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No secrets, that was one of his cardinal rules. It was the thing that kept their dysfunctional relationship from completely imploding, from being eaten away by bitter distrust.
He got a grip on the solid thing hidden underneath the flour and pulled it out, sending a plume of white dust around his face.
It was a ziplock bag, wrapped around something about the size and weight of a cheap, disposable cellphone and a charger. He unfolded the layers of plastic, his temples throbbing with the weight of the possibilities.
He glanced towards the bathroom, hearing movement, and tipped the hard rectangular weight into his palm.
Well, what do you know. It was a fucking cellphone.
A rage that presented as cold indifference began to build in his body, the humming of the angry bees only drowned out by the desire for an explanation. But his gut said there was no explanation. She’d deceived him. She’d probably been talking to her family this entire time, risking everything he’d built so carefully. He located the power button and pressed it with a clean thumb, turning the phone on. It immediately demanded a passcode. Dornan jumped as his own phone began to ring, sending the long spike of ash that had been holding on to the end of his half-smoked cigarette onto the ground by his feet. He glanced down at the phone, hearing Mariana as she moved around in the bedroom. He dropped the phone back into the bag, and shoved it back into the flour canister, giving it a good shake to bury it properly. He replaced it in the pantry and swept the small bits of flour that had powdered the counter onto the floor.
Dornan braced against the counter with one hand as he took his cellphone from his jeans just as it stopped ringing. One missed call from Viper. Dornan’s stomach dropped as he remembered what had happened earlier in the day.
Another day marked another round at the fulfilment centre, another assortment of women boxed up, sold and ready to be delivered.
Only today had been different.
The cells that contained the prisoners were soundproof, part of their brilliant design. X-rays couldn’t pierce the boxes they’d had constructed to herd people like cattle through secure checkpoints and border crossings. But when you moved that little swatch of plastic to the side, sometimes the screams got out.
Today had been one of those days.
Cell four. As soon as he’d looked through the glass, Dornan wanted to die. Because there was a woman, maybe in her late twenties, and she was huddled on the floor, screaming. And she was pregnant. Very pregnant.
Dornan had slammed the viewing pane shut, but it was too late. He could still hear her screams, even though he knew that couldn’t be possible. He finished up the other thirty-nine checks, most of them the same as cells two and three. Nobody else had screamed like her. Nobody else had made themselves heard like the woman about to become a mother, who vocalised her doom for nobody except Dornan to hear.
And then they were gone, loaded onto the truck, which rose on its bridge and disappeared into the sub-floor, ready to be driven out to make the scheduled deliveries.
His phone rang again, snapping Dornan out of the garish daydream he kept replaying in his mind. He looked at the screen. It was Viper again. Viper, along with a couple of other Brothers, was running the trucks tonight. It might be a situation. He took the cigarette from his mouth and hit answer. ‘Yeah?’
The sound of heavy tyres on asphalt greeted him through the phone. It was loud running trucks back and forth across the zig-zagging roads of the United States.
‘We got a situation, boss,’ Viper yelled over the steady hum of the road noise. ‘I need you to help with a clean-up. I’m pulling in to the rest stop.’ He gave an address and Dornan memorised it. A clean-up. That was code. It meant one of the prisoners had died. Fuck.
Mariana walked into the loungeroom in a thin bathrobe that left nothing to the imagination, her hair wrapped up in a peach-coloured towel. Dornan fought the urge to tie her up and either interrogate her or fuck her senseless. His cock ruled him when it came to Mariana Rodriguez.
‘Which one?’ Dornan asked.
‘Number four,’ Viper replied immediately, and Dornan’s suspicions were confirmed.
‘Boss, it’s fucking bad. Hurry.’
The line went dead.
Mariana hovered at the edge of his vision. ‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
Dornan raised his fist and slammed it into the counter hard enough that the whole thing shook. The immediate pain calmed him somewhat, but all that rage, all that fight, was still waging a war inside him.
‘What happened?’
He raised his gaze to look at her. He drank her in for a good few moments, taking in the curve of her hips, her tiny waist, full breasts and slender neck before his almost-black eyes settled on her dark blue ones. Was she a liar? Had she betrayed him? If she hadn’t yet, would she?
‘Get dressed,’ he ordered, thinking about the secret cellphone. He wouldn’t let her out of his sight until he got an explanation.
‘Why?’
He frowned. ‘That’s for me to know,’ he said, his tone vicious. Go on, resist me. Argue with me. Do something so I can fucking explode.
But she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Her ability for feeling out situations was just as good as his, if not better. She heard the danger in his voice and decided to obey. She nodded, pulling the robe tighter around her as if it would somehow protect her.
