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“Why doesn’t he rein them in?”
“Shh, he’s training his kid, but we’re not supposed to know that. He thinks he’s being slick.”
“I see! So, your advice?”
“Let her be. She’s already in it now, and the women aren’t going to stop just because you ask them to. Sorry.”
“Fine, I’ll work something out on my end.” I hung up the phone and sat back in my chair behind my desk at the office. Right now, my wife, who I told to stay out of shit, was sitting in her home office doing research into shit that she had no business being part of.
I know that she’s bored now that the kids are gone, and I’m still here most of the day. I had planned on spending more time with her once the kids were out of the house because I knew that that was going to be the new nexus of our relationship.
What I didn’t anticipate was the pandemic and the toll it would take on the world and my mission. Whoever Jack and Jessica were working for had gone under once people from their little network started dropping like flies. Not from the pandemic, though that was used in many cases as cover.
But they had to know they were being hunted because of the pattern that had started to form in the last few years. Dad had been more covert in his actions; he was old school. Lyon, on the other hand, doesn’t try to hide what he’s doing. You just never know when he’s going to strike.
I do know that the man posing as Jack has been doing this for years, though Jessica hasn’t always been his accomplice. They differ from region to region and according to the sexual type of the mark. We know the companies they took over through blackmail as well. But the one thing we don’t know is who or how many are behind them.
This is the big leagues, not some low-level trafficker. But Lyon or his kid had taken out a lot of the European clientele, and we still have no idea who their suppliers are. We’ve come far enough to know who is being supplied, which was a monumental feat since all of these people, not most, all of them are counted among the world’s elite. But getting rid of them is just part of the problem. Someone out there is the head of a very dark organization whose business is the trafficking of children for multiple purposes, and none of them are good. And my wife wants to wade in that cesspool.
CHAPTER13
My hand was getting numb from all the writing. I had grown so used to writing in my journal that I was using that method to make notes as I dug into the information Cierra had sent to me. It was like a maze working through everything and I was learning things about people who had been in close proximity to me that I would rather not have known.
For starters, Jack’s real name was Raymond Walters, and Jessica’s was Samantha Stone. This was the third time the two had worked together running the same scam, but Jack had been involved in a few others.
The thing is, he’d been caught in a scam himself going back to his time in college, and that’s how these people got their hooks into him. Jessica, too had been involved in something that she didn’t want the law to know about and had been sucked into the trafficking game.
Silly me, I always had one perception of trafficking, like the way it’s described on the news when they deign to cover it. Mostly, runaways being taken to parties where they’re drugged and sold into hell. Or young girls being pimped out on street corners.
I never imagined that there were kidnapping rings targeting children of a certain look according to what the client preferred. The most horrendous cases were the ones that involved kids being chosen randomly and snatched away from their families only to end up on the other side of the world being used by some monster or group of them for sexual exploitation.
I must’ve showered three times in two hours, and it wasn’t enough. But it was the last case that Jessica had worked on that sent me running to the bathroom to throw up. That vile creature. I was sitting on the cold bathroom floor with my head resting against the bowl when I felt him come in behind me.
He didn’t say anything when he lifted me off the floor and took me over to the sink to get cleaned up. He remained silent even though I could see the tic in his jaw that betrayed the fact that he was pissed and took me to bed.
I thought he would leave me there since he was still dressed in his suit and tie, but he just kicked off his shoes and climbed in with me, pulling me into his arms just as the shakes began. “Let it out.” It’s as if I was waiting for his permission to release what was inside of me. I buried my face in his chest, dug my nails into his shoulders, and screamed.
I cried well into the night as a piece of my heart broke and shattered into pieces that I knew would never be mended again. I’ve known that there was evil in the world, I just never imagined anything on this scale.
Poverty, crime against the elderly, someone taking someone else’s property, these things are criminal; the things that Jack and his ilk are into are pure evil. “Do you want to talk about it?” I shook my head against his chest and just lifted my lips to his, telling him without words what I needed.
I needed to feel whole and alive. I wanted to feel alive and loved. I helped him shed his clothes, our hands moving in haste, sending buttons flying without care until he was naked and warm beside me.
His fingers were gentle as they played over my body, his kisses sweet and soft, and when we came together, there was no haste in his movements.
We moved together slowly as he buried himself to the hilt inside me. My heart clenched when he kissed my tears away and soared when he whispered how much he loved me. I couldn’t get close enough, no matter how tightly I clutched him to me.
I wanted to crawl inside of him, to become part of him; I wanted to be completely enveloped by him. As if he could read my mind, his arms came around me completely until my much smaller frame was swallowed up by his, completely covered as if he was sheltering me from the rest of the world.
* * *
MARK
* * *
I felther agony before it hit her fully and rushed home to get to her. I had to bite back the angry expletive that threatened to explode from my tongue when I found her curled around the toilet, crying her heart out.
I knew what she’d seen, what she’d learned, and hoped like hell that it was enough to keep her away from this, that it was enough to stop her in her tracks, but when I tapped into her mind as I moved in and out of her, I knew that that was just wishful thinking.
