by Zoey Parker
So I went. I didn’t have any personal belongings, so there was no reason to stop by the room to grab anything. As soon as I made it past the door, however, he grabbed me.
His fingers closed around my arm and jerked me back. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he snapped.
“From the look on your face, I figured you wanted me gone.”
“Like hell. Get in here,” he said, pulling me into the bedroom.
“What the hell, Blade?” I snapped as he closed the door behind us. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Sit down.” He scowled down at me as I sat on the edge of the bed.
“What’s happening?” I asked him. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about those cops who came by earlier today. They were looking for someone who shouldn’t have been at the auction last night,” he told me.
“We already talked about this. You know I wasn’t trying to cause any problems. I was put there against my will.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about now. I think the same person who got you mixed up in it put someone else there, too, someone who turned out to be underage.”
“Oh. Oh damn. Did you find the girl?” I asked.
“I did.”
“Is she okay? How old was she?” The questions were falling out of my mouth as soon as I could think them.
“She’s fine, but look, that’s not important. I think you might be connected to this same guy, so I’ve got to ask you something.” It was obvious he was trying to preface the question to make it easier for him to ask me, but I wanted to know more about the girl. I needed to know more.
“What do you mean she’s not important? Tell me, is she okay?” I raised my voice.
“She’s fine. I tucked her away somewhere safe. Look, it’s important you let me ask you this question. If you’re connected to the same guy, you might be in danger. If he set you up to get sold off at an auction and finds out you got away, he could come after you.” He knelt down in front of me while he was talking. He looked up at me with sincere emotions in his eyes. He really felt what he was saying.
“What do you want me to tell you, Blade?” I asked him. “We’ve already been over everything, and my ex probably doesn’t even know about these damn auctions. Otherwise, he probably would have put me in one of them a lot sooner,” I argued.
“Well, that’s what I need to find out. Who was your ex?”
I asked myself why I was defending Axel by not giving up his name to Blade. There was no good reason to keep it from Blade. Still, I knew—somehow, I just knew if I gave up Axel’s name, the Marauders would be on his tail. I sighed and looked down at my hands in my lap.
“Axel Walker,” I told him.
His face suddenly dropped, and I knew right then I was in more trouble than I had realized. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Okay, tell me what happened again,” he said calmly after taking a moment to compose himself.
I went back over everything with him. The yelling. The hitting. The threats. I told him again about how I’d grabbed a jacket – that was all, just a jacket – and about how I’d left. I ran out, telling Axel not to come after me. I laughed at myself as I told him how I’d wound up on the street, thinking I was tough enough to sleep in an alleyway for the night, hoping I could find somewhere to stay the next day. My laughter was short-lived, though, as I reached the part where he came in.
“Why do you keep asking me to tell you the story again?” I asked him.
“Just in case any part of it can shine a light on what’s happening. It’s really strange that an undocumented girl and an underage girl would show up at the same time on the same night, both of them connected to the same man. That’s a very strange coincidence,” he told me, patting my leg.
“You don’t think Axel is somehow responsible for both of us do you? How the hell would he have known where I went?” I asked, not wanting to believe I could have been followed.
“I don’t think you realize how deep your ex runs. He’s in with some pretty serious criminals who have some serious power and connections. Chances are, someone was keeping tabs on you,” Blade explained. “But don’t worry, all that’s over now. You’re safe.”
“But you just said I wasn’t safe,” I argued. “You just said you might have to move me somewhere safer.”
“I don’t know yet. I need to gather more information. One way or another, though, I’m going to protect you. Don’t you worry about that. You’re okay.”
I didn’t feel okay. Blade seemed troubled. He furrowed his brow. His eyes had an angry look. He was not happy about what I’d told him, and I wondered what it meant for me.
“Sit tight,” he told me. “Hang out at the clubhouse a little while longer, until I figure some things out. If you want, you can go downstairs and grab a drink. No one here will mess with you or let anything happen to you.” He patted my knee again as he got up.
“Where are you going?” I asked him.
He turned around to answer me, towering over me as he stood in front of the bed. “I’ve got to gather some more information on what’s going on and figure out what to do next. Your ex is trying to bring this whole thing down, and for some reason, I feel like he’s targeting me specifically, which means he knew I was going to be there. No one knows what I do for Vlad, except for the guys who work the auctions. No one here knows. The Marauders are oblivious to what I do, and I want to keep it that way.”
“Well, my lips are sealed,” I told him. “I’ll stick to the same story you told that cop earlier. We met at the club. You helped me when someone stole my purse.”
“That’s a good story to run with. You’ve seen some of the work we do here, and I have a feeling you’re going to see more of it before this is all over.”
I cocked an eyebrow. His last statement was rather ominous for someone who had delivered toys to a children’s home just that same morning. He shook his head.
“I’m sorry this had to happen to you, but I’m going to take care of it.” He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead.
He turned and walked out of the room. His shoulders were certainly broad enough to hold the weight of the world, but that didn’t mean he had to. Yet, it was what he chose to do. He acted like he thought he had to be everybody’s hero, everybody’s knight in shining leather.
I sighed as the door closed behind him. I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. How did I get myself into this situation? If there had been some piece of information I could have given him that would have been helpful, I would have been grateful for it. But I had nothing more than a name.
Axel had been an asshole, and I knew he sold drugs. But I had never suspected he was part of something bigger than that. It certainly explained some of the inconsistencies in his behavior and the amount of time he spent out of the house. I wondered how much had gone under my nose. I had been blind to everything.
I fought back tears while I thought about how stupid I’d been for all that time.
Then, there was a knock at the door. “Hey, Maggie, it’s Bre,” the muffled voice on the other side said. “Listen, Blade sent me up here. Can you let me in?”
I groaned as I got up from the bed and opened the door. There she stood, good old Bre, eager to make new friends. She’d probably been trying to make me feel welcome, but she just made me want to climb under a rock and hide from everyone.
“Come on, girl, we’re going downstairs. You look like you could use a few stiff ones.” She put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me out of the room.
I closed the door behind me as she pulled me down the hallway with her. I never had a choice. She’d decided what was going to happen, and she wasn’t going to take no for an answer, not again.
“I guess I can have a drink or two,” I said lowly.
“You can have none for all I care, but you’re coming downstairs whether you like it or not. Blade told me not to leave you in th
e room, so I’ve got to honor his request. Cool? Cool.” She didn’t exactly dance as we walked, but she didn’t seem far from it. She moved as if there were music playing in her head, a song that only she could hear.
There was no sense in fighting with her, and sitting downstairs with Bre was surely going to be better than being stuck in that room alone.
Chapter 16
Blade
“I found the girl they were looking for,” I told Senior in the boardroom we used for meetings. I stood in front of the round table, and he sat in his leather chair across from me, leaning back.
He looked down his nose at me. “Good,” he said in an oddly comfortable tone. “Did you handle the situation?”
“I’ve started on it. I found out who set her up, and I think he’s aiming for me, or at least for Maggie,” I explained. Standing in front of Senior like this, I became very aware of the words I was using and the information I was giving him.
“How are you mixed up with a sex slavery ring?” Senior asked me.
“I’ve got eyes and ears all over the city, Senior. You know that. Occasionally, I find out about girls who have been caught up in them, and I take them to our safehouses when I find them. That’s what I did today,” I lied. Well, it wasn’t a complete lie. I did pull her out and take her to a safehouse.
“I better not find out that your work for Vlad involves anything like that,” he warned me.
“No, sir, it’s just security detail,” I explained, using an oversimplification of my job description.
“Now, you said you think this person is after you or Maggie. That’s the girl you brought back with you this morning, right?”
“Right.”
“And the official story is you picked her up at a club, but we both know you were working security for Vlad last night.” He cocked an eyebrow.
“Yeah, he went out last night, and I acted as his bodyguard while he was at the club. That’s when I saw her getting harassed by a couple of guys, so I stepped in. Come to find out, they took her purse and all, so I’m stuck with her until I can get her somewhere safe.” I shouldn’t have been lying to my president. In all the time I’d been working for Vlad, I had never had to lie about it outright. I just conveniently failed to mention exactly what I did for him.
“I’m still confused. How does all of this tie into the girl from earlier and the cops coming to the clubhouse to find her?”
“The guy causing all this trouble is Maggie’s ex. He was behind everything that happened to her last night, and I think he knows she’s with me now, so he’s trying to start shit. The girl from earlier is underage, and her brother did try to sell her into sex trafficking. She wound up with someone who has ties to Vlad. When that happened, Maggie’s ex, who happens to be Axel Walker, called the cops to tip them off that the girl was here.”
“Axel Walker?” Senior asked.
“Yeah, Axel.”
“He’s been gunning after us for a while.”
“He’s been gunning after everyone, and with this latest scheme, he could take a lot of people down.”
“Sounds pretty complicated. You can’t keep Maggie here if she’s going to cause this kind of trouble,” Senior reminded me.
“Yeah, I know. I’m thinking about dropping her off at one of the safehouses, but there’s something I need to do first,” I told him.
“Do what you need to do to get to the bottom of it. Let me know if you need someone to help you clean this up, Blade,” he said ominously.
“Will do.”
As I stepped out of the meeting room and pulled the door closed behind me, I couldn’t help but think he was trying to warn me. It was as if he’d been trying to tell me that there were dire consequences ahead if I didn’t go ahead and nip this situation in the bud. I felt like talking to him at all had turned out to be a mistake. Was there a chance he was onto me?
I slipped out the back door of the clubhouse. Standing in the lot behind the building, I fished out my phone and scrolled through my contacts. I didn’t want to call Vlad directly because I didn’t want to alarm him, but I couldn’t think of anyone else who would know what I needed to find out. I figured I’d try Alexander first. There was a chance he knew.
“Hello, this is Alexander,” the little man said in a Russian accent when he answered the phone.
“Alexander, it’s Blade. I need some information,” I told him.
“Oh, you,” he said, as if he’d been dreading my call.
“Yeah, me.”
“What do you want, Blade?” He spat each word out like it was poison.
“I picked up a girl from the auction last night. She wasn’t on any of the paperwork. We didn’t have proper information on her. You might remember her,” I suggested.
“Yeah, the one who was causing all that racket. What about her?” he asked.
“Where are her personal effects?” I asked.
“All of that stuff gets burned up. We can’t have that laying around, advertising that the girls were there. You know this. Why do you ask such stupid questions, Blade?”
“I was wondering what all she had on her. I was actually hoping to find an ID or something,” I told him.
“I don’t know. If we didn’t have any information on her in our papers, she probably didn’t have her ID on her,” he explained.
“What happens to their personal effects or the paperwork?” I asked.
“We’ve got a guy who incinerates it for us. He has a crematorium where he dumps our stuff and burns the shit out of it.” He started laughing. It was a hard, cool laugh. “I’ve heard him say that some of our garbage has wound up in people’s ashes. Talk about disposing of the evidence, huh?”
“Yeah, real funny. Can you send me his information, Alexander?”
“Sure. I guess it’s only been one day, so there’s a chance he hasn’t burned up everything from last night yet. What happened with the underage girl?”
“She’s been removed from the situation, and I’m working on tracking down the people who brought her in. Tell Vlad to watch his back. Someone is trying to set him up. You too, Alexander. I’d hate to see anything happen to you two. But don’t worry too much. I’m on it.”
“Excellent. I’m sending the information to you about our incinerator. Keep in touch, Blade.” Then he hung up.
I received a text giving me the guy’s name, the name of his funeral home, and the location of his crematorium. He was a few miles out of town, where he could work mostly unsupervised. I hurried to my bike and peeled out of the MC’s parking lot.
I had to find anything I could that would help me identify who brought in Maggie and Anthea. If there were any personal belongings that we still had, I wanted to get those back to the girls. I felt like they deserved it.
I pulled up to the funeral home about thirty minutes later. It looked like any other funeral home. The building was a cross between a church and a bank, featuring a carport that resembled the drive-thru lanes for window tellers as well as signs that resembled those that would be found outside of churches, including similar script.
Merrick Funerary Services and Crematorium was the name of the place, and I was looking for a William Merrick, the owner. I roared into the parking lot on my motorcycle. The place was deserted except for a four-door Volvo and a shiny white Silverado.
I walked in the front door and was greeted by a woman in a conservative black skirt and white blouse.
“Welcome to Merrick Services,” she said in that usual morbidly chipper tone that was intended to be comforting, but just came across as creepy.
“Yeah, I’m actually here to see Mr. Merrick,” I told her.
“I’m not sure if he’s available right now,” she said.
“Could you check, please? Tell him Alexander sent me. I’ll wait.” I took a seat in one of the office chairs in the front room while I waited on William Merrick to show. Somehow, being in a funeral home for a reason other than a funeral felt really strange to me. I felt like I shouldn’t have
been there. It was not a place for the living.
The lady walked off in a bit of a huff. A moment later, she returned with Merrick in tow.
“So sorry to keep you waiting,” he said politely as he approached me with an outstretched hand.
“That’s fine. Hey, I’ve got some questions for you about a job,” I said.
“Say no more. Walk this way.” He turned and led me past the receptionist’s desk toward the back of his facility.
“So, how can I help you, Blade?” he asked as we reached the room where he handled cremations.
I tried not to show my shock at being called out. Of course, Alexander had called ahead to tell him I was visiting. “I have some questions about the paperwork and personal effects from last night’s auction,” I answered.