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Axel’s eyebrows rise as a smirk finds his face too. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He whistles and we waste no time.
We start grabbing everything and I remember something. I shout, “Drop the chips. Don’t grab the chips. Put the chips back.” The words just spill out of me as I panic. “They’ve got trackers in them.”
“Fuck, that was a close call,” Axel says while dropping them like they suddenly caught on fire.
Once we fill four duffel bags, we call it quits but I soon realize that I’m in trouble with the weight as I try to lift it. I resort to dragging the bag behind me like a dimwit but Mikhail’s muscles aren’t just for licking and throwing me over his shoulder, he relieves my struggle by grabbing the bag from me and shouldering it along with his bag. Well, shit Hulk. Damn.
I hurry to get every door for them as we haul ass out of here.
***
We run back to Calder’s place because we aren’t sure where else to go. We leave the money in the car. “Now what?” Axel asks.
“Yeah, we can’t just hide out here. They’re bound to start looking for us. Sure, maybe they don’t have our faces but our prints are all over the place,” Mikhail’s pitch rises a bit.
“Fuck! We had sex on Emilio’s carpet!” Calder strokes his hair, grabbing onto it.
“So what? We’ve got a team and shit. I say we find somewhere to hide out and we take them down,” I propose.
“Take who down?” Mikhail looks at me like my head has been replaced with the moon.
“Everyone. The city of Las Vegas. Everyone who is involved in sex crimes. Everyone who was involved in the whole Wasp scheme,” I say as I look at him with a mirrored expression.
“Look, I know that was the plan but that ain’t happenin’,” Axel chimes in.
“And why not?” I say, my hands on my hips.
“Uh, I don’t know if it’s the adrenaline rush but as smooth as we tried to be, we weren’t exactly clean. There’s no hiding out and bringing them down in secret. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” Calder insists.“Nah, and let this just continue?” I raise my voice.
“Julissa, babe. Listen. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves right now. I know that you want to save everyone but what use are we dead? If we don’t get the fuck out of here, that’s exactly what we’ll be by the end of this week if not tomorrow. I’m with Calder,” Mikhail reinforces.
“Yeah, me too,” Axel agrees.
Well fuck. I can’t force them to come along with me. But I can’t do this on my own. Mikhail does have a point. My stomach turns and I feel nauseous. I can’t help but feel that we made it out of there alive for a reason. I never imagined that we would. Now, I’m just supposed to let it go? While the city just recovers and goes on business as usual? How am I supposed to do that?
Every single person who has been compliant with human trafficking must be punished. Every politician, every person who works in law enforcement, anyone making billions of dollars off the lives of others. I haven’t spoken for a while as these thoughts play out in my mind.
“Julissa, who knows how much money we have now? We can go somewhere, start over, change our whole identity. I can get us new documents. They would never be able to find us again.” Calder takes me by the shoulder so that I can look into his eyes.
His eyes are soft, pleading, loving and I can’t imagine something happening to him because I want to keep carrying out justice. Equally, I can’t bear the thought of leaving and not doing more to stop the injustices here.
Fingers stroke my scalp and I turn to see Mikhail looking down into my eyes. “We can’t play God babe. We did what we could. But we don’t have the power it would take to reverse all this damage. You eliminated a major threat to those girls and I think we left a deep enough message for other traffickers. Whatever they do next is up to them and that’s their karma, not yours. We can’t save everyone. And we’d rather have you here than have you dead.”Ouch. My chest cramps and my face contorts to reflect the blow I was just dealt. He has a point. I thought victory would feel a lot lighter than this but it just feels like cleaning off a speck of dust on the surface while cobwebs hang all around it, filling the surrounding areas. Las Vegas needs a deep cleaning.
“You guys don’t want to do this?” I ask them, and they all look at me with pleading eyes.
My head drops and I breathe heavily, forcing the weight off my shoulders. I shake my head and Calder releases them, tilting my head up with his finger.
“Please Julissa. I want you alive. I want us alive. Aren’t we worth it?” Calder asks and my eyes shoot open, needing to reassure him and them that of course, they are.
“Give us a chance at something normal.” Mikhail rests his forehead up against my temple and his breath brushes up against my ear, causing me to shiver.
“Normal?” I ask, rubbing my head against his in soft strokes. “I don’t think I was ever made to be normal.”
His lips caress my ear as they turn up into a smile. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it? No more running away in terror, no more drama, only the stress of normal…everyday people things.” He chuckles. “Like, I don’t know. Getting mad at me because maybe I didn’t do the dishes or Calder let one rip or Axel didn’t make the bed. Something silly. Doesn’t that sound nice?” He finishes off by planting a kiss on my temple and it leaves little flutters in my chest that make me feel like I could just fly away.
Normal. Is that even possible for someone like me who grew up with drug-addicted parents who sold me into trafficking, who finally got free by killing her trafficker and any other trafficker she could find so she could help other victims be free as well? I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I mean, take away all of that and who am I?
I shiver at the thought of it. Yet, I’m tickled with curiosity. Does being normal give me a chance at happiness and do I deserve to be happy after everything that I’ve done? Sure, they deserved what happened to them but in the eyes of normal people, I’m just as evil. I don’t know where I would even begin and the thought of it is daunting.
