A grin tilted up on the side of her face. “That’s really sweet that you would that for me.”
“I want you to be comfortable here.”
She didn’t know how to react to that, nobody had wanted her to be comfortable in such a long time. Nobody had cared for what she thought in such a long time, that it shocked her. “Thank you.”
“No big deal.” He shrugged. “But let’s go get you settled; otherwise, we might not have any more alone time as soon as everybody else realizes that you’re here.”
That was exactly what worried her. Would everyone else be able to leave it alone or would they press and pull her in different directions? She knew one thing; she would have to remember to be true to herself here. If not, who Christine Stone really was would get lost again, and she didn’t want that to happen, especially when she was just starting to find her.
“Is it okay if I put my stuff on the left side of the sink in here?” she asked an hour later. They had spent time putting her clothes up, and now they were moving on to her knickknacks and toiletries.
“Wherever you want to put it is fine. I don’t really have a set spot.”
And that had been the truth. It was one of the reasons that Meredith and Jessica were giving him such a hard time. He’d woken them up at 5 AM when he’d gotten the text from her, begging them to help him clean up his room. It had been a mess, considering he spent most of his time in the cave. It had been almost embarrassing. In return for helping him, the two ladies figured they could also be all up in his business.
“It smells good in here, lemony.”
Thank you, Pine-Sol. “I like to be clean,” he told her.
She smiled from where she was. She knew that was probably a hell of a lie. A few minutes ago, she’d opened up what he told her was a storage closet that he never used and that she shouldn’t…an avalanche had almost fallen on her head. It looked like everything that had possibly been on the floor had been shoved into that closet.
“I see that.”
For some reason he felt like he hadn’t fooled her. “You know don’t you?”
“That you probably shoved all your shit into that closet when I texted you this morning?”
He laughed, a blush working its way up his cheeks. “Am I that transparent?”
“Not really.” She laughed along with him. “I’ve been known to do the same thing every once in a while.”
They stood in silence for a moment, neither one sure of what to say. “So,” she asked. “Who will I be meeting and when?”
“I’m waiting for Liam, the pres, to tell me when he wants to meet with you. His sister is being used as a pawn, just like you.”
She hated that. “I’m sorry.”
“This isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of a sick man who found out a secret from another sick man. We need to know what we’re dealing with here, and you are our ticket to that. You’re invaluable right now, I hope you realize that.”
“I’m not sure how invaluable you’ll see me once I’m done. Who’s to say your pres won’t kill me once he gets the info out of me that he needs.” She shuddered at the thought, but wondered if she didn’t deserve to meet the business end of a gun. Because her life had been so fucked up, she was fucking up other people’s.
“He won’t. He’s a dad, and once you tell him exactly what happened, he’s going to be pissed, but not at you. He’s going to be pissed for you. He has daddy issues just like you seem to have…the person I’m most worried about is Jagger.”
Those were her exact thoughts. She didn’t want him to think that he had caused this for her. But neither one of them, when it came down to it, could really deny that. Her brother leaving had amplified their father’s moods, and when Jagger was no longer around to deflect him, he’d turned on her. If she could keep that quiet, she wanted to. There was no reason that Jagger had to be miserable now because she had been then. She hoped they could start over and get to know one another again, but before they did that, she had to figure out a way to tell him everything. She had worked on forgiving him for a long time. She was closer now than she had ever been, but she hoped that he would be able to forgive himself.
Travis’ cell went off, and he fished it out of his pocket, grimacing before he put it back in. “It’s Liam and he wants us up to the house.” He rolled his head around on his shoulders, stretching his neck out before he reached into his other pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You want one?” He offered the pack to her.
She’d never smoked a day in her life, but it felt like she needed something to calm her nerves, her heart beat like it would come out of her chest. “Sure.”
“Have you ever smoked a cigarette before?” he asked, a small smile playing on his face.
“Well, no, but I gotta do something to calm down.”
He pulled a fresh cigarette out of his pack and put the filtered end up to his mouth. She watched as he lit it, cupping his hand around the flame and the burning tip. He inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke away from her face. Steele licked his lips and held it up to her. “Here ya go.”
She eyed him, not sure how she felt about taking it from him. It seemed like something a couple would do, and that wasn’t officially what they were, but there was another part of her that loved the fact her lips were about to touch where his just had. It was that desire that won out. Christine grabbed the cigarette from his fingers and stuck it in her mouth, inhaling like she’d seen people in the movies and in real-life do on occasion.
“Not too deep,” he cautioned as she started coughing loudly. “How is it?” he asked, a grin on his face.
“Great,” she wheezed. “Absolutely great.”
Chapter Twelve
“So this is the infamous Christine Stone?”
Christine did her best not to be intimidated by the man who stood before her, but authority oozed off of him in waves. He wore it like a badge of honor—it almost reminded her of Clinton.
“This is her.” The don’t-be-a-dick tone of Travis’ voice told Liam that maybe he had laid it on a little too thick, but they were all on edge. Someone was threatening the club and members of their family.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” he asked, sitting at his kitchen table.
She did so, breathing a sigh of relief when Travis sat down beside her. She was half afraid that Liam would say he couldn’t be a part of what was starting to feel very much like an interrogation.
“I’m not trying to scare you, honestly I’m not,” Liam started, as he reached over and pulled a cigarette out of a pack that sat on the table. “You want one?” he offered it to her.
After her experience moments before, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to touch a cigarette again in her life. “No, thank you.”
“I’m not going to bullshit you,” he told her after he had fired one up and took a long inhale from it.
“I’m glad.” And she was. She was sick of bullshit in her life; she was working on clearing out the bullshit.
“Whoever this Clinton guy is wants you back in a bad way. He’s willing to use Travis’ cousin and my sister.” He let that sink in for a few moments; let her really understand the gravity of the situation. It wasn’t like he was picking on her because he had no one else to talk to. She held the key as to what this man wanted, and she refused to talk about it. “I want to know what you know—every single detail. You got that?”
“There’s no need to talk to her like she’s a fucking idiot.” Travis took exception to the tone that Liam used.
Liam’s eyes cut over to his communications officer, his face hard, his tone harder. “I can do this either with or without you, my man. I was polite in letting you sit in on this.”
The thinly veiled threat did nothing to make Travis feel better. In fact, it increased his anxiety. She didn’t deserve this shit, not after everything she’d already been through, but it wouldn’t help to talk back or down to Liam either. He would throw him out faster than he could open his mouth and then t
alk to her however he wanted to. “I know.” The thank you wasn’t implied and it went unsaid.
She took a deep breath and looked inside herself for some fountain of energy she didn’t know that she had. She had never planned to tell anyone anything about Clinton Herrington. Once she had escaped, she figured she would live her whole life looking over her shoulder, but she never figured she’d have to relive the things that he had done, what he had put her through. As she began to speak, her mind drifted back to the scene that she spoke about.
“I don’t want to marry him!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. Her father, her own flesh and blood, had all but sold her to this man. There had even been a contract written up and signed between the two of them. Slave trading had been outlawed for hundreds of years, but it was apparently alive and well in Kentucky. She wondered what in the world her father had gotten her into.
He sighed, slapping the end of his belt in his hand. “Christine.” The way he said her name spoke of boredom and impatience. “You know that it hasn’t been cheap for us to raise you. God blessed us when Edward left the way he did.”
“His name is Jagger.” She tilted her chin up in defiance.
“His Godly name is Edward, and you will call him that.”
There was silence between the two of them as a battle of wills ensued. Finally, she had to break eye contact, she couldn’t stand it anymore. How could a parent do this to their own child? How could he wish one dead and then sell the other one off?
“What will I do?” she asked, her voice small and scared.
“You will service him, just like a wife is supposed to. You’ve read the Good Book, just as I have.”
His version and her version were definitely not the same, but it had always been that way. Elias Stone had always seen things the way he wanted to see them; he’d always been a master manipulator, especially when it came to the Good Book.
“I just don’t think that’s what it says, Dad.” She dared not look back into his eyes. He might smite her. He had done it before, numerous times. That was one of the reasons Jagger had left as soon as he turned eighteen.
“Are you talking back to me?” he yelled.
She felt moisture on her face. He had spit on her. “No, sir,” she said softly. It was the only thing she could do.
“Then you will go upstairs, pack a bag, and then come meet your husband.”
“What did you do?” Liam asked, as he let her have a breather.
“I did what he told me to do. I was so tired, tired of walking around on eggshells, tired of being knocked down, tired of being talked down to. I thought that maybe, for once, I had gotten a better end of the deal than he knew. I mean, I had snuck romance novels from the library.” She sniffed as unexpected tears came to her eyes. “For once I decided to be optimistic. It was the absolute worst mistake of my life.”
The man who had come to get her hadn’t spoken one word to her since he’d picked her and her bag up from her family home. It was very disconcerting. She wasn’t sure what to do with this. The man was much older than she had been lead to believe, and now she was nervous.
“Go inside and have a seat at the kitchen table,” he told her. The first words he’d spoken to her. They were coarse and demanding, telling her that he wanted no argument from her. It was the same kind of tone her father used with her, and she absolutely hated it.
After she had a seat, a woman came over to her and pulled her up by the hand. The woman wasn’t much older than she was. “I need your clothes,” she told Christine. “And you need to take your hair down.”
For the next two hours, she was poked and prodded. Her clothes were long gone, as was her modesty. She had been waxed—everywhere—and her hair had even been dyed. It was now a garish white color. And she was given contacts that made her eyes even bluer. Looking at herself in the only mirror she was given, she realized that she looked like a young girl, almost like a doll. She’d been made into something that she wasn’t. “Why did you do this?” she asked the woman who had brought her back to the room and performed all the rituals on her.
“Because it’s what Clinton likes.”
That first night, she was introduced to a lot of what Clinton liked, even more throughout the next few weeks. He married her seven days after she came to live with him. Two months after that was when the other girls started disappearing.
“What happened to them?” Liam asked her, running a hand over his face. This went a lot deeper than any of them knew. It went deeper than he’d wanted to get involved in.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, her face blank. “I like to think that they got away, but I’m almost certain one of two things happened to all of them.”
“What’s that?” Travis asked as he reached over and grabbed her hand, trying to soothe her.
“There were other men who came around. I think what we were was a ring, not necessarily pornography, we were all of age.”
“That’s bullshit,” Liam spit out. “Pornography is pornography, no matter how old you are. But what I think you were part of was more like slave trade.”
She had thought that many times while she had been “learning her lesson” from Clinton, but she had been afraid to say it. If she said it, it meant it was true, and if there was one thing she had learned, it was if you said words, you gave them power. It could be good power or bad power, but either way, it gave them something over other people.
“You said one thing happened or another, what was the other?” Travis asked, although he had a pretty good idea. People who did things like this didn’t want there to be witnesses.
That same look came over her face again.
“Have you seen Tracy?” she asked one of the other girls as she folded the laundry for the house.
“Not in the past few days. She was supposed to go with Clinton to Cumberland Falls. He came back last night, but I haven’t seen her.”
Christine’s blood ran cold. Tracy was her friend, and at night, the two of them had taken to whispering about what they would do when they were finally out of this house. They knew they couldn’t be made to stay here forever. One day, someone would come and find them. They both held on strong to that belief. It was the only thing that helped them make it through. This time, Christine had a very bad feeling. As she opened her mouth to say something, Clinton came into the room and handed them a towel with blood on it.
“That’s going to need to be disposed of. The cat got run over,” he mentioned, as an afterthought.
When he left, they looked at the towel, neither one of them wanting to touch it. Neither one of them believed that the cat had gotten run over, especially when the aforementioned cat came in the room after Clinton had left. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, Christine took the towel and threw it in with the other whites, pouring bleach over the top of it. It was then that she knew she had to leave; she had to figure out a way to get out. She knew that if she didn’t, she would die.
“Jesus Christ,” Travis breathed.
“One by one, the girls disappeared, and another cat got run over, until I was the only one left,” she whispered.
“So you can pin this on him,” Liam finished for her. “You have just enough to pin a handful of murders on this man. Not to mention, I think we can all agree that he was doing some sort of slave trading.”
“I have a ton of questions,” Travis said. “How did he keep this quiet? How does no one else know about him?”
“Do I have to answer anymore right now?”
The two men had a good look at her. She was pale and her eyes were drawn tight. “No,” Travis answered for the two of them. “You’re good for now. Let me take you back to the clubhouse, and then Liam and I can meet with the rest of them and figure out what we’re going to do.”
“What about Jagger?” she asked.
At some point, and that point was going to be soon, they were going to have to deal with him. “We’ll deal with it tomorrow,” he told her. “Right now, I think all of u
s need to sleep on this. You’ve given us a lot to think about.”
She’d also given herself a lot to think about. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted anymore, but she was very happy that she wouldn’t have to go through this by herself. Even a little bit of support was better than no support at all.
Chapter Thirteen
Travis sat in his cave later that night, checking on Heaven Hill’s interests. As he scanned the cameras, he saw a car pull up to Roni’s apartment building. It wasn’t unusual for someone to park in her other parking spot, but this car looked familiar. Doing what he did best, he tapped into the Wi-Fi of the apartment building’s security cameras and zoomed in.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he chuckled.
Rooster was making his way up the sidewalk, and miracle of all miracles, he wasn’t dressed in his sheriff’s uniform. Dare he say that Rooster looked like he was about to go out on a date? He shook his head as Roni let his cousin in and quickly shut the door.
He clicked out of that feed and took a look at everything else. It all looked closed up for the night, and he was exhausted. The last few weeks had taken a lot out of him, and all he wanted to do was close his eyes for a week and catch up on all the sleep that he missed. It wasn’t unusual for him to go on little sleep, but it was starting to take a toll. Shutting down everything but the essentials, he set the alarms and took one final sweep of his cave. He usually checked his feelings before he shut the door. Did he feel like he could go to his dorm room for a few hours? Was he at ease? Usually if he wasn’t, something was going to happen. Tonight he was thankful that he was at ease.
When Travis made his way back to his dorm room, he felt odd. He’d had women in his dorm before, but never any that felt like this. He actually cared what she thought, wanted to make her happy in his own way. Should he knock on the door? Was it okay for him to just to walk in? Had Christy decided to move to an unoccupied room? They did have some of those. He hadn’t shown them to her, but someone else could have. Glancing at the black watch he wore on his right wrist, he saw that it was later than he had meant for it to be. Opening the door slowly, he tried to be quiet as he walked into the room.
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