by J Paton
Isaac’s brows rose and he stared at me. “You been holding out on me?”
A little heat warmed my cheeks. “It’s been a rough time, and I haven’t been able to tell my arse from my elbow, what with all the changes being thrown at me.”
“Cryptic much, get to the point,” Isaac growled impatiently.
“You know I’m bi and I was dating Barbara?” He nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing on me. “She got pregnant when I was home on leave. Anyway, I arrived back six months later to a nice surprise.”
“Holy fuck! That’s some surprise. Did you know she was trying to conceive?”
I shook my head. “She wasn’t trying to, she got sick and she’d been prescribed antibiotics, which can apparently reduce the effectiveness of the contraceptive pill she’d been using. The doc explained it all when we went to see him.”
“Again, holy fuck. How do you feel about being a dad? And why the fuck am I only hearing about this now?”
A smile spread across my face at the memory of Issy’s toothless grin. Ignoring Isaac’s bluster, I reached into my pocket to pull out my phone, scrolling until I found a recent picture. “Fuck, if I’m not besotted with her. Besides Mum, my boss, and now you, I haven’t told anyone about Issy. Given our past, you know the risks better than anyone. A baby is great leverage to gain information, or to hurt me.”
“Yeah.” A worried expression replaced the pissed off one as Isaac took the phone. The second he looked at the screen, a smile dawned on his face. “Fuck, she’s a cutie. She’s got your blonde hair, and your eyes.”
“Yeah, she’s a lucky girl to get all my good genes.”
Isaac rolled his eyes as he handed the phone back. “Have you moved in with Barbara? Has the man who likes to live in the wilderness been forced into civilisation?”
“Nope.” I sighed dejectedly. “She’s decided a baby is too much like hard work. She’s signed over her custody rights to me and we’ve not seen her since. It’s been hard-going, but Mum’s helped, and my boss has found me a great agency with trustworthy nannies.”
“Well, shit! Why are you offering to help me when I’m sure your time’s squeezed tight enough already?”
“Because I understand love driving you to protect what you treasure most.” I pointed at him as his lips parted. "And don’t argue with me. Sit, and let’s see what we can sort out between us until I get a chance to speak to my boss.”
Nix
I sent Isaac a cryptic text, saying I needed to meet him as soon as possible. His reply was full of questions, none of which I wanted to answer. After going to see Phil about taking on Ferron’s protection, Phil had sent the contracts to Isaac for him to sign. More information had come to light about the club Ferron had gone to, some dots between Gabriel’s case with the missing boy, Immanuel, connecting. Phil wanted to talk to Ferron as a matter of urgency as he’d still found out very little, Phil explaining at the last team briefing about the goings on at Dom’s Haven. He was frustrated, as was Gabriel, time ticking away without there having been any headway on finding Immanuel.
The atmosphere in the car was thick with tension. At Isaac’s request, Phil was driving me and Gabriel to The Playroom so we could meet there without arousing Ferron’s suspicions.
Once we reached the building, Phil parked in the underground car park. I used the code Isaac had given me to access the second floor where Nathan’s office was. As soon as we’d exited the lift, the sound of loud voices could be heard from behind the closed door, one of the voices sounding like Isaac’s boss, Nathan.
“Someone doesn’t sound happy,” Phil said, eyeing the door warily. “And we’ve not even shared anything yet.”
I didn’t answer, Gabriel stepping forward and knocking on the door. He didn’t give anyone in the room a chance to respond before opening it and popping his head through the gap. I caught the killer smile he aimed at the men as we all entered the room. Isaac’s brow furrowed as he glanced from Gabriel to me, and then to Phil.
The tension in the room crackled from all the testosterone.
“What the fuck is this?” Isaac growled, his eyes narrowing on Gabriel and his chest puffing out aggressively.
“Isaac, you’re giving me the creeps. Why are you looking at me like that?” Gabriel asked pleasantly enough, but something shifting in his eyes said differently. He went farther into the room without having been invited, his posture changing to one that resembled a battle stance.
“Have you been following Ferron?” Isaac asked without any preamble.
“Why? You worried, big man?” Gabriel’s large frame relaxed as he leaned against the wall. I waited to see if we’d need to step in. It seemed Gabriel was a tease.
Phil interjected. “If you two are going to have a pissing match, can you do it later as I’ve got a shitload on my plate at the moment?” Phil’s brow arched as he took the seat opposite Nathan, who’d sat back down.
Isaac scratched at his unshaven jaw. “Why are you here, Phil?”
“Shit, didn’t I mention that it’s Phil’s security firm that I work for?” I said, my shoulders lifting to shrug off the accusatory glare aimed in my direction.
Had I told him who I worked for? I rubbed at the back of my neck, trying to recall our conversation about my work. “Security Specialist Advisors, SSA, for short. I mentioned the name to you and it will be on the paperwork you filled in and signed.”
“Yeah, okay.” Isaac glanced at Phil. “I wasn’t aware it was your company.”
“You got a problem with me?” Phil’s face was unreadable, but his voice was tight.
“Nope, but I like to know who I have working for me. Why didn’t you mention the name of your security firm before? Like when you helped to ramp up security at New Year?” Isaac glanced over at Nathan as he coughed.
“We seem to have got off track. Shall we get back to why we’re here?” said Phil, his question directed at Isaac.
“The floor is yours,” Isaac offered.
Expecting Phil to talk, my eyes widened a fraction when Gabriel spoke first, his expression one of resignation. “Several months ago, SSA were hired by a wealthy family to look for their estranged son. They’d had a falling out when they found out he was gay, but before they got a chance to make up, he disappeared. The search led us to Dom’s Haven.”
His face became an impenetrable mask. “What I found, well, let’s just say that if we were to compare this place would be a beauty spa, and that would be a dog fighting pit. You were right to be worried about the possibility of there being other men out there caught up in the same web of deceit as Ferron. They seem to ferret out men with no family to check up on them, like Ferron. After that, it becomes a little less clear what happens because the Dom’s there aren’t that talkative to other Dom’s who haven’t been part of the club for that long.”
Gabriel released a frustrated sigh. His eyes were full of fire though. “I don’t have any bloody trouble imagining what Devon did to Ferron, but finding someone else to talk about it, now that’s the fucking sticking point.”
No one spoke as they digested the information.
Phil was the first to break the silence. “After Nix filled me in on all the background info about Ferron, I started to put two and two together. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was the same club we’re investigating over the other young man’s disappearance. Do you think Ferron would be willing to talk about what happened?”
I could see that Isaac wanted to refuse. It was there in the tight line of his jaw and the fierce light in his eyes. “He’s seeing a psychologist and he’s starting to talk about it… but it’s… it’s hard for him.”
“Is he working today?” Gabriel asked.
“He is.” Isaac checked his watch, cursing as he got up out of the seat. “He’s downstairs and probably wondering where I’ve got to.”
When Gabriel's face lit up, Isaac held his hands up. “We’re not rushing this. Ferron has to take the lead on this, not you, not any of you. Got it? I
gotta go. I’ll speak to him and if he’s happy to talk to you, Phil, then I’ll let you know.”
“When?” Phil’s question came before Isaac had even taken a step towards the door.
“Gimme ten minutes and I’ll call up from the bar if he’s happy to talk.”
Isaac left, the tension remaining in the room.
Phil gave Isaac ten minutes before asking Nathan to ring Isaac to see if Ferron would talk. When Isaac appeared a few minutes later with a terrified looking Ferron, my heart bled for what the man had to have endured to put that look in his eyes.
There was a hushed silence as Ferron took a seat and looked to Phil, his hands clasped in his lap. His lips quivered, Isaac laying a gentle hand on his shoulder as Ferron spoke. “What… do you… want to know?”
An hour later in the car, my throat felt as raw as my stomach. I was sure that neither of the men sat silently felt much better. Ferron was lucky—if you could call it that after what he’d endured at the hands of that monster—to have survived. It had hurt to listen to each torment that had been inflicted on him, to understand that the club Gabriel was trying to infiltrate was a part of some sort of sub trafficking, or that’s how it appeared.
Ferron’s words had brought that home. “I was given.” They were powerful words that held a world of pain. In all the years that I’d worked alongside Isaac, I’d never seen him crack under the pressure we’d faced: mutilated bodies, women and children raped in countries under attack by militants. They were the dregs of society, and we’d swum in those murky waters, been tainted by them because it was impossible not to be, but broken by it, no, that had never happened. But today, Isaac had been unable to mask how much Ferron’s story had affected him, revealing the depth of his feelings for Ferron.
Before Issy, I’m not sure I would have got it, but love changed everything, and it made me more determined than ever to make sure that justice was served.
Phil
After not sleeping properly for days and spending far too much time staring at a computer screen, I had the mother of all headaches brewing at my temples. The meeting with Isaac and Ferron at The Playroom a couple of weeks earlier had confirmed several theories about Immanuel’s disappearance. A disappearance which I now knew was connected to what had happened to Ferron in that same club.
The report from Nix of another attempt to snatch Ferron when he’d been with Isaac proved that the men at Dom’s Haven were concerned about the information Ferron could potentially share, which up to now hadn’t gone beyond a close circle of men. Isaac had reached out only this morning to say that Ferron had decided to tell the police what he’d already shared with us. After Isaac’s phone call, we now had men on security detail when Isaac was with Ferron.
Sending men in broad daylight to grab Ferron reeked of desperation. It meant they’d go to any lengths. Isaac wasn’t prepared to take any risks, and I got it, making a note not to bill him for the extra hours. I wasn’t going to profit from either Isaac or Ferron’s suffering.
I’d spent nearly every waking hour over the past two days trying to figure out how everything fit together, what the next steps were going to be, and who they needed to include. That was why I’d invited Gabriel and Nix to my office this morning.
The conversation with Ferron had triggered a memory, and had given me another direction to look in. I’d gone back to the information I’d already gone through, seeing I’d missed something in one of the spreadsheets which had an additional sub file. This new insight created one fucking ugly pattern, one that left my stomach raw with the knowledge that it was all going to blow up in our faces.
Security work wasn’t valued in the same way as police work was. And there was little I could do to prevent the fallout. Now I had a clear picture, I had to be careful that whatever I shared wouldn’t get me or my men in trouble. I’d been cautious in selecting what information I gave to Isaac from what Gabriel had discovered from his time in the club, but it would hopefully be enough to warrant further investigation into the club. Whether this would impact on the impending court case against Devon, the monster who everyone had originally thought was Ferron’s Dom/boyfriend, I wasn’t sure. It was a complicated mess that I could only see getting worse with every new piece of evidence that was uncovered.
There were a lot of grey areas that often occurred with security work. Particularly pertaining to some of the evidence collected, especially those involving cyber-crime. It was something I’d worry about later, because I hadn’t yet figured out how to share it without getting arrested. That wasn’t my only concern. There were just too many variables I couldn’t account for, my gut telling me that I was missing a connection to who was protecting Dom’s Haven from closer scrutiny.
The deeper I dug, the more obvious it became that there was a protective shield around that club. The level of their IT security, and the sheer number of hours I’d used to circumvent their firewalls left me pissed that these fuckers were outsmarting me.
I’d only finished going through the initial Information I’d obtained this morning. I needed to quickly share those findings because for some reason I couldn’t fathom, I sensed we were running out of time.
At the buzz of the downstairs door, I checked the security feed and let Gabriel in. Minutes later he came into the room, his hair ruffled from the wind. It had been a shocker of a day, the weather anything but summery today. He took a seat without waiting to be asked, the lines around his mouth grim. They’d become a perpetual fixture as the months had bled into each other. Hopefully though, things were now starting to go our way and Gabriel’s diligence was going to pay off. “How are you doing?”
“Is that a trick question?” He ran a hand through his collar-length hair. “Ignore me, I’m feeling particularly bitchy today. Have you sorted out what you need when I next go to the club?”
I nodded, not getting a chance to say more as Nix buzzed to be let in. Gabriel lapsed into silence as we waited for Nix to appear. The minute Nix came through the door, Gabriel turned in his seat and nodded his acknowledgement to the other man. Nix pulled the seat out next to Gabriel and sat.
As both men looked expectantly at me, I took a calming breath. “Nix, Gabe, thanks for coming at such short notice, but I didn’t think this could wait. After meeting with Ferron and Isaac at The Playroom, and given the revelations about the true nature of Ferron’s relationship with Devon Critchlow, a known Dom at Dom’s Haven, it gave me a different lead to follow. It was one I hadn’t paid particular attention to before, and I decided to change a couple of the parameters in my search of the information I got from the Dom’s Haven computers before their security measures locked me out.” I lifted my glass of water and took a sip before remembering my manners. “Anyone want a drink?”
“Nope,” Nix said.
Gabe shook his head. “Have you been able to find another back door into their systems yet?”
“No, I’m working on a piece of malware that might bypass their new updates. But every time I think I’ve cracked it, the fucker protecting them puts in another layer for me to have to get through. I’m sure the fucker is laughing his head off at me.”
I shrugged. “I’m not worried about that right now, though. What I have been doing is looking at how Ferron’s information was stored in their files. The clarification on the type of relationship he had with Devon got me thinking. We know Ferron was kidnapped and held against his will and that he was locked inside Devon’s home for more than a year. I mentioned this before, but what if he wasn’t the first victim Devon had trapped in his home?”
Both men shifted in their seats.
“I dug a little deeper into the information I have on the members, including Devon. There are a high percentage of Dom’s who are extremely wealthy, Devon being one of them. Then I went through the list of subs and delved into their finances. There’s a noticeable difference between the socio-economic backgrounds of these men. Most of the subs come from working class families, which in itself wouldn’t cause anyon
e to think twice about it. That is, until you look at the percentage of those who come from broken homes and have no family.”
“Jesus!” Gabriel muttered.
I continued without acknowledging him. “I cross-checked against those who applied during the same time period as Ferron. After Gabe pointed out that the form was some form of filter, I looked to see if there were any differences in how the information was processed. Forms for Dom’s have one file. Whereas the subs are split between three separate files and labelled. Each is coded differently. File one is saved under the initials CA, which I believe is Club Admission. File two is saved under the initials LC. I think this is Lower Club. And file three is saved under CM, which is where I found Ferron’s information and I believe means Criteria Match.”
“Skip back a sec. The second file ‘lower club,’ what do you mean by that?” Nix questioned, his fingers tapping on the arm of the chair.
I looked him in the eye. “I’m getting there. Gabe has been slowly identifying subs for months, and I’ve been matching them against the information in file one, and I can confirm that they’ve accessed the club on a frequent basis and don’t appear to have been coerced in any way.”
Nix’s brow was marred by deep frown lines. “That still doesn’t explain the other two file names, and why they’re different.”
“This is where it gets interesting, and the reason I wanted to talk to you both together. So far, Nix, you’ve only been connected to this through Ferron. I want to get you inside that club too. This next stage needs someone to watch Gabe’s back.”
The other man visibly bristled, his lips settling into a thin line as he stared me down. I ignored his reaction. “Gabe has been invited to sign up for a private membership to the club housed in the basement, LC, lower club, one for those with disconcerting tastes, it seems. The price is steep, and now that I’ve set up his new bank account, Gabe will be going in to meet with Riley, the owner. As far as I can tell, their set-up is to have money transferred to an offshore account based somewhere in the Virgin Isles.”