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As the sun rises and the city comes to life, I throw on a suit without showering and scramble down to Agave. Rurik will be arriving soon, and I need him to help me out with this.
Taking on Luka isn’t a solo mission. I need my troops.
Upon arrival, I find Rurik in one of the back rooms behind the bar, stacking boxes of guns against the wall. We have a deal to make soon, and he’s hard at work getting everything prepared.
The deal will have to wait, though. Delilah is more important than money.
“Hey, I need you to go find this guy’s address,” I say to Rurik before he even sees me.
He turns around, surprised to see me here so early, but his expression changes when he sees the photograph of my target. “Luka? What did he do?” he asks cautiously.
It’s not often that I choose to have my men wrangle my enemies in their own homes. I try to avoid any interference by family members, and I’d never forgive myself if an uninvolved, unsuspecting relative were to get hurt because of me.
This time, none of that can stand in my way.
“He kidnapped Delilah,” I reply firmly. “And he will pay for that with his life.”
“What do you mean? I thought we went with him willingly. Didn’t you say they were related or something?” Rurik asks, narrowing his eyes.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Turns out, this is something he pulls all the time with girls who are adopted. He uses their lack of family ties to convince them that he’s their brother and then traffics them. We’re going to stop his little game once and for all.”
Rurik looks just as bothered by this as I am. I know he and some of the others were friends with Delilah, and letting her go from the club must’ve been difficult for everyone.
But we’re getting her back.
“I’ll get some of the guys together, and we’ll hunt this bastard down,” Rurik says, setting down a large crate. “Didn’t he give you his address at least once? I feel like he’s constantly up your ass about something. I’d assume he’d at least try to meet with you at his own place for the power dynamic.”
“No, Luka’s an idiot, but not enough of an idiot that he would risk showing me where he lives. At least not until he’d secured my participation in whatever scheme he’s trying to run,” I reply.
Rurik nods, leaving the room to start our new mission, one he realizes far exceeds the need for more weapons.
We already have enough weapons to blow down a military base, but the issue is making sure that we can even find Luka in the first place. He and his family are known for being elusive, and they’re all so well-connected that I wouldn’t be surprised if any of them could pay someone to help them disappear off the face of the planet.
19
Delilah
Ihave no idea how long I’ve been down here.
I hear speaking periodically, sometimes as whispers from the other women across the room. They speak a language I’m not familiar with, though it sounds Slavic to me based on the little I’m able to hear.
Other times, I hear Luka and his men shouting upstairs above me. Because I don’t have any sense of time, I have no idea what kind of shouting could be taking place. Is Luka just drunk? Has he pissed off the wrong person? What is the likelihood that he’s going to get the whole place shot up or set on fire?
If he was attacked, me and the other girls would be nothing but casualties. We’d have no hope of escaping.
Because of the lack of windows, I haven’t been able to gauge the passing of days at all. I’ve fallen in and out of sleep a few times, but I don’t know for how long. I’m honestly shocked that I was able to sleep at all.
I don’t feel safe here, not even with the other women. I can never understand them when they do speak, and I have no idea if my presence as a new person is threatening to them in some way.
It could have been days by now. I don’t know. The whole time I’ve been awake, I’ve been terrified. The basement smells faintly of rust and mold, and occasionally I feel something crawling over my foot as I sit curled up against the wall.
But sitting in pitch black is still better than dealing with Luka.
Occasionally, Luka will come back down to take one of the girls upstairs with him for an undetermined period of time. Whenever they come back, we all hold our breath as she’s tossed back into her place. I’ve noticed that sometimes, the women are rotated from place to place so that the beds are shared.
How considerate of Luka.
In the darkness, I can always hear one of the women crying, especially if she was recently brought back from upstairs. The thought that some of these women haven’t seen sunlight for a prolonged period of time makes my stomach hurt.
