New export dates.
“We’ve narrowed the next shipment out to a pier,” Daniel says quickly, hitting a few last keys before he looks up at me.“All the girls currently marked for shipment have the same pier number.”
That seemed...too easy.
But I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“All shipping out at the same time?”I ask.
He nods.“Tomorrow night.Pier 9.A ship called the Dodo.”
“I don’t really care about the ship’s name,” I note.“How many girls?”
“Thirty,” he says, and dives into a complicated explanation of where they’re coming from–all from a warehouse in the district–and where they’ve been up to this point.
The truth is, I don’t care about any of that, either.I don’t need to know where they’ve been or how they got there.I just need to know where I can get to them before they end up on that ship, being transported to foreign buyers.Because once they’re on the ship, I can’t save them anymore.
And I’m not willing to let any more of them go.
I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to forget the faces of the girls I didn’t save last night.
We got only one of them, the girl Brooks had with her when I found her, and that girl died early this morning, courtesy of the wounds she’d received before Brooks could get to her.
Twenty other girls were loaded onto a ship in the midst of the battle and sent to destinations I didn’t know.Twenty other girls who’d been right there, ripe for the taking, and who we’d missed because we weren’t as prepared as we needed to be.I hadn’t known the shipment was happening until Brooks figured it out and left without me.
Leaving a note behind, apologizing.
This time, I don’t have her as a loose canon, though, and I’m not going to make the same mistakes.I’m running this rescue mission the way I want to, and I’m counting on Brooks to stay the fuck out of the way rather than screwing it up.
A part of me knows I’m being unfair even thinking that.It knows that she was doing what she thought was best, and doing it for the girls she was trying to save.But a larger part of me is well and truly pissed that she’s thrown herself into danger again, and refused to let me pull her out last night when I could have, andthatpart is pleased as punch that she won’t be able to screw this mission up.
While also furious that she insisted I leave her where she was.
I turn back to the planning to distract myself from that, and run through the list of girls.It’s not a complete list–or at least we don’t think it is–but it does include some very important names.Aislyn Brennan, for one.The governor’s daughter, second.The girls I thought were being used as bait.They’re scheduled to go to the port tomorrow night, so they’ll be at Pier 9, but I’m not positive they’ll actually go onto a ship.
I think they’re being handed off to someone else.
Either that or they’re being used as bait, just to try to draw me out.
I’m going to feel pretty stupid for falling for it, if that’s the case, but I’ve got important business with those girls.I want to get them out of the ring and into my own house.And then I want to start questioning them about how this all works.I want witnesses from inside the ring to tell me where they’ve been, how long they’ve been held, and how many men there are.I want to something I can hold over Dom’s head.
Most of all, I want to get to the bottom of this and figure out who’s running the whole thing.
The victims might not have all the answers, but they’ll have some, and as long as Brooks is going to insist on infiltrating her father’s operation on her own, I’m going to keep myself busy with something else.
Other girls, as the case may be.Because I’m more than a little angry at her for continuing to put herself in dangerous situations.I let her stay this time, but the next time I see her, I’m not giving her a choice.
In the meantime, I just need to figure out how to save this group without tipping my hand...or losing Brooks.
I don’t know what Dom knows about me at this point, or if he thinks I’m dead.From what I can tell, he hasn’t inquired about me at all, which seems strange when I was stolen right out of one of his vans.He should be raising hell trying to find me, and the fact that he’s not makes me extremely nervous.
It’s almost like he didn’t expect to keep me.
Like he knew there’d be a rescue attempt, and that his men would lose me.
The thought freezes me in my tracks, because it feels like I’m hitting the mark on the head with it.Dom’s men didn’t kill us last night when they could have, and if I wasn’t mistaken, we got away a lot easier than we should have.There were fewer of us than there were of them, and they definitely had bigger guns.
Yet we didn’t lose anyone.
