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That shit used to happen. Not anymore. His father was a clever man, and he’d commissioned an engineer to design the cells a few years ago. The death rate during transfer had gone down almost one hundred percent. There was still the odd girl who’d have a heart attack, literally frightened to death of where she was headed, but apart from that, they did just fine. The buyers appreciated it. They received their goods in working order, on time and discreetly. No longer was it necessary to arrive in the dead of night and herd screaming, crying women out of the back of a truck under the threat of machine-gun fire.
Because, let’s face it, they were almost always women.
Now, all they needed at the other end was a forklift. The truck opened, the allocated package was located – all having been stacked in order of drop-off, of course – the forklift took the container, and so it went on, until every single soul had been exorcised from one of the massive trucks they ran weekly from coast to coast.
Sometimes, they even couriered overseas. They were that good.
No longer did Emilio, as kingpin of the entire operation, have to worry about valuable virgins being covertly deflowered en route by his men, or escaping when the doors were opened and sweaty bodies poured forth like an avalanche of sadness and fright.
It wasn’t the dirty, crowded shipping container job it had once been. No, these days it was practically fucking clinical, the way they traded and delivered humans like refrigerators.
Practically fucking civilised. The guys drove the trucks, delivered the goods, and only the buyer had the code to open each large container that housed their human transaction.
The guys never saw the girls they were delivering, and so there was no problem. There was no temptation. Nobody saw a thing.
Except Dornan.
Dornan saw every single soul, stared into every pair of eyes, heard the agonised begging of every single slave they bought and sold. He knew his father did this on purpose, but he’d sold his own soul a very long time ago, and he was indebted to his father for the rest of his life for the favours he had asked and the things he had done.
He hated it. Sometimes he thought about how good it would be to disappear, to slip underneath the surface of the ocean and just swim away.
But it was a briefly indulged fantasy, because he had sons, and he had Mariana.
Dornan ticked off the last piece of merchandise on his list. The whole process had taken less than thirty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. Dornan took the stairs two at a time, not caring that his boots thudded loudly on the metal as he ascended as rapidly as he could. He was a grown man, and the pit – the name he’d given to the basement warehouse of horrors – terrified him.
Lighting a cigarette outside, Dornan wondered briefly if he was turning into his father. He didn’t think he was, at least not yet. But his father didn’t look into the eyes of the prisoners before he sent them to their hellish fates, and so maybe Dornan was already worse than his father had ever been.
CHAPTER NINE
JOHN
John Portland’s morning was fucking splendid. As the president of the Gypsy Brothers MC, there was always something urgent that needed attending on a Monday morning. By 10 a.m. he’d already beaten a guy’s front teeth out, sent half his crew on a run, and coordinated the shipping of a new haul of machine guns across to Mexico. His hand was throbbing from where the guy’s pointy canine tooth had gouged into his skin, and he had a case full of damp cash to dump at the strip club to be counted and processed.
He stormed into the strip club and was immediately bailed up by Riviera, one of the dancers. Bleached blonde, and with enough fake tan for an episode of Baywatch, she thrust her jewel-encrusted tits at him and smiled.
‘Hey, John,’ she cooed.
‘Not now,’ John shot back, shouldering her out of his path. His hand was really fucking hurting. Maybe he’d broken something. That guy’s face had been like a brick wall. He’d slept in, just had enough time to drop his daughter at the school gates, and then found his fist in someone’s face. He hadn’t even had a goddamn cup of coffee yet to give him a kicker.
In his good hand, he held a suitcase full of bills. They were supposed to be clean. But when he looked inside, the piles of greenbacks were damp, and some were marked with a fine sheen of blood.
Fucking excellent start to the morning.
He opened the door to the small office on the second floor and dumped the suitcase onto the first of two desks that filled the small, airless room.
The woman behind the desk scooted her seat back and smiled wryly. ‘Really, John,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have.’
He eyed the suitcase dubiously.
‘Please tell me these ones are clean.’
His mood lifted immediately at the sight of Mariana Rodriguez. Pretty, smart and sarcastic as hell, she always managed to distract him from the shit-kicker muscle work he invariably did from day to day. Being Prez might look good on a leather jacket, but in reality it wasn’t so fucking special. Plus, being under the thumb of Emilio Ross and his cartel didn’t exactly bolster his enthusiasm. Most days, lately, he’d been phoning it in for the sake of keeping the peace. It wasn’t like MC President looked great on a resume. The last time he’d held down a legitimate job that wasn’t at a front business for Il Sangue was back in high school, fixing bikes at his uncle’s garage down in SoCal.
John grimaced. ‘I could tell you that, but I’d be lying.’
Mariana stared at the suitcase, resting her chin in her hands. When she leaned forwards like that her dress dipped a little and he could see the outline of her cleavage, and what a welcome sight it was on this particularly shitty morning.
‘Do you think if I stare at it long enough, it’ll clean itself?’
