What crew?
What the hell was this man talking about?
The confusion must have been written all over my face, because I felt his hand take mine, all leather gloves and tips of his fingers, before he spoke again. “I’m part of a club here in Redd Valley. The Iron Battalion MC. We sort of watch over our town. Make it our mission to make sure everyone is all right.”
“Like Sons of Anarchy?” I croaked out.
“Not at all like that, but the basic jist is the same.”
“So you’re in a gang,” I said, my voice slowly growing stronger.
“No,” he said almost immediately. “We aren’t a gang. We don’t run drugs. We don’t harm others. We have our businesses. We protect what’s ours. We look out for our community.”
I furrowed my brow softly. “You have a business?”
“I run the local bar in town.”
“Oh.”
Slowly, I managed to peel my eyes open. The world tilted a bit, but the deeper I breathed, the better that got. I felt his finger slowly sliding against the skin on the top of my hand. I squeezed his hand for a moment, and he squeezed back.
“Are you hungry?” Ghost asked. “Doc says you should be good to eat.”
My eyes flitted around, trying to get my bearings. My eyes passed by a window, but even with the curtains drawn, I saw it was still dark. Okay, same night. Unless I’d been out for twenty-four hours. I tried searching for a clock on the wall or something. Anything to tell me what time it was. But when I turned my head a bit, I found a desk perched in the corner with a bunch of televisions mounted to the wall.
“Why do you need so many TVs?” I asked.
He didn’t even look over his shoulder. He simply answered. “They’re not TVs.”
“What are they, then?”
“Don’t ask questions you’re not ready for, Jaz.”
That was the second time he called me that. Jaz. No one called me that. Why did he call me that? I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Not the ‘Jaz’ thing. That was fine. I didn’t mind that, I don’t think. It was the televisions.
Why was that his reaction to the televisions?
I stared at him for a while. He stared right back. I hoped he’d just… volunteer the information. I didn’t have the energy to go back and forth with someone. But when he didn’t respond, like every other time in my life, I accepted defeat.
Eventually I found my voice again. “Why are you following me?”
He didn’t hesitate. “You have information on the company that we believe is helping to supply this trafficking ring in some way.”
I blinked. “What?”
He scooted what I realized was a chair he was sitting in a bit closer to the bed, but he didn’t release my hand. “The law firm you work for is working with this sex trafficking ring.”
I scoffed. “That’s insane, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I just work for?—”
“Jasmine, listen to me. My crew and I have circumstantial proof that the law office you work for may be in cahoots with the ring pushing into our town. To what end, we aren’t sure, but we know the two are connected. We could prove to you right now.”
I furrowed my brow. “Cahoots? What are we in, some kind of murder mystery from the seventies?”
His chuckle ignited his eyes, and I hated how warm the sound was. I hated how it shivered down my spine and slithered through my veins like morphine.
His next set of words, however, were a cold dash of water on that warmth. “My crew tasked me with getting close to someone in your place of work to see if we could find any sort of physical proof of the connection between the women that we know are being taken and your law office.”
I just stared at him. The first rule of law was that if someone could say something over and over again, phrasing it differently but never changing their story, it was worth listening to. My brain kept screaming at me that this wasn’t happening. Thatthis was all a dream. That I was still on my couch, fielding text messages from my boss about…
