“What have you found?”
Donovan passed me a flash drive, a grim look crossing his face as I inserted the stick into my laptop and pulled up the encrypted file. There was a single file marked photos on the drive, and I clicked to open it.
The photos pulled up. Michaelson’s Mercedes was alone in the empty lot near the ship channel. A limo pulled up beside him and the door opened, revealing Botello. This was the confirmation we needed. The judge was in bed with the devil himself.
“It gets worse.” Donovan’s voice was laced with fury. I looked up into his eyes and saw the deadly calm of my friend, knowing he was ready to die as long as he took the bastards down with him. “I’m telling you now, Killian. I’m killing them—bothof them.”
“Botello is easy enough to kill, Donovan, but you are talking about killing a federal judge. That will bring hell on us we don’t want.”
“I don’t give a fuck, Killian. I want him dead. He deserves nothing less.” I’d never seen my friend lose control like this before. Rage was written all over his face.
I sat back in my chair without scrolling to the next photo. If Donovan was this pissed off about them, I knew they would be bad. “Tell me.” Not sure I wanted to see what came next for myself, but I would trust my friend’s word.
“She’s young. Barely eighteen. Who the fuck knows how long he has had her or what she’s been through?” He tunneled his fingers through his hair as he paced in front of my desk.
Fuck. “Did you follow him?” I knew the answer before he gave it to me.
“He took her to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere.”
I regarded as my friend. “Where is she now?”
“Safe.”
“Were you seen?” Donovan gave me a skeptical look. “Was anyone guarding her?”
“No. She was alone in the cabin.” His voice dropped to a menacing level. “He had her chained to the concrete floor, and they bolted the door from the outside.”
“Jesus.” I ground my teeth. No wonder Donovan wanted to kill the bastard. “We’ll get him, Donovan. I promise. We have to be smart about this, and there’s someone else we have to protect now, too—his niece.”
I asked him again where he had stashed the girl, and I knew she would be safe when he told me where she was. She spoke a little English, but he could get her name was Alondra De la Mora. They took her from Honduras and brought up here on a cargo ship with a bunch of other girls.
“Did you get anything else out of her?”
Donovan shook his head. “She was terrified of me, which is why I took her to Rowan.”
I nodded. “She’s in excellent hands, then.”
Rowan was the sister Donovan, and I never had. Her past was just as fucked up as ours, but in her own special way.
When she first came to the group home, she didn’t talk to anyone—even the adults. She kept a wide berth from everyone until one day they stopped keeping a wide berth from her.
Donovan and I found Rowan being pushed around and cornered by two assholes double her size and with several years on her. She was small and frightened, but she was also very pissed off.
Rowan turned into a hellcat, scratching, clawing, and kicking at her attackers. They were too much for her though, and had Donovan and I not showed up when we did, those fuckers could have hurt her worse than the ripped clothes and the busted lip that she got.
Donovan and I ended up getting sent to juvie after we beat the shit out of those guys. They had broken noses, missing teeth, and cracked ribs by the time we were done with them. Both boys were our age and had to be taken to the hospital, and Donovan and I got carted off in cuffs. Before the cops took us away though, Rowan approached us both and said the first words any of us had ever heard her say. “Thank you.”
It didn’t matter that we stepped in to save a young girl. Our force was “excessive” they said, and they shipped us off to juvie, but not before we spread the word that nobody touched Rowan, or they’d suffer the same fate. She became one of us that day. A part of our fucked up mismatched family, and the only one Donovan and I would trust with anything besides each other.
“She’s safe. Rowan won’t let anything happen to her until we can figure out how to best help her. I need something else from you now, though.”
“What?”
“I need you to find me everything you can on Michelsen’s niece. I need her name, age, schedule, friends, what she does... We have to get her out quickly or Michelsen is going to sell her to Botello.”
Donovan sighed, then asked, “Any idea how we are going to pull this off?”
“We have to take her. Once she’s safe, we will explain to her why, so she’ll cooperate, and then we’ll figure out how to fix this mess.”
