AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Not one inch of the building missed inspection. I had enough men with me to make sure it would be efficient.
Nick whistled and Stefano headed toward him. In the back, one of the larger crates held all the guns we were missing. When Stefano had called the distribution center, he’d made sure to get the serials from the guns that had been shipped.
They weren’t the normal type of serial numbers, but something the distribution center used to track gun shipments in case they were to go missing. In our type of business, it didn’t happen often, but it could happen. We had to have our own way of tracking that didn’t involve the feds.
“Boss, we also found this hiding back there.” Stefano held onto the arm of a scrawny, dirty girl.
She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She had dark rings under her eyes, her cheeks were gaunt, her hair matted, and the stench that fumed off of her was ripe. If fed and cleaned up, she could be quite pretty, but life hadn’t treated her nicely.
Stefano let her drop to the ground as he released her.
Trying to get to her feet was difficult, her knees were shaking as she put weight on them. She had to keep using her hands to get up off the floor, but as soon as she found her balance, she took off.
Faster than she would appear to be able to move when that weak, I understood the need to escape from a bad situation. A boost of adrenaline could make her more capable. This little fighter had the spirit to try and get away.
Stefano caught up to her and brought her back in front of me, fighting against his grip with the last remaining energy she harnessed.
“Look, we don’t want to hurt you. We want to help. These people shouldn’t have taken you and we need to fix the situation.” I tried to calm her down.
She stopped struggling but eyed me and my men with disdain. She didn’t know who to trust, but I wasn’t somebody she had seen before. She didn’t know what kind of devil I could be.
“Just kill me now. I can’t go through any more of this.” Her legs gave out and she begged on her knees.
Rage catapulted up my spine. “Catalda, you need to level with me. How did she get here? Are there any others?” I demanded, staring him and his men down before me.
The men in front of me played dumb, shaking their heads like a ridiculous bobble head doll.
“Sir, I have no knowledge of how she got here. Sometimes we get stowaways. We don’t look through the containers when they get here. We just take them off the trailers and put them on the new ones,” Catalda said.
Tired of this type of game, I shot out the kneecap of one of the others standing next to Catalda. Impatience and liars made me testy, and I couldn’t help but further the conversation along.
“Why is there a crate of our guns in your warehouse? Why is she here? How many other things are we going to find that should be safely in a Romano warehouse instead?” I was getting extremely pissed off that someone would dare to steal from us. “You steal things obviously, so where did you steal her from?”
The girl flinched and ducked her head lower, trying to hide her face in her straggly hair at my words despite her brave statement to kill her; she still wanted to live. There was still a fire lit in her eyes. She wasn’t completely devoid of the world.
“Bring her with us,” I ordered Stefano. “Nick, I want you to stay and find out what else is stored here and where our goods are. Take off fingers until you get some good answers from them.”
“Yes, sir.” Nick nodded and he, along with the crew assigned with him, began to tie the men to chairs for the removal of their fingers.
The girl continued to tremble even with a blanket that I’d had one of my men get for her, wrapped around her body. She shied away from all of us, but we had to get her to a safe place. I also didn’t need her to see what was bound to be a bloody mess. She had enough trauma to work through.
Human trafficking. What a disgusting way to make money?
I left Nick in charge of sending the men a reminder they weren’t likely to forget while Stefano and I took her back to the house. We had some pressing business to take care of and find out who was trafficking humans in my territory.
On the way home we let her have as much space as needed. It didn’t take her long to fall asleep when she realized we weren’t getting into her space, but I knew she would wake up instantly if either of us got too close. When we parked Stefano carried her into the house to a room where she could be watched safely. She didn’t fight him, but she was anything but relaxed.
“Whatever she needs, make sure that she’s taken care of. I’m going to speak to my father. He’ll want an update.” I headed toward my father’s wing and into his office.
I hadn’t even closed the door to the office before my father began to ramble on about Bria.
“You simply have to get that woman in hand. She’s a menace running around the halls all night and waking up old men. I won’t have that type of interruption in my home,” Angelo warned me.
“Things are going decently well with Bria. I’ll take care of whatever seems to be the problem this time, but right now we have other issues that need to be addressed.” I really didn’t need to have all this happening right now.
I sat down and let a bit of my guard down. I was tired, and I let my father see. “There is a girl that we found in a shipment from our middle distributor on the docks. They have taken up human trafficking in our city and that is something that we can’t have happen.”
Without any hesitation, he said, “It’s Marco. That’s why he wanted this peace treaty with us. He was afraid that he’d get caught and we’d take it out on him again. It’s why he gave us his daughter, so we’d reconsider violence against the family.” Antonio rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
