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"Good girl," he sneered, and he shoved me backwards, forcing me onto the bed. Slamming the door behind him, I heard the lock twist, sealing me to my fate.
I stared at the three lines sitting a few feet away from me and screwed my hands up into fists. I didn’t know if I had the strength to keep resisting them much longer, but I had to try.
And I had to pray that Paulo had meant it when he’d told me that he was going to come for me. Because the thought of being lost to this life once again was more than I could handle.
Chapter Sixteen – Paulo
"Paulo, you need to sit," Alex told me. I didn’t even look at him. My mind was running too fast to close it off right now, and I needed to work off some of that excess energy before it drove me crazy.
It had been a full day since Selina had been taken, and I had called in Alex to help me strategize on getting her back. I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face in that car, resigned, as though she had already accepted what was going to happen to her. What if we had already lost her? What if she was already gone? Not physically, but mentally. She had been so fragile, so on edge the whole time she had been here, as though she had never trusted that she deserved this kind of life for herself, and I could see her toppling all too easily back into his clutches once more.
Alex had managed to keep me from going after him right then and there, though it’s all I had been able to think about since I had watched her be dragged away from me. My head was a mess, thinking about everything he might have been doing to her, all the ways he might have been using her. I knew it wasn’t helpful, letting myself get caught up in those details, but I just couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop the terror, the fear of losing her, from ripping me apart.
"We need to fucking do something," I snapped back at Alex. I knew it wasn’t his fault that all of this had happened, but there was so much emotion in me and no way to get rid of it. I didn’t even know where to start in shaking it all loose.
"I know," he replied, and he stared up at me for a moment. "What the hell is going on with you, Paulo?"
"What do you think?” I fired back at him, more sharply than I intended. "We’re supposed to be helping these girls, not letting them get taken …"
"Yeah, I know," he replied, keeping his voice steady. "But I’ve seen you deal with a lot of shit in this line of work. And I’ve never seen you like this. What’s going on?"
I fell silent. I didn’t want to have to tell him the truth. I knew he was going to judge the hell out of me for what I had done, getting involved with her like this. These women came to us vulnerable, and I was doubtful Alex would be able to see our relationship as something honest.
"You have feelings for her?" Alex asked, sounding shocked. I didn’t look at him, but I nodded.
"Yeah," I confessed. He let out a long breath through his nose, as though trying to wrap his head around it.
"Has anything … happened between the two of you?" he asked, his voice careful, free of emotion. I hesitated before I responded. I didn’t want him to see me differently because of this, but there was no point denying what was going on with me. I knew holding shit back was just going to make this mission harder to pull off.
And I couldn’t risk anything getting in the way of it.
"Yeah, it has," I replied. "But it was all on her terms. I didn’t push for anything. She came to me, and …"
I trailed off. It was hard for me to explain the depth of our connection to him. I knew it was something real, something true, something I hadn’t felt in a long time—if I had ever felt it before, that was. Seeing this woman, seeing her so vulnerable, and knowing that she felt comfortable letting me see that vulnerability, it made me feel so much less weak, so much less of a pariah for the shit that I’d been through. I had seen her at her worst, and I could tell there was so much beneath the surface, beneath the front she put out to the world.
"Fucking hell, Paulo," Alex replied, finally, once the words had hung there between us for a moment. "You really …?"
"I know how it sounds," I told him, turning to face him, where he sat behind the desk in my office. "But it’s not like that. I really feel something for her. I don’t know if she feels the same way about me, but she was willing to give sobriety a try when I suggested it to her. I feel like … I feel like I could help her. Like we could help each other."
His eyes scanned mine for a long time, searching for anything that might have given away my true emotions, but I was laying them out for him as it was. I was telling him exactly what I felt, even though I knew it must have been hard for him to hear. He had gotten into this line of work because he wanted to help these women, but I needed him to see, I had, too. I had just fallen for one of them, as well.
"You really like her, don’t you?" he asked softly. I nodded.
"I know you might not believe me," I replied. "But I don’t really care. I like her. I’m … falling for her. And, no matter what, I don’t want her to get pulled back into that world. She deserves better than that."
He nodded in agreement.
"That’s something I can agree with you on," he replied. "I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you, honestly, but I know we have to get her away from that bastard Stefano."
I breathed a sigh of relief. I was glad that his priorities seemed to line up with mine. I knew it couldn’t have been easy for him, hearing all of this from me, but I was glad I had laid myself out on the line for him. I didn’t want to hide the truth from Alex, not when I knew he would be the driving force behind getting her out of there.
"We need to move fast," I told him, finally sinking down into the chair opposite him. "She’s vulnerable to him. She’s still struggling with being out of that place, and I get the feeling he might be able to talk her into sticking around again if we don’t get to her quickly enough. Plus, he might be supplying her drugs again, and if she gets hooked, it’s going to be harder for her to break free."
"Right," Alex muttered, jotting something down on a notebook in front of him. "And where do you think she is? Where do you think he’s taken her?"
"I think he’s taken her back to that brothel," I muttered. "It makes the most sense—he wants her to work again, that’s why he came after her the way he did. So, he’ll bring her back to where it all started, try to force her back into the life she was in before."
"You’re probably right," he agreed. "You want me to get my men together? We can send a group out now, take him down—"
