AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Or many others. I hadn't seen my parents since my father and ex-fiancé had me committed "For my own good." But I had family. My sisters were a pack of unpleasant women who didn't understand why I didn't want to get married five years ago when I was twenty and start producing a shit load of kids. My mother had never seemed to like her tomboy daughter and we'd had a cold relationship until Mark was the one to tell me my mother depended on me. She might not understand my strength and self-reliance or my need to be a cop and work undercover with no contact with my family, but apparently she depended on it. If my father the career policeman wasn't around for her to depend on, I was her rock.
I owed Mark something for that. I'd never have known. Those people would be hurt if I vanished forever, not an undercover assignment but something from which I never returned. They deserved better.
For the first time I thought I did, too. Not better as in I wanted to do something else. This "assignment" was completely voluntary, off the charts, and borderline illegal. I'd keep fighting the good fight even if I never wore a badge again.
I just deserved better than this.
What I deserved would have to wait.
Theo looked more like he'd like to be filled in on where we were going and when, but deferred to Chad, who didn't ask.
Surprisingly, it was Evie who asked. Because she needed to know how to gild the lily and get me ready to travel.
I got lucky. Raven, having proved me to herself by proving what I could withstand, and having proved herself to me by showing me what she could dish out, was now finished with me. In my opinion, her little show of ugliness and force was pointless. It was too short to show what I could endure, and there'd been no point in enduring it. Not that I wanted a contest of wills, or to be forced to remain unshackled and on my feet while enduring Evie's assault, but it would have been a better idea of who I was. When ordered to submit, did I drop and take whatever punishment was coming for not enduring the right way? Or did I idiotically hope that obeying would get me a lighter hand? Did I look like I was enjoying it secretly? If I were Raven the sick fuck, that's what I'd be looking for, and I'd look for it somewhere farther along than five minutes after unpackaging my latest acquisition.
But maybe the display we'd just gone through was enough for her to decide who to sell me to. I found that hideous and terrifying, because I didn't know which part of what had just happened was the most important. That I fell apart? Or that afterwards I came back together? That I screamed or that I endured?
I didn't think that was a great measure. What kind of beating can you take? Didn't seem like the most promising of interview questions. But it filled me with dread as I thought about what kind of monster she'd deliver me to.
Where I got lucky was that once they dropped me to the floor and had their little Q and A about the car, they were done with me. I'd just become nothing.
It's dangerous to do that. Underestimating your opponent can get you hurt.
Another piece of luck was that Evie needed direction. Apparently as well as being in charge of beating she was in charge of makeup and wardrobe. That thought was so bizarre I could have broken into hysterics if I didn't have a lot of training. Going undercover was always more scary for the sudden kindnesses in the midst of the worst possible human behavior.
Or, equally freakish, a logical corporate twist to things. And this is Evie, Vice President in charge of Makeup, Wardrobe and Test Beatings in our little enterprise.
Lucky for me Evie was vp and the buyer was a new account. That meant there had to be some consultation of where I was going and what he was expecting. And since I'd just been delegated commodity and relegated to deaf and dumb bystander, they spoke as if I wasn't there.
The client was in the U.S. apparently he was in Los Angeles, which meant a shorter transport than I might have expected. He was rich and he was building a harem.
Sunlight fell across me where I sat on the floor in the warehouse, dressed in a t-shirt and nothing else. Instead of feeling vulnerable, I found anger growing. This was why I was doing this. To stop the client 3837's of the world. That's all Raven called him. That's all Evie needed. Apparently the information Evie needed would be released through the client number. I wondered how much Raven even knew about him. He had a type. He liked underage.
That made me see red and explained a few more details. Because I'd just hit twenty-five and it wouldn't be much longer I'd be able to go deep cover as a teen, but for ]now, Erin Trace and her history of arrests? She was on the cusp of eighteen. Still had three months to go.
They were buying it.
He was buying me. Whether or not 3837 would fall for my being seventeen and three-quarters remained to be seen.
I had a good idea where I was in Arizona. The trackers should be sending back information that would allow investigators to sift through and find some link to Raven even if there were dummy corporations and a handful of people between her and this weirdly bedazzled warehouse with its fluffy curtains.
The new client was in Los Angeles. Evie still held me by the arm, ready to march me to wherever it was she was going to do whatever it was to get me ready. I'd become nothing more than a package she was getting ready for shipment, and for the first time I did feel like a woman in this group was betraying her own kind.
The idea of them talking about the client only seemed careless. They could be excused for not thinking a late teens not that smart girl with an impressive rap sheet couldn't do anything with the information that she was going to Los Angeles.
So I listened and listed in my head, the various ways I could get back at them for treating me as if I were nothing more than an animate sex doll.
Once Raven and Evie were in custody, maybe the investigators would find their way to whoever 3837 was. I'd hopefully be there to provide whatever information I could. Because a harem of underage girls was sick. And because even if he was buying them just on that borderline between under eighteen and over, he needed to pay.
Hopefully he'd lead us to more. I thought Raven was near the top of this organization. There was hired muscle around the shadowy edges of the warehouse. I'd slowly become aware of them. That they were armed I didn't even have to wonder. This was a full fledged operation that was probably better put together than any number of entrepreneurial startups. Imagine if she put that business brain to something legitimate. Something that built instead of tearing down.
Chad and Theo would have the information of where I'd been taken. They were deferential as one is with a tough boss or a good paying job they want to keep, but it was obvious they'd been working for Raven for a while. That familiarity would also help.
I was getting somewhere, squirreling away information in my brain, pretending to write it on a notebook that I could always access, repeating salient bits to myself and biting the tip of my tongue for a mnemonic.
This is what I'd come for. Being sold to Raven's client sucked.
Exposing Raven's secret, client-number-protected client and having him arrested? Seeing charges brought against him for interstate human sex trafficking and the girls if they were honestly under eighteen?
