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“Okay,” she agreed, exhaling hard.
“Want five minutes?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll be downstairs. You can use the freight or the stairs,” I told her, then walked out of my room, closing the door behind me, so she didn’t feel exposed.
I figured this wasn’t going to be easy for her, staying here.
She was someone so accustomed to being on her own, who never had to worry about anyone else looking at her, talking to her, butting into her business.
Granted, yeah, we were good about minding our own business. When you were a bunch of grown-ass adults who lived together. You had to know when people did and didn’t want to interact.
But still.
It would be an adjustment for her.
I made my way downstairs, hoping to catch Slash for a minute before Murphy came down.
“She alright?” he asked as I made my way into the kitchen.
“She’s worried you’re going to ask her questions about her past that she doesn’t want to talk about,” I told him, cutting to the chase.
“You think it was bad, right?” he asked, jaw going tight.
“I think it was… really bad,” I told him. “Enough that she is ready, at the drop of a dime, to abandon her entire life and income to go hide away. Enough that she has nightmares that have her almost screaming in her sleep.”
A growling sound escaped him on his exhale. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not gonna ask her about that shit. That’s her business. I just need to know who it is. And if she thinks they can trace her to any of the Henchmen clubs.”
“I figured that was all it would be. Have you talked to Huck?”
“Yeah. I told him that this shit is just more complicated than any of us planned on, but we will get her back to work as soon as we source the materials. He thinks their client is fine with it if he knows we have ‘possession of’ her,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Like we are gonna fucking chain her to her desk or some shit.”
“You know how rich clients like that can be,” I said, shrugging. “Always think the world stops for them.”
Money talked.
But it didn’t trump some woman’s safety.
We turned as we heard the elevator coming down, then the patter of dog feet as they started sniffing around once again, getting a feel for the scents of the place.
“Okay,” Murphy said, nodding at Slash.
Her guards were back up. And, I guess, no one could fault her for that while she was standing in our club, accepting our protection.
“Okay,” Slash said, waving a hand.
“His name is Cain Roth,” she said, and I looked to Slash, trying to gauge if he knew the name, because it wasn’t ringing a bell for me. “And he is an evil, sadistic, son of a bitch. Which is saying something. Because I work for a lot of morally gray people,” Murphy clarified.
“What is he in?” Slash asked.
“Skin,” she said. “He buys young women off their parents. Or he makes it sound like they’re coming here for work. Either way, the girls are thrown into one of his dungeons and he has beds and cameras and clients who pay to take their turns. Then he films it and offers it as a pay-per-view model on the dark web,” she told us, and I felt my stomach twist.
The tick in Slash’s jaw told me that he was pissed, but trying to contain his rage for the sake of this conversation.
“Did he hire you for a job?”
“He tried,” Murphy said. “I look into most of my clients if I don’t recognize them right off. I know my work is rarely used for good, but I don’t want certain people to get their hands on my kind of weapons. Cain was one of those people.”
“Let me guess, he’s not used to taking no for an answer?” Slash asked.
“If by that you mean he’s willing to sneak in, kidnap you, and lean on you until you do what he wants? Yeah.”
“So you did the job. Under duress,” Slash added, making sure it didn’t sound like he was judging. How could he? We’d never been in that situation. And even if we had been, we would know that our brothers were coming for us, that we would just have to endure for a short while until they found us.
Murphy had nobody.
“In a way,” she agreed, but her eyes were far away, lost in memories.
CHAPTER TEN
Murphy
They came for me in the middle of the night.
Because, yeah, when else would monsters creep across your floorboards, slap tape over your mouth, bind your wrists and ankles, and carry you out over their shoulders, confident in their knowledge that no one would see, would report it?
I hadn’t been living in Santa Monica in those days.
I hadn’t been far from the neighborhood I’d grown up in, actually. Because, well, I was just starting to make a name for myself. I didn’t have a whole shitload of money. I lived below my means, so that I could continue to tinker, to do what I liked most, without having to work the usual nine-to-five.
