by Zoey Parker
“If there is anything I can do to help, you know how to reach me,” he said.
“Yes, I know. Thank you.”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to reach out to you for this job. Nothing can go wrong with this auction, Blade. Security is going to have to be tight. There can be no undocumented girls, no slip-ups with underage girls, none of that, do you understand?” he asked, getting to the real point of his call. It felt like a threat more than a question, as if hidden somewhere in his tone was the message that we couldn’t slip up like we had with the previous auction.
“Yes, sir, I understand. There won’t be any other problems with this one. I’ll see to it personally.”
“And just to be clear, you’ll take the job?” he asked.
“I will. You know I’ll be there,” I explained to him.
“Excellent. Thank you, Blade. Expect a call from Alexander soon.”
And he hung up.
I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time we were on the phone. I set the phone down and stared at the walls a moment longer before checking to see if any new messages had come in during our conversation. There was nothing. No one had spotted Axel yet.
To top it off, I had bigger fish to worry about. Yuri Ivanov was coming to town. If my time on the street had taught me anything, it was that there were no coincidences. When significant occurrences happened close together, there was a good chance they were related. By that line of reasoning, Yuri’s visit was going to tie in with Maggie and Anthea. It somehow had something to do with Axel, or else Axel was going to try to cause trouble with it.
Normally, fuck-ups like the last auction led to people dying or disappearing. Vlad wasn’t known for his leniency. My loyalty and dedication over the years was being rewarded with my life. It also meant I would be in a position to find out who was helping Axel infiltrate the auctions, if I couldn’t stop him before.
Still, it did mean working another sex slave auction and participating in something we were vehemently opposed to in the Marauders. If I could have, I would have saved all the girls from being sold, not just Maggie and underage Anthea, but there was only so much I could do to help.
With Maggie, I felt like I was doing more than just helping. I groaned and ran a hand across my face. Frustrated, I tucked my phone in my pocket and got up from the bed, where I’d been sitting most of the day, making phone calls and sending out texts in an effort to locate Axel.
I walked downstairs and sat at the bar. A couple of the guys were watching a fight on TV. UFC. They really got into it, because it wasn’t staged like wrestling, and it wasn’t as controlled and restricted as boxing.
“What’s going on?” Mac asked from behind the bar as he passed me a Guinness.
“Too much. Not enough. Hell, who knows?” I said, raising my bottle to him.
“What happened to that girl you had in here yesterday?” he asked.
I didn’t realize anyone had even noticed her, much less realized she was gone. “Man, she’s got a lot of shit going on. I took her to one of the safehouses. She needs some distance while I help her clean up her mess,” I told him.
“It’s that bad, huh? Or do you think there might be something else to it all?” he asked, staring right at me.
Mac was a freak. He did all the tattoos for the MC. He was covered head to toe and wore his hair in a mohawk to show off all the ink he had on his scalp. He had piercings all over, as well, and he often walked around without a shirt on, showing his tattooed bird chest off because of his nipple rings. He was a freak, but he was a loyal brother, and he often offered a different perspective on things, so we didn’t give him a hard time about how off-the-wall he got sometimes.
“It’s a little bit of both, I think,” I told him, admitting out loud that there were other reasons for sending her away. She wasn’t the one who needed the space. I did. She was an auction girl, jam packed with drama.
“I think you should go for it, brother,” Mac said.
“What do you mean, go for it? Go for what?” I tilted my beer back.
“You know exactly what I mean, bro. Go for her. You know you’ve thought about it. You should make a move on her, brother.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are you fucking with me? If I wanted her to be mine, she already would be.”
“Then, why are you sitting here talking to me instead of going after her?” he asked.
“Did you pierce your brain recently? Do you think you’re some kind of mind reader or something, Mac? How do you know how I feel about this girl? Man, she’s just drama. She’s trouble waiting to happen,” I explained to him, going off on my own little tirade about her.
“You want to know how I know what you’re thinking? It’s all in the way you’re acting now,” he replied.
“Fine. I’ll go see her,” I said. “But not because you told me to. And not because I want to make her mine. I’m going to go check on her, make sure she’s all right.”
Mac laughed as I finished off my Guinness and hopped up from the barstool. “Good luck, Blade,” he said.
“Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” I told him. “I’m not trying to win her over or anything like that. I’m just going to check on her, brother.”
“Yeah, sure. Tell me all about it when you get back,” Mac said as I walked away.
“Always got something to say,” I muttered under my breath as I walked outside toward my car.
I had gone downstairs to get a drink so I could feel better about what I was about to do for Vlad. Instead, I felt worse about what I wasn’t doing for Maggie. I wasn’t protecting her by keeping her at a safehouse. All I was doing was keeping her at arm’s length so I could work. I was keeping my distance so I didn’t have to admit she was already getting in my head.
As I pulled away from the clubhouse, I decided not to go over there empty-handed. I didn’t want to show up at random like some kind of stalker. I needed to bring something with me, so I decided to stop and pick up some Chinese takeout. It was good for just about every occasion, and it gave me a semi-legitimate reason to be over there.
All I could think about on the way over there was the horror of yet another auction. Images of girls bound to those upright tables haunted me. Once they were in the trade, they were gone. And I was helping to facilitate that. I knew that soon, I was going to be helping with a big auction, and I couldn’t digest that notion. Especially not after rescuing Maggie and pulling Anthea out of some pervert’s room.
At least with Maggie, I was trying to do the right thing. I hoped it was the right thing. I was going to continue to protect her now that she was away from the auction block.
Chapter 19
Maggie
“Stop resisting,” the cop said as he slammed me against the hood of the car.
“I’m not resisting. I’m just asking what I did wrong,” I tried to explain, but the cop holding me down and his partner weren’t hearing it.
“You’re under arrest, Miss Evans,” the other officer said, standing next to me with a hand on his gun.
“All I was trying to do was buy some fucking tampons,” I yelled back at them.
I had walked down to the corner store, maybe a block from the safehouse where Blade had dropped me. I had gone in to buy some tampons because on top of everything else that had happened, my period started, like that was ever a good idea.
I had smiled and nodded at the two cops leaning against their squad car at the curb. They had nodded back as I walked into the store, but they hadn’t stopped their conversation. I didn’t think anything of it. I hadn’t done anything. I had figured they were just out getting some fresh air or maybe grabbing a smoke.
It wasn’t until I came out of the store, tampons in hand, that I realized something was wrong. They were staring at me intently. As I stepped outside, back onto the sidewalk, one officer stepped casually in front of me. He wasn’t being confrontational at all. I just figured he was stepping away from the car, but it didn’t feel right. Th
at was when the other cop had grabbed me.
I stared down at the discarded box of tampons on the ground while the one read me my rights and the other cuffed me.
“You’d do well to remember who you’re talking to, ma’am,” he said in a gruff voice. “I don’t take well to being disrespected.”
“What is this about?” I asked again.
“Should we tell her?” the other cop asked his partner.
“Let’s get her in the car first,” he said.
“No, you should definitely tell me now,” I yelled.
“Hey, officers, what is the problem?” the shop owner said, stepping through his front door. “She paid for the tampons. She’s not stealing anything.”
“Get back in the store,” the nice one barked at him as the other cop grabbed the back door of the car and started to force me inside. “This doesn’t concern you.”
“But she paid. I have it on camera,” the shop owner continued.
The cop who had been relatively uninvolved so far pulled out his gun and aimed it at the man standing in the shop door. “I said get back inside. This has nothing to do with you or your fucking tampons.”
“No,” I yelled at the cop, putting my feet against the car and pushing myself into the cop who had his hands on me.
“She’s not cooperating,” he told his partner as he struggled with me.
“That’s fine. If she doesn’t make it, no one will be too terribly upset.”
“Help me get her in the car, man.”
I pushed again. I jerked my body side to side. I stayed in constant motion, pulling away from the cops and pushing myself against them to throw them off. I was not going into that car easily. I fought as hard as I could with cuffed hands and two men trying to manhandle me.
“Ma’am, this will be a lot easier if you just cooperate,” the one said as he took my ankles.
I jerked my legs and kicked him. “I will not cooperate.”
Before I knew it, the other, with my arms in his hands, threw me into the back seat of the squad car. I landed across the backseat, and he slammed the door shut. The two shook hands and looked in at me, laughing. They seemed to be laughing off the struggle and sizing up the damage, which wasn’t much, I was sure.
They were still chuckling when they got in the car.
“You put up a pretty good fight.”
“It’s really a shame we couldn’t do that for fun.”
“Oh yeah, I had a blast,” I remarked.
They just laughed harder.
“So, what are you getting me on?” I asked. “Certainly, picking up a pack of tampons with some money I was loaned by a friend isn’t a crime.” The money had come from the safehouse.
“You’re a person of interest in an ongoing investigation,” the passenger said, turning his face toward the back of the car.
“I see.” I nodded, thinking they were picking me up for my connection to the auction.
“But we could add some things to it. Like resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, obstructing an investigation,” the driver added.
“I see,” I said again. “Did you ever find the girl?” I asked.
The two officers looked at each other across the front of the car, as if trying to decide exactly how to answer my question. “We’re not at liberty to discuss the details of the ongoing investigation with you,” the driver said.
The look they gave each other wasn’t the only peculiar thing. The car was silent. There was no radio noise. Everything was turned down. Then, I noticed they weren’t even wearing radios on their uniforms. And we certainly weren’t driving toward the police station.
I didn’t know if they were aware, but this wasn’t my first ride in a police car. I had been in several over the years. And they had never been this quiet. I decided to do a little probing of my own.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re going to meet with the lead investigator on the case,” the passenger said.
“Wouldn’t he be at the station?” I questioned him further.
“No, he’s out in the field,” the driver answered quickly.
I watched closely where we were going. We were entering the industrial section of town. We were riding past old abandoned buildings that hadn’t been in use for decades. I knew we were going to one of those buildings, and I was starting to sense that we weren’t meeting any investigators there.
I shut my mouth as we pulled into the lot at one of the vacant warehouses. I didn’t want to say anything else. Until I saw who was waiting for us.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I announced in the backseat, and started kicking the door to try to get out.
“Nope, we’re not kidding,” the driver said as the car came to a screeching halt, and the cops got out to open the back door and pull me out. They stood me upright and marched me right up to the man standing in the suit in front of the open bay door with two of his associates.
It was Axel Walker, my ex-boyfriend. But it wasn’t how I’d left him. The Axel I had known had always worn ragged t-shirts and jeans with holes in them. He was the classic, stereotypical junkie. The man in front of me was anything but that. But it was still him, with his long black hair pulled back, his goatee and pointed mustache, and the tattoos on his face.
“Thank you for delivering my goods, officers,” he said to the two cops, “but I think we can take it from here.”
The two cops let go of me as Axel gestured for his two men to move forward. They were dressed in black suits with black shades on. They rushed up and grabbed me by the arms. They dragged me into the vacant warehouse and sat me down in a metal straight back chair. There was a single light bulb hanging down from the rafters just above me.
“Surprised to see me?” Axel asked.
“Fuck you.”
“Charming,” he added. Then, he gripped my face and leaned down close enough I could smell his breath. “Listen, I’d love to catch up, but I’ve got a job for you,” he growled, “and you’re going to do it.”
“What do you want?” I asked, jerking my face away from his.
He laughed. “I want you to get all the information you can for me on your little boyfriend and his motorcycle club, the Marauders,” Axel told me.
“And what if I refuse?” I asked.
“Then, my cops out there will gladly kill both of you,” he said plainly, standing back up.
I looked up at him. There was no humor in his face, no emotion whatsoever. He looked down at me with an empty expression on his face, as if to say he didn’t care what I did one way or the other.
“The clock is ticking, Maggie. If you don’t give me an answer soon enough, they’ll kill you here and track him down to execute him,” he threatened.
I swallowed hard and looked down at the concrete floor. I couldn’t believe what I was about to say, but I didn’t see any other way to protect myself or Blade. “I’ll do it,” I breathed.
“Of course you will.” He opened his suit jacket and fished out a small phone. “Take this phone. It’s untraceable. My number is programmed in there. Answer it when I call. We’ll be trailing you all the time, so don’t play any games. If you fail to answer, you’ll be dead within the hour. If you breathe a word of this to Blade, I’ll kill you both right then,” he said.
Axel’s tone was even enough and calm enough that I believed him. He was telling the truth, or he thought he was. He nodded, and his goons picked me up from the chair. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, so I couldn’t take the phone. Instead, he stepped to me, stood right in front of me.
I felt something akin to desire emanating from his body. He didn’t exactly want me, but he wanted something. Something about this situation was turning him on. Maybe it was the control, I didn’t know. He took the phone and shoved it down into one of my front pockets. I felt his hand slide into my pocket and stroke my thigh.
My skin crawled with revulsion at his touch. He just smirked. My reaction pleased him.
“Don�
��t disappoint me, Maggie,” he said, his lips a breath’s length away from mine. I could taste him already on my breath. He nodded, and his men jerked me away.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked them, but they didn’t say anything. They dragged me back outside where the two cops were still waiting for me, leaning against their car.
“You guys finished already?” one of them asked as they saw us coming.
The goons shoved me and let go. I stumbled towards the police car and started to fall, but one of the cops rushed over and caught me by the arm.