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“Special Warehouses? What’s that?” Caleb asked.
“The slaughterhouses.”
“Cattle? I didn’t know the Infidels were involved in that. Seems too legit for them.”
“They’re not related to animals,” I ground out, hating the thought of it.
“They’re torture and killing zones,” Jonah told him.
Caleb scrubbed his hand over his face. “This just keeps getting darker and darker.”
“You want dark? I’ll tell you what’s likely happening to Asher in one of these shitholes right about now.”
Caleb skillfully skirted around that and asked instead, “This is where you think he is? In one of these demented places?”
“Has to be. Carson knows what Asher’s done, he’ll want punishment. The slaughterhouses are where he’ll take care of that. There is another place too, but I highly doubt he’s taken Asher there.”
“Highly doubt? I’m gonna need more than that not to look into it.”
“It’s a dungeon beneath the Monroe Estate.”
“That’s where he was tortured? In his actual home?”
“Yeah,” J confirmed, grimacing at the thought of it.
He wasn’t the only one. Jesus fuck.
“He told you about that?” J asked, not liking that this guy knew something so intimate about Asher, something he simply didn’t speak about. Ever. Me and Jonah had inadvertently found out about it through a slipup from Reed Keller, he hadn’t actually told us.
“He did.” He held up his hand at the growl now emanating from Jonah. “Before you get your boxers in a twist, he didn’t just confess it in a moment of loving intimacy. It was a condition.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “A condition of what?”
“Of our arrangement.”
“You mean your depraved punishing fuck sessions?” Jonah bit back.
Was this how I came off to him and Ash when Aurora was concerned? Jeez.
“J, it was years ago. The past.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “The past.” He shifted his weight, then said without that edge that’d come right back in moments, “Fine. It’s buried. My bad.”
He was lying.
There was no way he had let it go.
He was just putting it aside, or more like pausing the issue, something I was sure he’d launch back into with a vengeance down the road—likely, when he determined that Caleb was off guard.
Fuck. Whatever. We needed to focus.
“Jonah, why do you think he’s not at the dungeon?” I asked, keeping us on this track.
“Carson and Samuel know you and me are still out there, along with Caleb, who they just know as an accomplice right now, no identity, nothing to go on. They know we won’t leave Asher behind. They’re gonna be worried about the mystery that is Caleb, especially given the damage he did with destroying that auction and extracting the remaining hostages, effectively putting an end to the entire dollhouse network. Carson won’t want to risk any interruptions either. The Monroe Estate is way too obvious to you and me, to even someone like Caleb who’s connected to Asher. The slaughterhouses are harder for us to track, given how many there are and the fact that only a couple are actually known to us. We don’t even know the one where Revenant was kept. Asher never said and we weren’t exactly focused on that part either. So, yeah, strategically, taking him to one of those hellholes buys them enough time to track us before we track Asher. In their minds anyway.”
“Damn, look at you learning from the master,” I said.
Caleb gave a nod and told us, “All right, we’ll start there.”
