Page 35 of Deliverance

I didn’t love that we were all separated, but I wanted to hit all three buildings at once in case Kingfisher had eyes in this area we didn’t know about. Liam hadn’t found any cameras, and the surveillance team hadn’t seen any either but that didn’t mean anything. As a result, we were all wearing face coverings and black beanies. The Archers were used to wearing them. I tried to keep all of our identities secret and off cameras that could implicate us. The look on my guys’ faces when I handed them theirs reminded me that we came from different worlds.

“All right, on my mark.” Izzy said.

She was in the van next to Liam, monitoring the area. Maya’s dad still wasn’t letting them go on active missions, and although I missed Maya, HQ had been too close a call, so I backed him up.

“Three, two, one, go.”

I drew my gun from its holster and rose to my feet. Under the cover of darkness and the broken security lights, I followed Adrian to the rusted side door. Marcus and Danny flanked us, peering behind us as I made quick work of the rusted lock.

The door swung open with an ominous screech, and I winced. Our element of surprise was gone, so we entered the building quickly.

“Beta team entering the building,” I said softly as we filed inside.

The dark interior was broken up by a patchwork of streetlight filtering through the windows. We paused behind some old pallets, ears straining for any sounds. Nothing.

Marcus tapped my shoulder and motioned with two fingers towards the right of the building, then pointed at me and Adrian and motioned to the left. I nodded. They would sweep the right side, while Adrian and I would sweep the left. As one, we rose. Adrian and I kept our guns raised and headed towards the offices to the back left of the building. Other than some abandoned boxes and desks, there was no sign of life in any of the offices we cleared. Nothing indicated someone had used this building recently and certainly no sign of the trafficked girls. We met up with Marcus and Danny on the far side of the building.

“Clear,” Marcus said. “Nothing.”

“Same,” Adrian said.

I held in my groan of frustration.

“Guys,” Sebastian’s voice crackled through the comms. “You need to see this.”

Our group broke into a jog and headed out of the warehouse. Sticking to the shadows, we jogged down the end of the street to Sebastian’s building. Jasper stood in the doorway and waved when he saw us.

“This is it, boss,” he told me, his face grim.

While the exterior of the brick building looked deteriorated, inside told a different story. One box truck, identical to the one we found at the rail yard, sat inside one of the three loading doors. Up the set of stairs, Sebastian stood with Finn in front of a row of offices. His cheery grin was absent, and I hurried up the stairs.

“This is it,” he confirmed when I approached. “They definitely kept the girls here.” He gestured to the door behind him and stepped aside as I passed.

I stopped in the doorway, breathing in quickly. Fuck, he was right. Old, stained mattresses littered the large room. There had to be at least ten mattresses in here. Stained towels and blankets were strewn haphazardly. There was an open case of water against the far wall and a bucket in the corner that reeked. Danny covered his mouth as he entered. The smell was pungent, but I didn’t shy away from it. These girls were going through hell; I would smell what they had smelled. I would bear witness to it.

“Search it,” I said. “See if there’s anything they left behind that might identify them.”

Marcus, Adrian, and Sebastian joined me and Danny as we moved and checked mattresses. We carefully moved one after the other, shaking out each of the blankets and towels as well, trying to find any clues as to who these girls were and where they came from.

“Evelyn,” Adrian called me over to the far corner. He had pulled a mattress away from the wall. “Look.”

I crouched down, peering closer at where he was pointing. A series of numbers were scratched into the drywall roughly, like someone had used a nail or a fingernail to do it. 827301. Next to it, a weird squiggle was scratched.

“What is that?” Marcus asked, crouching next to me.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling out my phone and taking a picture of the numbers and the squiggle. “But whatever it is, it’s important enough that someone risked punishment to scratch it into the wall.

“Boss,” Wilder said from the doorway. Alexander stood behind him. “We found something else.”

I stood up and followed him out of the room. Two doors down, Alexander stood in the open doorway. He reached out, pulled me into him, and pressed a kiss to my forehead before letting go. Wilder stood in a small office that looked like it had been hastily cleared out. Drawers were open on the desk, and a small coffee machine sat on the small table against the wall with the door.

Wilder pointed at the coffeepot. “It’s still warm,” he said. “I think we just missed them.”

I placed my hand on the pot. It was still warm. Not hot, but too warm for it to have been made hours ago.

“There’s one more thing,” Wilder said, gesturing toward the warehouse.

I followed him out the door. Dominic and Jasper stood in the loading dock area over a puddle of oil.