AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"You think she’ll tell us?”
He shook his head.
"I don’t know if she trusts us like that yet," he admitted. Yeah, he was probably right. Sleeping with us was one thing, but telling us the truth of her past, that was quite another entirely.
"So how do we figure it out?" I wondered aloud. He leaned back in his seat, tapping his finger against his chin.
"I could go down to that auction," he remarked. "See if I can get some information out of them about who put her up to it in the first place."
I cocked an eyebrow.
"You think you can handle that?" I asked him pointedly. He might have made a reputation for himself back in the day as a fighter, but he was an older man now.
"I know I can," he replied, his voice dropping slightly. And I could tell this was personal for him. Whatever had happened to her, he was determined to get to the bottom of it, determined to expose the people who had done this—the person who had put her up for sale like she was an object to be sold at their leisure.
He rose to his feet.
"You take care of her while I’m gone, okay?" he told me, and the tenderness in his voice caught me off guard.
"I will," I promised him. He paused for a moment, as though there was something else he wanted to say to me, but he soon thought better of it, whatever it was, and made his way out of the office.
I didn’t know if those guys who ran the auction had any idea what was coming their way. But I didn’t envy them the task of taking on my stepbrother when he was pissed.
Chapter Fifteen – Damyan
"Tell me who the fuck gave her to you!” I ordered the man, pulling him upright from the heap I had left him in on the floor. His head lolled to the side, a thick string of blood and drool dripping from the corner of his mouth where I had knocked out one of his teeth.
"I told you, I don’t know," he slurred, and I lifted my fist, ready to land another strike against his face. He held his hands up, doing his best to protect himself.
"Stop, stop!” he pleaded with me. "I … I might have some information in the records …"
I stilled my fist for a moment, letting it fall to my side.
"Go," I told him, pointing towards the door. "And if you’re not back in five minutes, I’m coming after you. Trust me, you don’t want that."
The man, Johnathan, scrambled to his feet and scurried towards the door, keeping his head down, wiping the blood from his lip and fleeing the room as quickly as he could. I shook out my fist, wiping the sweat from my brow, and began to pace as I waited for him to return.
It had been nearly an hour since I had arrived at the site where the auction had taken place, and I had found a handful of the men who had been there on the evening we had purchased Mina hanging out, drinking, and gambling. I had pulled the leader, Johnathan, aside, making out like I was having an issue with the girl I got from him, and then, as soon as I had gotten him alone, I had turned my fists on to him and started to beat the shit out of him until he gave me some kind of answer as to who had handed her to them in the first place.
She wasn’t going to give us that information herself—she was still protecting someone, and I needed to know just who it was. I wanted to find out who the fucker was who had thought they could just sell her the way they had. Who could look at Mina and think that was what she was good for? I could see it written all over her face, how strong she was, how smart, how much she had her shit together mentally, even if she hadn’t had a chance to do much with it, given what had happened to her. She deserved so much more than what they had stuck her with.
And I was determined to make them pay for it.
I was breaking all my rules right now, and I knew it damn well. Maxim’s father, my stepfather, had always told me to keep out of any fights I didn’t strictly need to be involved with, and this fit into that boundary. I could have just walked out of here, put some distance between myself and Mina, and told Maxim this was all on him and he could handle whatever came his way.
But I hadn’t. No, I had let myself get involved with her. It wasn’t just the sex; no, it was the way she had taken care of me—the tenderness she had shown me, as though she knew that I didn’t get a whole lot of that in my life.
I had never allowed myself to soften up enough to let myself need it. When my father had died, and my mother had re-married to Terry Antonov, I had known I needed to prove myself as more than just a son—I needed to prove myself as a worthy asset, someone who could lay claim to the family name, someone who deserved it. Not the kind of person who needed to be coddled or cared for or fussed over.
That hardness had served me well for a long time. Had let Maxim and I take control of our father’s empire the way we needed to. But now, I wished for something more than that, something … something that would let me accept a real care into my life. And when I looked at Mina, I saw that. I saw that chance.
A chance I wasn’t willing to pass up.
I waited for Johnathan to return, knowing he wasn’t going to be stupid enough to try and defy me after what I had done to him. Even if he’d tried to run, I knew he wouldn’t get far. We had allies all over this city, and if we wanted someone brought in and taken care of, they wouldn’t make it a mile outside of New Ruska before we stopped them dead in their tracks.
The question was how much they actually kept records around here, or whether they just did the bare minimum to get these girls in and out of the door as quickly as possible. I figured they would at least have kept some track of who was handing them over, if only to try and get some repeat business out of them, but I couldn’t know for sure …
My hand was aching from the beating I’d given Johnathan, but fuck, it had been good to wipe that smile off of his face. Show him exactly what I thought of him, in no uncertain terms. Men like that, who used and abused women, they were the lowest of the low to me. After what had happened to his mother, I knew Maxim felt the same way. The only reason he wasn’t here was so he could keep an eye on Mina, not because he didn’t care.
