The woman rolled her lips and stared. Their standoff couldn’t go on much longer. No telling if Cade would call in backup or if the traffickers had security triggers already in motion. Luke could—maybe should—pick her up, throw her over his shoulder, and be on his merry fuckin’ way. But hesitation had frozen him, staring at one of the most beautiful women he’d ever encountered.
“My name is Luke Brenner. I’m the guy you have to trust. Badge.” He flicked his waist. “Team.” His chest. “I’m the good guy. I’ll help you sort out what you need to. But we need to leave.”
She didn’t move a muscle. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“The same could be said for you.”
Her dark eyes narrowed. “I’d like to leave on my own.”
“We have to ask you a few questions.”
“Ask now then let me go.” She wasn’t scared, wasn’t cocky. An enigma more complicated than a simple victimization.
“Again. What’s your name?”
Defiance danced on her lips. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Look, lady. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Her eyes ran up his body, sizing him up, and finally landing on his face. “You look like you do nothing but hurt people.”
“Only the bad ones.”
“There are shades of bad.” For a flash of a second, he saw the victim, the scared woman who didn’t have a choice. But that faded in an instant as she sighed, seemingly letting her guard down. “Fine. I’ll go with you, but I need to use the bathroom.”
“Now?” He shifted in his boots, the urge to drag her out overpowering his manners.
“Please.”
“Shit,” Cade murmured in Luke’s earpiece. “Two minutes. Get her out of the building in less than two minutes. Read me?”
He nodded agreement for Ryder to report in to the task force’s commander, but the woman took his nod as permission to hit the bathroom. Before he could say anything, she hurried away. The red soles of her expensive-looking shoes caught his eye, and something felt wrong about the girl. His thoughts went into overdrive. Who was she sold to? How long had they had her? Did she worry this was a cartel test where the traffickers tested their women to see if they’d run? Did she know her new owners?
“Hey, boss. What do we know about—”
Muffled glass shattered from the bathroom. Luke spun and slammed against the locked door.
“What—” Ryder broke into his thoughts via his earpiece. “—the fuck? Your girl’s pulling herself through a tiny-ass window.”
With another slam against the bathroom door, it broke open. Luke’s eyes peered out the tiny, broken window.
“We’ve got a problem.” Grayson’s voice crackled through the earpiece as Luke stood in disbelief in the empty bathroom.
Ryder broke in. “She’s scaling the damn wall, climbing toward a balcony.”
“What?” Luke’s mind spun.
“These girls,” Grayson said, “say that lady is management. Upper management.”
His blood went cold. She was a goddamn human trafficker? Luke jumped onto the toilet and peered past the broken glass.
“I’ve got a shot,” Ryder announced. “You want management taken out?”
“No!” he snapped, against everything he had stood for in his life. “No shot.”
“No,” Cade agreed, less forcefully and more calculating. “Where’s she going?”
“Roof,” Ryder replied. “Seventh floor. She’s climbing toward the roof.”
Luke took off, barreling through the hotel room and gunning it for the hotel’s staircase. Did he just say no to shooting a human trafficker? They all needed to be taken out, even the pretty ones with full lips and innocent faces. But something was missing. No way could she be involved in this. Even as he took three stairs at a time in a full sprint, he wanted to see with his eyes if it were true.
The hotel was twelve stories tall. Part of him worried that she’d kill herself accidentally before he could catch her.
“Update, Ryder,” he said.
“Woman’s still moving. Kicked off her shoes and hauling ass.”
“Son of a bitch. Where now?”
“Eleven.”
Same as him.
“We have company.” Ryder’s vocal inflection was concerned.
“Hold back, Brenner.” Cade jumped in. “Read me, Luke?”
At the roof door, he didn’t want to stay back. “Why?”
“Asshole. You do not question. You listen.”
Damn it. “Who’s out there?”
“Brother,” Ryder broke in, “we have a chopper coming in fast, rifleman hanging out the opening.”
“Fuck!” Luke slammed both hands on the door.
“Stay put!” Cade ordered.
Ryder layered in. “They’d take you out in a heartbeat.”
“She’s out there?” Luke asked.
“Roger. Estimated ETA for a pickup, fifteen seconds.”
Fuck it. Cade can kick my ass later. Luke pushed through the door and ducked defensively into the humid heat, pressing against the wall to take in his surroundings. There. The object of his unfathomable interest hustled across the south side of the roof. “Hold up! Stop.”
She spun, eyes wild, out of breath from their adrenaline-filled race.
Luke bunched his fists, holding himself back, more curious, or even turned on, than sane at the moment.
“Who the fuck are you?” he shouted.
Their eyes locked. The chopper lowered, and not wanting to die that day, he threw his hands up and hoped it enough to keep himself from being target practice. They’d still shoot, he’d still die. Ignoring his orders and entering the rooftop was a huge mistake, but he needed to know who she was. His reasoning had abdicated authority, and she was the unknowing catalyst.
“I’m going to find you,” he said.
A ladder dropped from the helo. She quickly grabbed onto it, shouting what he guessed was an instruction not to shoot.
Why? Why would she say that? They were enemies. They survived because the other one didn’t.
But as he wondered, an arm reached out of the helo and pulled her inside. She was safe from falling, safe from Ryder’s sniper rounds, and that was a relief, which screwed with his head more than her scaling a Miami hotel. The chopper pulled back hard and fled. Task force intel buzzed in his ear, communicating that a satellite had locked onto the bird. Parker would work his magic and see where it ended up. Simple. Their team would get them. Eventually.
Still, Luke stood there with too many questions. Namely, who was that girl? And for the first time, he wanted answers as much as he wanted blood.
CHAPTER TWO
Pulling out his earpiece to silence his cursing team leader, Luke pushed back inside to the air-conditioned hall and bounded down the stairs. When he hit the ground floor, Javier and Ryder were waiting. Grayson and the girls were gone. Luke’s chest hammered, and his mind couldn’t latch on to a logical course of action, so he stayed silent and fell into place when they boarded their blacked-out Expedition.
“Where’s Cade?” Luke asked.
Ryder shook his head. “Rode back with Gray.”
Luke nodded. He had about five minutes of quiet before they showed at their rendezvous, where Cade would tear him a new asshole.
“Damn it.” He tried to contain the hum of his muscles. Stress exacerbated that uncontrollable urge for pain. To inflict it. To receive it. He wasn’t a sadist—just a fighter. And clenching his fists only to release and do it again, he felt a growing need to find a brawl.
“What happened up there?” Javier slowed, already exiting the highway onto a palm-tree-lined street decorated with brilliantly painted buildings. A co-op grocery, local restaurants, housing that had seen better days. The farther they drove, the sketchier the area, until they were in a place Delta and MacKenzie security could hide unnoticed.
“Dunno, Brazil.” Luke rubbed his eyes, hunched over in his seat. “Things happen.”
“I know.”
Ryder clapped Luke on the back as they pulled into the parking lot. Javier threw the SUV into park, and Luke looked up, wondering if his screw-up would kick him off the team.
“Ready?”
“Fuck if I care.” Which was a total lie. He wanted cartel blood. He wanted to know about the girl.
“Right.” Ryder got out.
Luke dropped his head back and heard Javier say, “Shit happens. We’ll get them another day.”
They would. Both he and Javier needed that to be the truth. They might have different trafficking targets, but they thought the same way, lived for the same goals. Luke grumbled and opened the door.
Cade stood a dozen yards away. “Let’s go, asshole.”
Fuck it. He fell in step, and they walked into an abandoned garage that Cade had taken over as a home base for the past few days. Hot air hung heavy with the scent of expired oil and brake dust from years before.
“Didn’t have your ears on?” Cade asked.
Luke flicked the abandoned earpiece off his shoulder. “You know I did.”
“So no excuses then. Not listening for what purpose? I don’t have time to babysit your dumb ass, you get that. Brock sent you down here with a giant fucking warning. You screw up, you’re off the job. I don’t want a body count that includes anyone on my team. I have a damn reason when I say stay on the sidelines. Do you get that?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“You don’t come from a background where you’ve been broken down and built up, but you better fucking believe that’s what I’ll do if you can’t listen and follow orders. Do you understand?”
He shrugged and was slammed against the wall so quickly he almost didn’t see it coming.
Cade thrust into his face, their eyes inches apart. “You want me to destroy you? You want to know what the bottom of my fuckin’ boots tastes like?”
“No.”
“Good. Get your head out of your ass and stay on point.” Cade stepped away, shaking his head. But he looked back because they both knew what had to come next.
Some folks drank, others a lot worse. Luke needed the pain.
“Get the fuck out of here, and don’t get your ass arrested,” Cade said.
That was all it took—their agreement, which Brock had negotiated with Cade. Luke would fight when he needed to. He’d take part in that blessed addiction that kept his head sane. He nodded and went to drop his gear and change out of what kept him safe—the gear, the Kevlar, the guns and knives. He wanted to forget it all just long enough to go find a fight and have nothing to protect him but his speed and agility. Sometimes Javier accompanied him—they had the same mindset about the saving grace of brawling—but not today.
Luke didn’t say good-bye as he pushed out the door, walking who knew where. Miami always provided a way to alleviate the pressure, whether it was an organized throw down or just a picked fight. By the time the night was done, management would be a distant figure in his memory, and his focus would be on his end goal. Eradication.
The Mercier corporate office in downtown Miami was a façade. Maddy hated the desk, hated the job, and would much rather have been at her company, Love, Inc. She had two jobs, two lives. They were interconnected, but Mercier was the opposite of Love.
She despised Mercier almost as much as she did her father, who owned the sketchy conglomerate and source of his wealth that made him richer than sin. Some girls wanted to meet a billionaire and be whisked away, but not Maddy. She knew too many of the men who had as much money as her family. None had made it in a way that they should. None spent their dollars on decent activities. And all spent their money on pleasure.
Pleasure was something she didn’t understand…at least the sexual kind. Pretty people, beautiful clothes, and a sunset over the beach were simple things that brought her pleasure.
Her mind raced back to earlier. The law enforcement team she’d escaped had DEA emblazoned on their fronts or badged on their hips. Even if Maddy thought her father was neck-deep in trafficking, she only thought he moved women—not that drugs weren’t as bad or worse. But it might be that he was expanding. Her stomach sank. All this time spent to get to the heart of Mercier Corporation, and she missed that?
What good was she as a Trojan horse if she didn’t know the extent of what she wanted to destroy?
The desk phone chirped before her secretary’s voice filtered through the speaker. “Ms. Mercier, your father is on the line.”
Maddy glared at her phone but answered as she always did, her muscles aching from the exertion of her escape. She might have been trained, but she didn’t have to escape and evade in the normal course of her life—though it had happened occasionally before working with the slime Mercier dealt with.
One day, she would take down Mercier and make Love, Inc. her only focus. After she destroyed everything her father stood for. “Yes, Papa?”
“I need you to inspect a new shipment. It will arrive to replace the merchandise we lost.”
The merchandise he lost? Meaning the women who were saved by American law enforcement, a group of agents who didn’t take Mercier money? She almost hadn’t thought those people existed.
Her father was evil, but was she much better? Mercier was the family business, the only existence she knew. For as long as she could remember, growing up, she’d been sequestered on their estate in the south of France. This was the life she knew. Papa’s business trade partners and her tutors came in and out of the house to give her an English education and erase her French accent. She knew no other children but her brother, knew no other life, nor a mother. Yet somehow she knew the business that she and Lucien, her brother, were being groomed for was wrong. Maybe that counted for something, that she wasn’t inherently evil, just completely messed up in the head—ruined as a woman before she ever had an interest in being feminine. She found it ironic that the family business sold sex—and now likely drugs—yet she was a virgin with not a single smidge of interest in sex.
Many times she’d come to the conclusion that she lacked the gene that would allow her to experience desire. That was punishment for her involvement with Mercier.
Still, she was there. Papa had even helped set up her successful business in Miami. Maddy was talented, with a keen eye for business. After all, she’d had the best business education his money could buy. Love, Inc. was a modeling and scouting company. While Papa saw it as something for her to do to handle the boredom that would come from living in a place as distasteful as Miami and overseeing Mercier corporate offices, she needed Love, Inc.’s income to support her long after she brought down her father.
Between Mercier and scouting for Love, she had her fingers in so many parts of underground Miami that she didn’t know whether to hate herself or be proud. Either way, the life she led had colored a part of her soul, one of many reasons she couldn’t feel anything on the inside.
God, she was screwed up in the head.
Papa needed her to assess what product to keep or, worse, what to sell. Rather…who to sell. Once they were gone, they were gone—slaves to their masters, whores to their pimps. No matter what happened to the sold merchandise, their salvation was impossible. At least right now.
“Madeleine?”
She swallowed away the urge to vomit or scream her rejection. “Oui, of course.”
“Let’s see what we have.” Papers rustled in the background.
This was nothing but a business transaction. He was likely looking at their invoices and would expect a full report from Maddy. They diversified their product line, selling as many women into whorehouses as they did wealthy fetish deviants.
“Seven new girls.”
“Sept?” The French rolled off her tongue as she cringed, hoping her surprise and disgust didn’t bleed through the call. Long ago, she’d thought about calling the authorities, both at home and in
America, but it seemed that even law enforcement was Papa’s friend or on his payroll. She didn’t know enough about the legal side of life to trust it. Nor did she want to end up in prison. She suspected that was the reason her curiosity was so stoked after having escaped the hotel room raid.
Maybe Mercier’s fall was less of a daydream when men like the American agents really existed. She bit her lip, not wanting to get her hopes up, not trusting the tinge of excitement percolating in her chest.
Trust no one. Expect betrayal. Always have a plan to escape. Those were her father’s words, which had been trained into her for as long as she could remember.
Papa would one day die. He was protected night and day, so she couldn’t help the process along. Murdering her father…? Maybe she was as evil as him.
“Yes. Seven.” More papers rustled. “You cost the company money today. Three girls removed into US custody? Two of my men?” He tsked into the phone.
Her head dropped, the battle between guilt and anger raging. “Yes, sir.”
“Tell me. When our men talk to the police, are they going to mention why there weren’t the five girls in the hotel room? Four and you. I believe there was one missing. Because US agents only took three girls into custody.”
Her stomach dropped. The other girl was a waste of a sex slave. She wouldn’t have held up mentally, physically. She’d had too much trauma before ending up in Maddy’s care. So she’d done the only humane thing—bought the girl herself and let her go. Fake papers. A new identity. And a doctor who would help her come back from the brink. But all of that, no one could know. If she could do it for every girl, she would. Soon…
“See, Papa, I thought—”
“Madeleine,” he snapped. “You’ve been caught before, and you promised those days of bleeding-heart help were over. This is a business. You understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
He grumbled. “If they had any intelligence on the female count today, you are lucky they considered you the fourth, not part of Mercier.”
“Yes, sir.” Her eyes pinched closed, and not for the first time, she realized why her father had had her French accent wiped from her English education. He knew, even when she was a child, this would be her life. “I only meant to—”
Delta: Rescue: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) Page 2
