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Shit. That wasn’t good.
“I didn’t just come here to tell you my story, Bailey,” he assured me darkly. “I came to show you exactly what happens to those who double-cross me.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small cattle prod.
Well, shit.
“So,” he smirked, his eyes lighting up, “let’s begin.”
34
It wasn’t meant to be this way. She was supposed to be a means to an end. Nothing else. We’d have our fun with her and hand her over. That had been the plan we discussed without Father the night we found out she was a Crowe.
Then she took our hearts.
All of them.
Even our father had developed a softness for her. But still, the plan never changed. Then we learned who she truly was. Kiernan had lost his shit when he’d found out she was the daughter of Toph Eriksen. Enemy number one. The senator’s puppet. We’d wondered how Crowe had managed to get the Iron Horsemen to do his bidding, and now we knew how.
Bailey.
How it had all come around was still a mystery. Bridgett didn’t have all the pieces of the story. How had Crowe gotten his hands on her? Did Eriksen know Bailey was his daughter, or did Crowe have something else on him?
None of us could have known that Crowe wasn’t her real father or that he already had plans in motion to sell her. His original plan had been to hand her over to be groomed before being put on the auction block. Us involving her in our scheme and then outing her had moved up his timeline. Something that hadn’t made her ex-fiancé, Drew, too happy.
No, he hadn’t really been her fiancé. She’d been sold to him.
“Goddamn it!”
We’d been lucky that Crowe had believed us when we’d informed him that we were looking at backing his presidential bid. He’d been skeptical at first, especially since getting in bed with him meant putting our hands into the skin trade. Something we’d always been fiercely against. However, Kiernan had managed to sell him on the fact that we were looking at expanding the business once our father handed over the reins to the kingdom next year.
And the greedy sucker bought it.
“Calm down, brother,” Kiernan huffed from across the room.
“Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down,” I roared at him from my seat. “It’s your fault she’s in this position in the first place. If you hadn’t insisted we go through with the fucking plan, she would be here and not god knows where.”
Kiernan looked thoroughly chastised. “We’ll find her,” he assured me with a confidence I didn’t have.
Because we hadn’t found her yet. Everything was coming up empty.
I scoffed. “And if we don’t?” I asked. “Crowe is watching us closely. Too closely. If he thinks we’re going after Bailey, it’s over. We need to take him down, or else he could easily give the order to Lina before we can get to Bailey.”
“Matthias has men on both Crowe and Lina,” Kiernan assured me. “We just need one of them to slip up enough to get the information we need. Bridgett is putting together everything we need to ruin Crowe at the speech he’s giving next week announcing his presidential bid.”
“Are we sure it’s going to work? He’s got a lot of powerful people backing him. Including this mysterious financier and whoever is running the flesh trade through the city. I’m starting to wonder if they’re one and the same.”
My brother shrugged. “We always assumed it was Ward who had been running the trafficking ring because he ran the stables. None of us bothered to think that there was someone higher up.”
“If we had, shit might have gone down better.”
“Yeah.” Kiernan sighed. He’d been depressed since his confrontation with Bailey at the auction. He’s said some hurtful shit, and it was weighing on him. Kiernan hadn’t meant a word, but our girl didn’t know that. She didn’t know any of this because we’d been the ones to turn her over to her father in the first place. The look of hope she’d worn when she’d seen Kiernan’s face in the crowd of lustful men and women ready to buy her flesh had nearly broken me. She’d believed we had come to save her, even after everything that had happened.
Her screams still haunted my sleep.
“All right.” My father strode into the room with three tankards of beer in his hands. “Let’s get this all sorted out.”
Kiernan and I exchanged a look. Why was he wanting to help? Bailey’s father was his enemy. He’d been more upset with the fact that Toph Eriksen was her true father than when he thought Crowe was. Then again, it hadn’t been Crowe pulling the trigger on our men, filling the streets with their blood.
