He frowns at me like a dissatisfied woodland creature.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
The stern look I give him doesn’t seem to penetrate through his feigned indifference, so I let it go and focus on my phone.
“Just checking,” I say in a sing-song voice.
I’ll keep checking, whether he wants to answer or not.
“I need to shower.”
He looks down between us, anickexpression forming on his face.
My eyes quickly scan to the end of the messages, and I look back up at him when I’m done, suddenly feeling awake and focused.
“Yep. Time to go. We have criminal shit to do, and I have the secret instructions.”
Chapter Nineteen
Fallow
According to Kaitlyn, there’s a big, semi-legal casino that’s a front for an organized crime family. They have a back building that is supposed to be a strip club but sounds like it’s more of a human trafficking front, if Ellery’s information is to be believed.
Ellery knows this because they worked here, but right before we fucking got here, right at the end of this long trail, Ellery went dark. Kaitlyn told us casually, not knowing our real mission here, and it lit a fucking fire in me.
I will find my sister if I have to kill every mafia fuck in this building.
The trafficked strippers I’ll free, obviously. I already regret not freeing the lizards, although they were clearly treated with more humanity.
Kaitlyn’s password still gets us into the club. We’re pretending to be normal patrons—although Colm is a terrible liar, I’ve come to learn—but the guards here seem pretty disengaged and aren’t interested in interrogating us, as long aswe have money. We head to the bar first to get the lay of the land, and Colm orders us two beers that I have no intention of drinking.
There are some stages and poles dotted around with girls dancing on them. They all look very clearly drugged, which isn’t that unusual, but really sells the trafficking front to me. Well-paid, well-respected sex workers who are in it for the love of the game can be drug users sometimes but certainly not all of them, and not to this point of uniform sedation. At the edge of the large room I see a few more doors, just like in Colm’s club. Private rooms.
Except these have very committed-looking guards, and from what I can see, suspiciously thick walls. I don’t like the look of this place at all. The thought of what’s probably happening in those rooms is making my skin crawl. I may be a murderer, but abuse and exploitation always hits me right in the morals. It makes sense to me. The people I kill have it coming, I just happen to enjoy giving it to them quite a bit.
Colm is quiet. Too quiet. It’s making me more nervous. After a minute, I try to discretely pinch his thigh to get his attention, because he’s staring way too hard at one of the dancers on the other side of the room.
He looks at me, snapping out of his daze, but I can clearly see concern etched on his face.
“What?” I ask, keeping my voice low.
Colm glances at the lone bartender and stays silent until the man walks to the opposite end from us so he can clean something.
“I know that fucking woman.”
My eyebrows raise, but I keep myself still, so I don’t draw any attention.
“What? Where from?”
“She was an escort back in Possum Hollow. About as high-end as you can get in that place. Really nice girl, too, she was seeing one of the guys at the house. She knew how to keep her mouth shut but had no interest in any of our mafia shit. She was one of the first ones to go missing in this recent spate that’s made me worried. Everyone convinced Liam that she just took off. They said a bunch of shitty things about dating escorts in the process, obviously, as if that’s not drowning in hypocrisy. I didn’t get involved until several other women went missing.”
I hiss quietly through my teeth.
“Well I guess that seals it. Something funny is going on here and you seem to be involved. Y’know, I was really, really hoping this mission could be all about my thing, without the tragic human trafficking vibes.”
Colm doesn’t smile, but I can feel him lighten by a degree. I only half mean it; I’m mostly trying to keep him from freaking out. Not that I’ve ever seen him freak out, but this is about as close as he probably gets.
I don’t think he was expecting to have to do actual work here, either. He definitely wasn’t expecting to discover something big, because it’s just the two of us and as formidable as I am, that’s probably not enough to take down an entire mob army we know nothing about.
