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“What happened?” I sounded like a stuck record.
“Long story,” Kayden began, then lowered his voice. “Human trafficking, these are the kids that they wanted Ethan to move. Twelve from Ethan, and another nine from a second drop.”
I swallowed. “They being Rouxier? Danvers?”
“Combination of both. I waited until it was the kids, got into a firefight, shot a few people, got the kids away.”
“And Ethan?”
Kayden winced when Ryder cut away his shirtsleeve, irrigating the wound so the material wouldn’t stick. “He did his bit; his cover isn’t blown.”
“Is he hurt?”
Kayden glanced up at me with a wry grin. “Nah, when I was finished with shooting my way out, he was one of the ones I deliberately missed.”
“No one will suspect that he’s not what he says he is?” I had so many questions.
“No, he’s good.” Kayden chuckled, but it was a dark sound. “I punched him. Hard. Several times.”
I didn’t know how to take that and fought the sudden urge to wipe the smirk off Kayden’s face.
Ben arrived back, stickers and pens in hand, and I put him to work collecting names. The kids seemed to react better to Ben, as if maybe they could trust him, but then it was like getting blood from a stone. Ben knew enough school Spanish to ask their names, but even though they didn’t shy from his questions, they still didn’t hand over who they were.
Not until Ben took a label and wroteBENin big letters, along with a smiley face, and stuck it to his chest, doing the same for me, and then some of the others. Once all the adults were labeled, it was only then that the tallest of all of them—possibly the eldest—told Ben his name in soft syllables… Santiago.
The one missing name they didn’t have was for the unconscious boy, but no one knew him past the fact that he’d been in the same trailer. It seemed very few of them appeared to know each other at all. Thereweresmall groups of two or three, but in the main it was a large group of unknowns.
One by one, tests were run, the kids used the showers attached to the medical room, some going over to the main ranch. Someone went out to buy clothes in various sizes from different places, in surrounding large towns just so it wasn’t obvious, and there was nothing else for me to do except for make sure all the children knew they were safe.
“This is the human cost of what Rouxier is doing,” I murmured to Kayden who was fussing over a sling and not at all happy to be injured. “We have to stop Rouxier.”
Kayden nodded. “We’ll stop him, one way or another.”
“I know.”
Then he smiled at me, and it wasn’t a smirk but a genuine smile with emotion that reached his eyes and everything.
“I had to stop Ethan taking on the entire security team to get these kids away,” he said. “He’s a good man. A fighter.”
I returned Kayden’s smile and felt so much pride.
“Yeah. He is.”
ChapterTwenty-Seven
Ethan
“Don’t say a fucking thing,”Danvers warned under his breath. He didn’t have to tell me that. Things had gone wrong in the worst of ways; I’d regained consciousness to find chaos by the truck, all the children gone, and after rudimentary field medicine had my shoulder wound bandaged. Then I’d been bundled into a car and brought here. Kept separate from Danvers we’d been cooling our heels, overnight and through the day after, no sign of Mitchell, just a mattress each and food. Guards outside, stopping us from leaving,for our own protection.
Told to wait here.
Whereverherewas.
I’d disengaged the small Sanctuary tracker—a simple gold stud in my left ear—faked a lot more pain from where Kayden hit me and then knifed me, and now Danvers and I were both in a situation that could go bad in an instant. Yet again I’d fucked up an undercover assignment because of my stupid heart… my strong heart… my…
Fuck.
I couldn’t have let those kids leave that place any more than I could’ve left Josh in that bed the first night I met him. I wasn’t the man for this—I was action and purpose, not hurting people to get the next step in the ladder toward some nebulous goal of taking down the bad guys. I stayed quiet—Kayden had done everything to make sure I wasn’t implicated in the escape of all those kids, and I had to hope I lived to see tomorrow. Next to me, Danvers was sweating, anxious, telling me to stay calm when he was right there losing his shit. How much money had Rouxier, and this Mitchell guy lost through this? How fucked up was this on a scale from one to death? I kept my expression calm, but I nursed my left arm as if it was incapacitated, and I made sure to wince every so often and tilt my face to the light to show the bruises. I was playing the part of a victim—nothing to see here, just an innocent guy doing what he was told.
