She followed him to his car, and he drove them to the place the hacker wanted to meet, going just a little too fast for her to be comfortable with.
The place was an empty building in a part of town with a lot of warehouses. She thought about what her dad had said at dinner the other night about the Irish taking over the warehouse district. It looked like that was true.
“Wasn’t this a part of my father’s territory?” she asked, curious to hear Connor’s side of it.
“Yeah, until a few weeks ago. You met Ruby, right?”
“The waitress?”
“And Owen’s girlfriend. He’s crazy about her, which puts a target on her back.”
“Are you saying that my dad did something to her?”
“Actually, Leo abducted her. They brought her here.” He pointed to a warehouse across the street with a huge hole in the side of the building. “I drove a car through the building.”
“Was my father going to kill her?” she asked, feeling like there was ice flowing in her veins. She didn’t know about any of this, and picturing the bright smile on Ruby’s face made her feel even worse.
“He was, but we stopped him.”
She guessed that was probably when Leo got shot, and she couldn’t help thinking that he deserved it. The more she learned about her family’s actions, the more she realized she was on the wrong side of this fight all along.
She followed Connor into the building where the hacker was waiting. The inside was a large open space where she imagined there was once manufacturing equipment or crates of products, whatever the company that used this building needed it for. But it hadn’t been used in a long time. It was nothing but a concrete floor and brick walls now. But in the center of the space was a table and chair where a man sat in front of a computer.
“You must be Billy,” Connor said.
The man stood, and he wasn’t what she was expecting. Her knowledge of computer hackers was limited to over-dramatized movies where they were all portrayed by skinny guys in glasses with a whole lot of social awkwardness. Billy was nothing like that. He was a little short and leanly muscled. There were no glasses covering his hazel eyes. He was actually kind of cute.
“That’s the name I gave Owen, yeah,” he said, smirking. “You have my money?”
Not socially awkward either.
Conner reached into his back pocket and pulled out a white envelope that looked pretty thick to her. He tossed it to Billy, who didn’t bother to count it before tucking it into the side pocket of the computer bag hanging off the back of his chair.
“Okay, what do you have for me?” he asked, sitting back down.
Connor took charge here, giving Billy the list of names and the small amount of information that Alessia was able to dig up on her own, without any advanced computer skills. It only took minutes for him to confirm her information but much longer to get onto the black web.
“Holy shit,” he said after several long minutes of silence.
Alessia rushed around the table to see the computer screen, her stomach immediately heaving at the sight that met her eyes. It was a website with a picture of a woman. She was barely dressed, only wearing a thin white shift dress. The thing was sleeveless and barely covered her ass. Her blonde hair was long and unwashed and she had a bruise on her cheek, as if she’d been hit. The worst part was the text beside her picture on the screen. It was some kind of comments section, but not like anything she’d ever seen on social media. They were disgusting, lewd, and violent.
“Oh my God,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand.
Connor came to stand beside her, putting a comforting hand on her back. “What is this?”
“It’s an auction website,” Billy said, sounding just as horrified as she felt. “These men aren’t coming to town to participate in an auction. They’ve already made their purchases. The pickup date is in two weeks.”
“Son of a bitch,” Connor murmured.
“Where?” she asked. “Where are they picking them up?”
Billy didn’t answer. Instead, he started typing away on the computer. Windows flashed across the screen too fast for her to follow, not that she would understand what she was looking at anyway. Whatever Billy was doing took all of his concentration, and she leaned her head onto Connor’s shoulder as they waited.
They hadn’t talked about what happened between them the other night, so she didn’t know if he’d welcome this kind of physical closeness, but she needed it right now. Her heart was aching for the woman she’d seen and the others whose conditions she didn’t know.
“Damn it,” Billy said after a while. The metal folding chair that he was sitting on creaked as he leaned back and rubbed his eyes with a groan.
“What is it?” Connor asked, pressing a kiss to the top of her head before stepping away from her and closer to the computer.
