Like drugs.Hired murders.
Girls.
He’s exactly the kind of man I’d expect to find tangled up in a trafficking ring, and the moment I saw him, I knew we had our quarry.Now we just need to get him to talk.
“I don’t know anything,” he says again.“Come on, man.You and me, we go way back.”
“Which means I know exactly what sort of person you are,” I answer casually.“Daniel, his fingers.”
“No!”Simon screams, but he has no say in the matter.Not really.
Before he can say anything else, Daniel’s picked up one of his hands, put it against the stone, and brought the butt of his gun down on the man’s forefinger, shattering it.
Simon screams and sags again, and I pin him harder to the wall.
“Tell me what you’re doing here, Simon,” I repeat.“Or you’re going to lose more than your fingers.”
“And you’re going to lose more than that if you keep poking around,” he snarls.“This is bigger than you, Boudreaux.Bigger than us both.”
I motion to Daniel and he singles out another finger.
“No!”Simon screeches.“I’m telling you everything I know.This is big.Bigger than any New Orleans family.And they’ll take you down without thinking twice.Kill me if they even know I’ve spoken to you.”He turns his head and meets my gaze, his eyes bloodshot and terrified.“Stay out of this, or we’ll both lose our lives.”
Suddenly I hear movement down the tunnel from us and freeze, my mind skipping through the possibilities.It’s too early for the club to be opening, which means whoever that is might be smugglers.Probably armed.I only have four men and we’re not heavily armed.We’re not here on official Boudreaux business.
I’m not willing to get caught before I’m ready.
I lean toward Simon, furious at being interrupted.“I want to know what’s going on here, and I’ll rip the city apart to find out.Once I do, I’ll kill everyone involved.You tell that to your boss.See how he feels about having made an enemy of the biggest family in New Orleans.”
We turn and leave before the footsteps reach us, without anything but a possible location, and the knowledge that whoever is running this ring, they’re not hiring the best people.Simon leBanc is a mercenary.An outlaw.And if they’re using him, it’s because no honorable family will work with them.
This just got a whole lot more complicated.And I don’t like complications.
Brooks
Iget to my father’s mansion without a real plan for what I’m going to do, and that’s so unlike me that I have to pause before I hit the driveway and get my brain to actually think.
The moment I saw that logo in the photo at the apartment, I knew what it meant.Honestly, I’ve had the thought since Aislyn first went missing, and then again when Lucien told me girls were disappearing, and then again when I saw all those files.Even if I hadn’t thought about it consciously, my subconscious was making sure I remembered the girls filing through the hall in the basement, years ago.I’ve been dreaming about it since the war with the Poffo clan, though the two don’t seem to have anything to do with each other.
Something inside me knew this was going to happen.When I saw my father’s mark on that building, the pieces just fell into place.
And you’d think that would mean I know what the fuck I’m going to do about it.But you’d be wrong.Because for possibly the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan ready-made for this.
Maybe because ‘this’ is a situation where I suspect my father is buying and selling girls for sex and money, and doing it despite how deranged and disgusting it is.
I snort at that.‘Deranged and Disgusting’ could be my father’s middle name.Names.
I sit on the bike and stare up at the gates of the mansion, with their wrought iron curves and embellishments, and let my mind travel beyond them to the house.It’s huge and gothic, gray stone with turrets and a ridiculous roof, and the inside is just as bad.My father is sleek and modern, but his house is gaudy and overdone, like he went to the kingdom of the Sun King to get the internal decorations.Everything is done in gold and burgundy, with plush carpets and dark wood.And you’d think, with all that gold, that the place would shine like the sun, but the opposite is true.
The house is cold and dark and very intense.It reeks of evil.Particularly at night.
A shiver passes over my skin and I move on from the house, trying to gather what I know.I suspect that my dad is buying and selling girls, or at least moving them for someone else, and given what I’ve seen before, this isn’t a reach.If he was doing it when I was a kid, and making money, I don’t see any reason he’d stop.But according to our research, the game has changed.The girls I saw when I was thirteen were scratched up and dirty.Street girls who didn’t have anyone to save them.The girls I’ve seen in the files from Lucien are from a higher class.Girls with money and guards.Families who should have protected them.
Those aren’t the sorts of girls you traffic because it’s easy, and I want to know what the fuck my father’s playing at.
I also want to know who’s paying him to do it–or who’s buying them from him.I’ve seen enough in New York to know that no one works alone in a racket like this, even in New Orleans, where everyone is a freelancer.There are hundreds of girls in those files, which means this is a big ring.Too big for him to run on his own.
If I can figure out who’s pulling my dad’s strings, I might be able to stop all of this.
