His head still lowered, Aden watched from the corner of his eye as the woman picked up his clothes and fingered them with distaste.
“Put these back on for now. The matron will clothe you more suitably later.” She turned away dismissively as he began to dress. “Our business is complete, Hafiz. Come, boy.”
And that easily, Aden’s entire existence changed once more.
Chapter Seven
Chicago, IL, present day
SID WOKE THE next morning, feeling frustrated and angry. It wasn’t supposed to have worked out this way. Dresner had assured her that vampires were horndogs, always looking for an easy conquest to score both blood and sex. Unfortunately, she was now forced to question everything Dresner had told her, because it seemed the prof had been working for Silas all along. Dresner had all but admitted setting Sid up as bait for Aden, purely so she could help Silas win control over the territory. And now, because Sid had visited Aden’s office once or twice—with Dresner’s encouragement—she was in the crosshairs of this Silas, a vampire she’d never even heard of before last night.
Sid didn’t even care who won the territory. The only reason she’d approached Aden in the first place was because Dresner said he was the guy most likely to win, and therefore the guy most likely to help her fulfill her crusade to shut down Klemens’s old slave trade.
Granted, that was before she’d actually met Aden, the overbearing asshole. And now that she had, she really didn’t care who won. Or so she’d told herself all through her long walk in the dark last night, from Dresner’s house to a busy club where she’d caught a cab. And ever since she woke up this morning, too. Unfortunately, she wasn’t having much luck convincing herself that it was true. Somehow that infuriating, chauvinistic, high-handed . . . gorgeous, powerful, and intensely masculine hunk of vampire had gotten under her skin. And wasn’t that a bitch? Because as long as she was listing things that frustrated her, Aden had to be at the very top. One minute he was seducing her, and the next, like a switch being thrown, he was all business, all don’t get in my way, little human, the big bad vampire will handle everything.
“Fuck that,” she muttered and stormed over to her computer. Hadn’t she been working this story for months? She knew more about Klemens and his sleazy businesses than Aden did. He hadn’t even been sure there was a slave network until she’d told him. He’d seemed upset once he found out, though. She’d give him that. Of course, then he’d immediately gone all high-handed me-Tarzan and shuffled the little lady off to the tree house where she’d be safe. Well, double fuck that. She’d worked this story alone so far, and she could keep doing it. She didn’t need almighty Aden’s permission to do her job.
Checking her calendar, she saw it was the eleventh of the month, and the slavers maintained a surprisingly strict schedule, for bloodsucking bottom feeders. The newest shipment of girls would have come in last night. They’d be penned up in one of several holding houses, awaiting the next online auction, which would be on the thirteenth. The number of women to be auctioned varied. It could be as few as five or as many as twenty. It just depended on the gleaners and how much merchandise they could round up. Sid’s problem would be determining which of the houses the women were being held in. If she could figure that out, she could do some recon and maybe gather enough evidence to take to the police. If she could only persuade them to conduct a raid while the women were still being held prisoner, they’d have no choice but to open a wider investigation. Granted, she’d brought the police evidence before, and they’d never moved on it. She suspected they’d been bought off, though she’d never been able to prove it. But she kept trying, and maybe this time her report would fall to someone who wasn’t in the slavers’ pay, someone who would follow up on her information.
And if that went against Aden’s preferences for keeping the human authorities out of it, then too bad. If he’d listened to her, it never would have come to this.
Sid settled down to work. Because the slavers were so organized in other things, she’d been working on a system for figuring out which house they’d use in any given month. It wasn’t perfect, but so far, she’d been right about sixty percent of the time. Eventually, her odds would go up, but with any luck they’d be shut down before that happened.
She’d calculated her best guess and was gathering her stuff for a little field trip when her phone rang. She almost didn’t answer, too focused on her plans for the afternoon to be interrupted, but then she caught Will’s name on the caller ID.
“Fuck,” she whispered. Was it Wednesday already? She briefly considered letting it go to voice mail, but decided that was just too cowardly, so she picked up the phone with a breathless, “Hi, Will.”
“Hey, sweetheart. Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure, why?”
“You sound out of breath.”
“Oh, that. I dropped a file and was crawling around under my desk,” she explained, appalled at the ease with which the lie tripped off her tongue.
“Can we make it an early lunch today? I’ve got a meeting.”
It was the perfect excuse to cancel, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t have many friends since moving to Chicago. Or rather, she had them, mostly from college, but they were spread all over the globe. Will was one of the few who always made an effort to stay in touch, something she herself was woefully remiss in. Besides, who knew? Maybe they would get married someday.
Sid contemplated that last thought and shook her head. Nope. She just couldn’t see herself settling into her mother’s routine for the rest of her life. And that’s what life with Will would be. Not a bad life, but not the one Sid wanted, either.
“You there, Sid?”
“Yeah, sorry. My brain took a short trip without me. Early lunch is fine. Where and when?”
“I reserved 11:30 at Naha. That work?”
Sid checked the time on her computer. It would be tight, but she could do it. And she’d still have plenty of time this afternoon to check out the slavers’ house.
“Works great. I’ll see you there.”
“Looking forward to it.”
She disconnected, smiling at Will’s sign-off. No brooding, alpha male bullshit from Will. He was beta all the way. Had she ever seen him angry? Did he ever get angry? He must, right? Everyone did eventually. She sighed and slumped back to her bedroom to change clothes. Ripped Levi’s and scuffed Chucks weren’t going to cut it at Naha.
SID TOOK A BIG bite of her Naha “famous” half-pound burger and chewed with great relish. She caught Will watching her with a lopsided grin.
“What?” she demanded.
“How a bitty thing like you manages to chow down the way you do—”
“First, I’m not a bitty thing. I’m nearly five-eight, as you well know. Second, no woman wants to be told she chows down. As for the rest of it, there’s no reason you couldn’t have ordered a burger if you’d wanted one, so stop looking at my lunch like a starving dog, and eat your damn halibut.”
“Testy. But I had steak yesterday, and I’m trying to cut back on red meat, now that I’m getting older.”
“Oh for God’s sake, you’re going to be thirty, not sixty. Get over it.”
“Wait ’til it’s your turn. Speaking of birthdays, I assume you’re heading home this weekend for your dad’s big bash?”
Sid blanked for a moment. Her father’s birthday party was . . . oh, God, this weekend? She was mortified and feeling more than a little guilty that she’d forgotten.
“You forgot, didn’t you?”
“Of course not,” she insisted, thinking that she and Will knew each other entirely too well. “It’s on my calendar.”
“And you forgot anyway.”
“I’d have picked it up tomorrow. My alert’s set for two days before.”
“You have a present yet?”
“Bought it last month, Mister Know-It-All, so there.”
“Want to drive out there with me? I’m staying over at my parents’ ’til Sunda
y.”
Sid thought about the significance of that last part. It didn’t occur to either of them to stay in a hotel together, because there was no passion. Will would stay at his parents’ house, and, if she stayed over at all, it would be in her old room at her parents’ house. She found the reminder depressing.
“Sure,” she said to his invitation. At a minimum, he’d be good company for the drive, and if it turned out she didn’t want to stay over, she could always take the train back.
“Good deal. I’ll pick you up around ten. Gives you time to get gorgeous before the party.”
“Mmm,” Sid agreed, but her mind was hung up on the unfairness of it all. That a smug, chauvinist bastard of a vampire could rock her world, while a great guy like Will was relegated to the friends department. What did that say about her? Nothing good, that was for sure.
Will’s cell phone vibrated discreetly. He stole a glance at it and signaled the waiter for the check.
“Hope you don’t mind, Sid. But I can’t be late for this meeting.”
“Of course not.”
“Your brother said to say hi, by the way.”
“Tell him hi back.” Her oldest brother, Jameson Reid III, was Will’s best friend and a partner at the same law firm. Which was why Will saw her brother far more often than Sid did. She’d come by her obsessive work ethic naturally. It ran in the family.
Ten minutes later, Will gave her a brotherly kiss good-bye and slipped into a cab.
“You sure you don’t want to share?” he asked, before closing the door.
Sid shook her head. “It’s the opposite direction, and I don’t want you to be late. I’ll take the next one.”
“See you Saturday morning, then.”
She watched the cab carry him away, staring at the traffic until the doorman drew her attention with a polite, “Do you required a cab, miss?”
Sid regarded him blankly, considering. She felt like walking, but it was already late, and she’d have to take the train to her destination later. “Yes, please. Thank you.”
The cab ride was longer than she’d hoped. She’d forgotten how bad lunchtime traffic could be and could probably have walked faster. But it was too late for that. She rushed into the elevator and down the hall, kicking off her heels as she walked into her condo, pulling off her black cashmere sweater and charcoal pencil skirt and tossing them on the bed. She took the time to wash her face of makeup and confine her hair in a long braid, but before she got dressed, she added something she only wore during these nighttime recons of hers, and that was a bellyband holster along with a 9mm Glock 26 Gen4 with a ten capacity mag.
Sid wasn’t all that fond of guns and had never fired one before moving to Chicago. But she was fond of her life, and some of the places she’d had to venture in pursuit of this story were unsavory at best and flat-out dangerous at worst. She hadn’t really taken the danger seriously before Janey had been killed, but afterwards, one of the first things she’d done was buy a gun and learn how to shoot it. She now went to the range every week and fired a couple hundred rounds. Her first few times there had been laughable. She’d flinched so hard, she’d barely hit the target. But she’d stuck with it, and now, while she’d never be a sharpshooter, she was confident she could at least hold her own long enough to get away. Unless her enemy was a vampire. But in that case, she figured nothing would save her anyway.
She racked the slide, putting a round in the chamber, then dropped the magazine and filled it, giving her a total of eleven rounds. She replaced the mag with a hard slap, just as she’d been taught, then slipped it into the bellyband. Once she’d yanked on her clothes—a pair of torn jeans, a heavy, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a dark gray fleece hoodie, along with the black Chucks she’d had on earlier—the small 9mm was undetectable to anything but a pat-down.
Other than the gun, she didn’t take much with her on these recon forays. A notebook and pen, her ID and transit pass, and enough money for a cab, just in case, plus a small bottle of water and an energy bar. Experience had taught her that she could sometimes be stuck somewhere a long time, unable to move without giving her position away. She shoved it all into a small backpack, then checked the time again. Nearly 2:00 P.M. It was later than she liked, but there was still plenty of time.
She’d discovered early on that her best chances for sneaking up on the holding pens was during the day when the vamps were sound asleep. They hired human guards, but the humans had clearly been told that their job was to keep the women in rather than everyone else out, so they paid very little attention to what was happening on their own perimeter.
Besides, Sid had become quite proficient at blending into her environment. She could put on a sexy dress and high heels to seduce Aden, or she could pull on a pair of raggedy jeans and some scuffed Chucks to become just another teenager making her way in a rough neighborhood. She took the train, tucking her braid of red hair down the back of her sweatshirt, pulling up the hood, and adding a baseball cap to better conceal herself before disembarking. She’d been enough of a thorn in the slavers’ sides that at least some of them would know her on sight.
The house she was headed to was in Woodlawn not far from Jackson Park, and only a short distance from Lake Michigan. She actually knew of at least one shipment of slaves that had been moved by boat. She didn’t know where they’d gone after that, because she’d had little luck tracking any of the captive women beyond Chicago. She only knew for sure that her suppositions about the extended network were correct because of Janey’s personal experience.
Keeping her head down as she got off the train, Sid made her way to the street she needed. Her target was a fifties era, single-story house, with a broad, covered porch. She walked by the first time without slowing, continued down two full blocks, then crossed the street and did a second pass on the opposite side of the street. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had been replaced by large apartment buildings, which was a bit of good luck. She couldn’t hang around too long without the wrong people noticing her, but there was enough tenant turnover in the surrounding apartments that it gave her a little bit of cover.
Her initial walk-by told her the house she wanted was being guarded by two thuggish-looking guys. They didn’t do much, just sat on the porch, chairs kicked back, and watched the street. It said something about the neighborhood that no one gave them a second look, even though they were obviously armed and didn’t try to hide it. Holding her cell phone and pretending to carry on a conversation, she snapped several pictures of the guards, including a few that zoomed in on their guns, just for the record. Illinois had some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but that didn’t mean no one ever broke them. The police would be no more interested in the guns than the neighbors were, which meant not at all.
She kept walking. This was the hardest part, when her back was to the guards. It would look too suspicious for her to keep glancing over her shoulder, but she was always waiting for the attack to come. For a hard hand to grab her shoulder or a shot to ring out.
She reached the end of the block with a sigh of relief. There wasn’t much traffic, but she looked both ways, and as she did, she saw a third guard appear from the back of the house. He walked down the cracked concrete driveway, exchanged a few words with the porch sitters, and then exchanged places with one of them, who then disappeared into the back.
A total of three guards. That was doable, especially since Sid wasn’t planning on being a hero. There’d be no breaking and entering, no sneaking in to free the prisoners, and sure as hell no big shootout in the middle of the day. But she wasn’t going to limit herself to standing across the street, either. Today’s trip was all about recon, which meant she had to get close enough to verify that there really were captives inside the house.
She’d made that mistake early on, rushing off to report her findings to the police, only to have them discover an empty house and no sign that anyone had ever been there. Sid had been sure she had the right house, but it had been nothin
g but a decoy. She’d later learned that this was the slavers’ modus operandi. But that incident was part of the reason why the police didn’t give much credence to her reports anymore.
For the next phase of her recon, she circled around the block and cut through a second apartment complex that stood behind the small house. This late in the day, the sunlight barely penetrated the narrow space between the several buildings. With her dark gray hoodie, she had plenty of cover to stand and observe the slavers’ back yard. The third guard was there, sitting on a battered aluminum lawn chair and looking bored out of his mind. At one point, she was pretty sure his eyes drifted closed, but she didn’t make her move until he got up and cruised back around the left side of the house to rotate guard duty with his buddies on the porch.
Moving quickly, Sid slipped over the ancient and drooping chain-link fence bordering the property, and hurried across the mostly dirt yard and up to the right side of the house, which was covered in prickly and neglected holly bushes. She remained still until the new guard was settled on the lawn chair, forcing herself to wait even longer, until there was a good chance he’d grown complacent and bored. And then, hugging the right side of the house, trying to avoid getting her clothes snagged on half-dead holly branches, she moved from window to window. She always hoped for a torn window shade, or a gap in the curtain, something to give her a glimpse inside, but that rarely happened. And today, as usual, the house was buttoned up tight.
She’d never been inside this house, but real estate websites were full of information, if one knew what to look for. She knew the house had three bedrooms, two on the side where she was now, and a third at the end of a short hallway. The windows on the other bedroom faced the back yard which made them too dangerous to sneak a look at. The lawn-chair guard was absent during the changeover, but walking up to the house in plain sight was too much risk for too little payoff. Sid had no doubt what they’d do to her if she was caught. These were the people who’d killed Janey, and although her father’s name protected her from the vampires at the top, their street thug guards might not check her credentials before killing her.
Aden (Vampires in America) Page 8
