differences would stand out like a beacon.

  Kelly’s face twisted with remembered anger. “Yeah.” That was nearly a growl, rattling up through the boy’s chest and throat, a sound of such rage Owen became empathetically angry for him. “She was the only female. The rest of us were male.”

  God bless. The man had stripped even the more common human terminology from the kids like calling them boys and girls. What could possibly have been the reasoning for forcing the kids to live as dogs? “Were they mean because of that?”

  “Yeah, that’s what made the man mad. The others kept picking on her. She was so much smaller than everybody except the youngest kids, and those all had their protectors in the pack. After a while, all Shiloh had was me. The older boys kept picking on her, especially if I wasn’t right there. They’d force her to fight. Made me sick. I hate them. I hate the man, too.” Kelly’s bottom chin bumped a couple of times, and Owen watched the struggle as he fought for control. The b
oy dragged his bottom lip into his mouth and bit down hard to force the emotion away.

  Owen waited for Kelly to take a drink from the bottle and then asked, “What happened to make the man mad? Why did he bring you out here and leave you? I’m assuming that was him that did it, right? Or were you able to run away?”

  “I’d never leave Shiloh like that.” At the suggestion he’d abandon his sister, it looked like the boy was on the verge of exploding upward from where he sat. The sleeping bag fell to the ground as he flung his arms wide as if to keep even the idea at bay. His breathing spiked, and white showed all around the irises of his eyes. Panting, Kelly semi-repeated himself, “I would never leave her.”

  “Okay. Okay. I believe you, Kelly. I do. She’s your sister, and you’d do anything for her.”

  “I would. I did. I had a chance to run away so many times, but I couldn’t take her with me. So I stayed because I couldn’t just leave her behind.”

  “The man brought you out here? How far was the drive? Do you know his name?” Brow scrunched into a frown, Kelly shook his head, and Owen groaned at himself. One question at a time. He needed to focus on what had led to the man dumping his bought and paid for property, something Owen knew was expensive. Participating in those auctions took a next level of affluence and influence, no matter if the income was gained legally or not. If he’d purchased sixteen children, he’d be rich enough to consider himself untouchable, no doubt. “Sorry, Kelly. What happened so you wound up here?”

  “One of the boys was being a jerk to Shiloh and I got into it with him. I took my licks, but he was hurting too. I wasn’t going to let him think he could do what he wanted. I knew the man didn’t like it when we fought like that. But Five had hurt Shiloh. She was all scraped up. Then the man put his hands on her and I just…I couldn’t stand it. Not one more time. I didn’t think, though. We all knew not to try and fight him. He had the remote. He could do what he wanted.”