I grit my teeth. “You bitch,” I hiss. “So what? Are you the boss of this?”
She laughs, and it’s the first time I’ve seen any kind of joy come across her features. “Oh, no. I just run the men and women over to America. I return home tomorrow, but I wanted to see what you were all about, how this would play out.” She touches my cheek, and I move my head away from her outstretched fingers. “I am not disappointed.”
“If you’re not the boss, then who is?” I demand because, if I’m going to die here like I think I am, I deserve to know the truth before my last breath.
Anya looks behind her, and it’s the first time I notice – remembered – that someone came in with her. I follow the shoes up to the legs before the man squats beside her. Shock makes me stiffen as this man looks at me with sympathy.
“Hey, Charlie,” he murmurs.
“Miles?” I breathe out. No. No, this has to be a hallucination. I look between the two and then demand, “What the hell is going on? Miles, get me down from this. Make her let me go. Arrest her!”
“I can’t do that, Charlie.” He shakes his head in a sad sort of way and then balances his elbows on his knees.
“Oh my god,” I whisper as everything clicks together. “You’re part of this.”
“I have been for a long time.” Is that remorse in his voice? “I was just hoping it didn’t come to this, but you kept pushing, kept getting closer, and now? Now there’s nothing I can do to change your fate.”
I snarl at him. “Bullshit.”
“I truly am sorry.”
“If she’s the overseer of the trafficked victims, what does that make you?”
“I’m not the boss if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Then what are you?” I demand.
“I handle the drugs,” he says on an exhale. “I supply the workers, the business, with their addiction.”
I blink once. Then twice. And then everything clicks together like the last piece of a puzzle. “You have got to be kidding me. You… it was you?” He glances away in a bit of shame when he realizes that I now know. “You were the dealer supplying my dad – my mother – with drugs.”
“It didn’t end in a way that I could have predicted.” He looks back at me. “At the time, it was just about the money.”
“You got them killed!” I yell at him. “You ruined my life!”
“I’m sorry. I tried to step in, but –”
“Does Rochelle know about the scum that you are?”
He has the audacity to scowl. “She knows nothing.”
I laugh without any humor. “The protectiveness? The tracker? The cellphone? The warnings about staying away? The degrading? All the anger every time I’d get a step closer? Hell, even when you found out I was withNix.” I narrow my gaze at him. “It was all because of this, wasn’t it? Keeping tabs on me?”
“Yes,” Anya says with joy.
“I was trying to get you to get out of it,” Miles says. “I was trying to protect you from this, but you just kept pushing. You got popular overnight. Do you know how many times I’ve fought to keep you out of someone’s bed? Do you know how many offers I’d beg to be dismissed? But this time, Charlie? This time I have orders, and that is where you’ve landed yourself today. You caught the attention of someone who has too much money for his own good, and it’s an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
I close my eyes as the fear of my fate settles in. “Tell me one thing, Miles. Did you kill Nathan?”
“Nathan?” I open my eyes at his shocked tone. His eyelids flutter, shocked, at me a few times, as if I thought so little of him. “No, of course not.”
“Then what happened to him? And don’t lie to me! I know you know what actually happened to him.” After all, Nathan had his hand in this business, even if it was for innocent reasons like being their accountant. He couldn’t have known who he was truly working for. Nathan was a good guy; he wouldn’t have done business with them had he known.
Miles looks at me long and hard before his gaze rises and he peers past my dangling body. A cold chill creeps down my body as Anya pats my cheek and says, “You really are too innocent.”
His gaze stays behind me. “Miles?” I call. “I demand to know. What happened to Nathan?”
He isn’t speaking to me when he says, “I don’t want her dying believing that I killed you.”
