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“Until Luca Boneiro comes to the rescue, you won’t see it coming, father dear. I’m going to dethrone you by a thousand cuts. And the day I finally do, you will know why.” His eyes glazed over.
“Vengeance, you bastard. For Angelo.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Why don’t you just go back to The Sea Ranch and fuck your little girl, Jared Bates? You sure as hell don’t pay attention to anything I’m saying.”
“Because you’re ranting like a jealous wife, which we both know you’re not. Let’s just drop it, Paxton. We need to crack open this sex ring.”
“With no guarantee that you’ll be able to put any of the Mafia behind bars,” she tried to reason with him.
“Maybe not, but you saw the number of young kids they had turned into sex slaves. I can’t live with that on my conscience. I want to catch the bastards.” He cupped her face but she slapped his hands away.
“We can find another solution. We know the date and location of the next party. We can raid it then. You don’t need to play the sacrificial lamb.”
“You know as well as I do how many things can go wrong in a raid like that. The wrong timing and it could blow up in our faces. We might lose the one chance we have to get all of those kids and women out, not to mention any others that might be trapped.” He tipped her chin higher with his thumb. “I love that you’re concerned for my safety, little one, but I have my entire team as back up, as well as the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team.”
“And the Red Reign team.”
“No. You are going to stay put.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, Bates. You might be my Dom and by my choice, sexually dominate me but on this, I don’t need your permission.”
“I wouldn’t think twice about locking all four of you in the stronghold until it’s over, Paxton.” He pinched her chin between his fingers to keep her gaze locked on him. “You will not put your life in danger because of me. I’m the one responsible to protect you, not the other way round.”
“It’s time you understood woke culture, Bates. Sexism and its ancillary misogynistic behaviors are dead. Some of the world’s most notorious practitioners have had their careers ended, are behind bars or, better yet, are dead.” Her eyes glowed like emeralds. “If we’re going to be together, you need to stop living in the past. You’re my future and I’m gonna make damn sure you don’t fuck that up.”
She spun away and stormed out of the kitchen where they’d been preparing breakfast. His voice chased after her but she ignored him.
Jared had dropped her at the safehouse late afternoon the previous day upon their return to San Francisco. That was what had pissed her off— that he had joined the Cobras directly afterwards at their stronghold to strategize without including her team. Whether he liked it or not, they were part of the operation. He would learn soon enough that she was a woman to be reckoned with.
“You’re in for a very rude awakening if you think I’m backing off, Jared Bates,” she huffed as she put on running shoes. She needed to get back into her exercise routine. With anger dumping adrenaline into her veins, it was the perfect time to start running without a tail shadowing her. She needed time alone to clear her mind and sort through her emotions for Jared that seemed to have taken over every thought since their return. His attitude was absurd. She wasn’t some starry-eyed teenager. Yes, she’d been caught unaware by the depth of her feelings for him but she had to find a balance. She couldn’t afford to let a budding love rule her life— especially not during the situation they now found themselves in that could very easily end in a life or death scenario.
The skills she’d honed during the tours in Afghanistan aided her in evading the security team stationed at strategic places around the house. “A couple of miles should help to clear my mind,” she mumbled as she cleared the trees further down the street. Her runners danced off the asphalt as she set a fast pace. She timed her strides with the steady rhythmic beat of the music flowing through the wireless earbuds. It didn’t take long for a slight breeze to make her feel rejuvenated. Sunlight tinted the sky various shades of orange. After ten sets of HIIT routines, Paxton stopped to catch her breath and stretch. A feeling of being watched crawled up her spine. She looked around surreptitiously, expecting to see a couple of Jared’s security team lurking about but there was no one. She had taken the route around Lake Merced. It was still early but there were already signs of rush hour traffic.
“Must be my imagination.” She finished the stretches and took off again, this time sticking close to the shoreline of the lake. It offered a more challenging route with the unevenness of the ground.
Her mind was filled with visions of the small children they’d seen on the footage of a previous party at the Malibu residence. Her heart contracted at the thought of despair they must feel, the pain and degradation— the times they weren’t drugged into submission. At the moment, kidnapping stories were a regular theme of the 24-hour news cycle. Thousands of men, women and children were getting lured into sexual exploitation, forced labor and slavery through the use of force, coercion, abduction, and fraud. It was so commonplace that the public had become numbed by it. Parents were slow to realize that giving a child too much freedom was tantamount to being an accomplice in their disappearance as each one became a potential target of Transnational Organized Crime— human traffickers. Parents of the missing were paralyzed with fear about their child having been sold as either sex slaves to pedophile rings or forced into child labor.
She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of a speeding vehicle.
“What the fuck?” she exclaimed at the sight of a blue unmarked van approaching her at a high rate of speed. Situational awareness kicked in with a dose of adrenaline. She was about to be run over. Paxton bolted towards an exercise park where there would be people.
“Aww,” her scream was nothing more than a muted sigh as pain suddenly exploded in her head; the blow coming out of nowhere. Her legs gave in as she struggled to stay alert. In the split second of looking back, a figure had jumped from behind a clump of trees.
Crack!
A fist slammed into the side of her head.A flash of light, then purple dots populated her vision. Paxton’s brain bounced back and forth inside her skull as she dropped onto her knees. Before she could recover, she was cold cocked with a leather sap.
“That was easy.” A man’s voice echoed inside her tormented brain. It was the leer on his face— then it faded into black as she gave in to the void of unconsciousness.
Out for a run and then she was gone; knocked out, hooded, and thrown into the back of the van without anyone the wiser. They chose the spot well, made sure the trees hid them from view of the passing cars. No one saw a thing. It was over in less than a minute.
Goddammit, my head hurts!
Paxton reached up to touch the source of the sharp pain— a possibly fractured malar bone. She had been brutally sucker punched on the right side of her face then smashed on the back of the head with a leather billy club. It was a professional hit meant to incapacitate the victim. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to move. The sensation was like trying to walk through three feet of mud. She was being sucked down. Nausea made her want to retch. The more she squeezed her mind for details, the more intense the pain became.
Cold metal protruded against the dorsal scapular nerve endings in her back, pinging outposts of spinal ganglia, causing her to jerk uncontrollably. She had been cuffed with zip cord. The coarse weave of a burlap sack scratched at her face. Unable to brace against the physics of kinetic force, her body rolled and banged against the metallic interior of a cargo van with each turn and rut. Jump cuts of her abduction flashed in microsecond bursts inside her mind. Paxton was being transported like chattel.
