Quicksilver

by Elise Noble

  That wasn’t just a massive relief because it would give Rafael peace of mind, but also because it showed Leandro trusted me. And in return, I had to trust him, although the thought of walking into the so-called party pad made my heart sink to the toes of my ugly pink shoes.

  The Florida house had a ghastly fountain in the middle of the driveway, but the North Carolina house went one better with a miniature waterfall in the atrium. A shiny gold crocodile lurked in the pool below, and I added crimes against taste to the list of Nevin’s transgressions.

  “Would you like something to eat or drink before I show you to your rooms?” he asked, pausing by a vase of hot-pink orchids.

  “We ate on the way,” Leandro said.

  “Thank you,” I mouthed at him.

  There was an element of wanting to get the worst over with. Would my room have a bed? Or a leopard-print futon with twenty-five throw pillows and a cashmere blanket?

  “Both of your rooms are on the third floor. We don’t believe in segregation here at the party pad, so guards and girls are mixed together like one big family.”

  He may not have believed in segregation, but the women-are-second-class-citizens theme continued upstairs, meaning Leandro’s room was twice as big as mine. And while I had a bed, it looked child sized, as did the tiny armchair by the window. Did Nevin realise how tall I was? And yes, the windows had bars on, not only mine, but Leandro’s too.

  “Carl will bring your things in from the car, but you won’t need most of your clothes, Catalina. I’ve seen what Radcliffe sends with the girls, and it tends to be a little conservative for our tastes. But never fear—we’ll provide you with new outfits.” He flung open the closet door. “See?”

  Yes, I did see.

  “That’s, uh, a lot of leather.”

  “Our clients here prefer that look. If anything doesn’t fit, just let Lupita know. She’s our housekeeper, but she’s excellent with a needle and thread. Do you have any particular dietary requirements? Vegetarian? Vegan? Lactose intolerant?”

  “None of that.”

  Leandro shook his head too.

  “Good, good.” Nevin patted his stomach. “I can’t eat wheat myself. It makes me bloat. Now, let me show you our party room.”

  Party room? It was a freaking dungeon. Now I knew why Leandro’s quarters were upstairs in this house—Nevin needed the basement for his sick games. A stage dominated one end, complete with a dance pole and a strange padded bench with shackles at each end. Whips and chains lined the walls, and I dreaded to think what the metal rack on the ceiling was for. Joder. Just when I’d almost written Nevin off as a weirdo with odd tastes in clothing and decor, he revealed his true self. A depraved miscreant. A monster. A Bond villain on acid.

  Beside me, Leandro stiffened, having realised my fate right after I did.

  “Do the girls work in here every evening?” he asked.

  “Yes, but don’t worry; you’ll be able to use them after hours along with the rest of the team. We’re all night owls.”

  Nevin’s perverted playground made Radcliffe’s domain look like summer camp in comparison.

  “Look, here are some of your colleagues,” he said, pointing at the door. “I’ll introduce you.”

  Three girls filed in, and I snapped my head around to stare at them. Two blondes and one brunette, none of them Izzy, each wearing impossibly high heels and clad from head to toe in black leather. And they looked utterly miserable.

  “Mercedes, Julieta, Ainsley, come and meet Catalina. She’ll be joining us tonight.”

  “Welcome to the fun factory,” the shortest of the three said—the brunette. “I’m Mercedes, but call me Mercy.”

  “Not in front of clients,” Nevin warned. “Mercedes sounds so much classier, don’t you think?”

  Behind him, Mercy rolled her eyes, but I could hardly disagree in front of my new boss.

  “I guess.”

  A quiet set of chimes sounded from Nevin’s pocket, and when he checked his phone screen, his fake cheer turned serious.

  “I need to make a call. Mercedes, would you finish showing our newbies around?”

  “Yes, Nevin.”

  “Catalina, feel free to wander in the house during the day, but when clients are here, you should be dressed appropriately and ready for action downstairs. We have security on all the external doors and windows. Leandro, you’re welcome to come and go, of course, but you’ll need to buzz me first because I’m the only person with a pass card.”

  “What if there’s a fire?”

  “We have a sprinkler system.” Oh, that was comforting. “You’ll have to excuse me. There seems to be some sort of problem. Most unusual.”

  Once he’d gone, I turned to Mercy. She’d come from Colombia too, judging by her accent. Another of Roscoe’s victims?

  “Give it to me straight—how bad is it?”

  She steered me away from Leandro. “Where did you come from? Radcliffe? Duxworth?”

  “Radcliffe. Who’s Duxworth?”

  “The Kentucky guy. Okay, on a scale of one to ten, Radcliffe’s place is a three and this is an eleven. I hope you’re a good actress.”

  “Why?”

  “Nevin and his cronies like to see us cry and beg and scream. Don’t be fooled by his nice-guy act. As soon as darkness falls, he turns into one sick puppy.”

  Oh, hell.

  Mercy showed me the kitchen, where all the food was prepared without knives—yes, we were back to the finger buffet—then the gym, the lounge, and the dining room. In the late afternoon, the atmosphere was less oppressive than that of the Florida house, but it seemed things would change as the moon rose.

  Which would be any moment now.

  “You should go and change,” Mercy said. “Nevin likes us to be ready and waiting when the first client arrives, and he’s due in just over half an hour.”

  “You’re allowed watches?”

  “We weren’t at first, but Nevin got sick of us being late.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Seventeen months. I was at Duxworth’s before that.”

  “Have you tried getting out?”

  She paled visibly. “Once. But the guards caught me, and you don’t want to know what Nevin did with the cattle prod.”

  No, I really didn’t. Bile rose in my throat. How could I possibly eat dinner after this?

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek. Mercy had seemed so tough, so confident at first, but now I saw the chinks in her armour.

  “Just do what they say. It hurts less that way. And you’re beautiful, so you might be one of the lucky ones.”

  “What do you mean, the lucky ones?”

  “Some girls get sold into private ownership.”

  “Ownership? Like the freaking slave trade? But I thought the US abolished that in 1865?”

  Yes, I’d been that one kid who listened in history class.

  Mercy shrugged. “I guess nobody told Nevin. But anything’s better than staying here forever.”

  That was debatable. “What about the guards? Are they cruel too?”

  “They’re animals, but Nevin gets angry if they leave marks, so they have to be careful.” She glanced at the fancy grandfather clock in the hallway—another modern abomination—and her shoulders dropped. “Come on. We need to get ready.” Another tear followed the path of the first. “And don’t forget to smile.”

  CHAPTER 36 - CORA

  “NEVIN’S AN ANIMAL,” Leandro told me.

  Two minutes ago, he’d muttered at me to act scared then hauled me into his room. After the evening I’d just had, there wasn’t any need for the acting part.

  “I already know that.”

  The clients at Radcliffe’s had mostly been ageing bankers and investment managers who thrust away until their Viagra wore off. Here at Nevin’s, they were younger and meaner.

  “Shit.”

  Leandro looked as if he didn’t know whether t
o give me a hug or a wide berth, so I walked past and flopped onto his bed.

  “Tell me there aren’t any cameras in here.”

  “No, it’s the same as Radcliffe’s. Cameras in the hallways and your room. Nevin warned me to bring girls in here if I want to get adventurous.”

  And Mercy told me Nevin himself liked it when the girls struggled. Whatever he did to me, I vowed to lie as still as a corpse so he wouldn’t get his kicks.

  “The only adventure I want is removing Nevin’s testicles with a melon baller.”

  Leandro sat next to me. “How bad was it?”

  “Everything hurts.”

  “Fuck. I’m so, so sorry. We shouldn’t have come. I should’ve smuggled you out somehow and left the case to the rest of the damn team.”

  “But what about the other girls? What about Izzy? Mercy told me they sell girls into private ownership like freaking pets. What if that happened to her?”

  “They what?”

  “Exactly. Look, I’ll carry on doing what I need to do. But you need to get your evidence and find Izzy. Quickly.”

  Leandro sighed. “I know. But we might have a bigger problem.”

  “How? How can we possibly have a bigger problem than Nevin?”

  “After we left this morning, a team of hitmen arrived at Radcliffe’s and killed everyone except the girls and the guard on the front gate. We had agents in the house opposite, and they never saw a fucking thing.”

  My chest seized. “A team of hitmen?”

  “Yes, a team. Who does your brother work with?”

  “No way. That wasn’t him.” I reacted on instinct, but then I paused to think. My brother was a freaking hitman. He’d undoubtedly have killed Radcliffe if he got his hands on him, but he’d never been to the United States, nor had he mentioned working with anyone but Vicente and Grandma. “He doesn’t know anyone in America, and he works alone. What happened to the girls? Are they okay?”

  “Mostly. Hallie’s missing. Tasha’s been sedated, and the others won’t say much. So far, evidence suggests it could have been a mob hit.”

  “Retaliation for what happened at the warehouse? You broke our toys, so we’ll destroy yours?”

  “Possibly. Forensics is still processing the scene. But Nevin’s understandably twitchy, and he’s reassigned two of the guards to perimeter security.”

  “That’s good, right? Because that means there’s less of them in here.”

  “Yes, it’s good for us.” But Leandro didn’t look at all happy.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Radcliffe’s computer’s missing. I sure hope whoever killed him doesn’t find out about this place and pay us a visit because I’m a dead man if they do. And what if they take you the way they took Hallie? There’s no sign of her.”

  Every time I thought this nightmare couldn’t get any worse, it did. Hallie had been so nice to me. Why had someone taken her and not the others? What if she got hurt? Or… Or… No, I had to block Florida from my mind and focus on the task at hand. Thoughts of Hallie’s fate made it difficult to breathe, but I couldn’t afford to lose sight of my goal: finding Izzy.

  Oh, who was I kidding? Now I needed to look for Hallie too, because I’d never sleep while she was still missing. This was never going to end, was it?

  “We need to solve the case and get out of here. Can the FBI help to keep a lookout for the hitmen?”

  Leandro grimaced. “I kind of cut my boss off earlier. He seemed insistent on me continuing with the softly-softly approach again, but he wanted to send a surveillance team, and that isn’t going to work. Nevin’s keeping a close eye on movements in the neighbourhood.”

  Leandro had left the compound earlier to give SAC Childs an update and work out the lie of the land, and I’d never felt so miserable as when I watched him walk away.

  “What do you mean, you cut him off?”

  “I literally hung up on him.”

  “Can’t he track the phone?”

  “He could if I left it on. My phone’s been off since we got here.”

  “So we’re on our own?”

  “We’re on our own.”

  A scary thought, but Leandro’s colleagues hadn’t exactly proven competent so far, had they?

  “Did my brother send a message?”

  “Nothing when I checked.”

  My turn to sigh. Where the hell had Rafe ended up?

  “In that case, I vote we get some rest. I’m exhausted, and we’ll need our wits about us tomorrow. Can I stay in here?”

  “Too damn right you’re staying in here. I don’t trust any of the men in this house. I’ll take the floor.”

  A sweet gesture, but we only had one quilt, and asking for more bedding in this place would ring alarm bells. Nevin was no Radcliffe, that was for sure. The old man had made a terrible career choice, but he wasn’t out-and-out cruel, not like his North Carolina counterpart.

  “Just share the bed. We’re both adults.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I wouldn’t have offered otherwise.”

  And right now, sleep was more important than my feelings.

  Nevin had a thing for leather, I soon discovered.

  “Calfskin,” he’d told me earlier this evening. “Nothing but the best for my girls.”

  Pointing out that I wasn’t his girl would not only have been a waste of time since his views on women dated back to the prehistoric times, it would also have made him unnecessarily angry. Mercy had warned me about his volatile temper, so I kept my mouth shut and took the shiny black bra and panties he offered.

  Now I wanted to cover myself up as Leandro escorted me back to my room, because I looked ridiculous. It was nearly midnight. A month ago, I’d have been curled up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a good book, unwinding before bed, but now I found myself thinking, absurdly, that tonight hadn’t been that bad. Yes, I’d still been mauled by a stranger, but I didn’t have fresh bruises, so that was good, right?

  Wrong.

  All wrong, Corazon.

  I was starting to normalise this, and that was a bad thing.

  Leandro didn’t ask how I was, and I was grateful for that. Talking about the details was the last thing I felt like doing. I just wanted to sleep, but it seemed I wouldn’t get my wish when Leandro grabbed my wrist and pulled me into a side room.

  “Hey, come here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “This is Nevin’s office. It’s usually locked, and I want to take a look at his laptop.”

  “What about cameras?”

  “Not in here. Nevin likes his privacy.”

  The discomfort with my outfit was quickly forgotten. “What can I do?”

  “Listen for anyone coming.”

  Sweat popped out on the back of my neck as I stood by the door. After everything I’d been through this evening, this was the most stressful part. Not only because of the risk, but also because it was out of my control.

  “How long will this take?” I whispered.

  “Going as fast as I can.”

  A minute passed. Two, although they felt like hours. Then I heard the soft click of footsteps on the tile outside, and worse, they sounded like the brogues Nevin wore rather than the rubber-soled shoes the guards favoured.

  “Someone’s coming.”

  “Almost done.”

  “Hurry up!”

  Those were the longest moments of my life. And by the time Leandro shoved the chair back, we were trapped. There wasn’t enough time to get out and around the corner before our visitor came down the corridor.

  Think, Cora. Think!

  “Kiss me.”

  “Huh?”

  No time to explain. I yanked Leandro forward, and thankfully, he got the message and pressed his lips to mine.

  “Get the hell off!”

  A shadow darkened the doorway as I tried to push Leandro away, but his arms tightened around me. Good. He’d understood my plan.

  “You know this is gonna
happen.”

  Nevin clapped slowly as he approached. “Feisty, I like that. But why the hell are you in my office?”

  Leandro looked around as if seeing the room for the first time. “Are we? The door was open, and I didn’t realise it was off limits.”

  “Well, it is.” He jerked his thumb towards the hallway. “Get out.”

  I started to follow Leandro, but Nevin caught my arm. “Not you.” Now he smiled. “You can stay. I like it when girls struggle.”

  Oh mierda.

  Nevin kicked the door closed, and I could have cried. On the plus side, Leandro hadn’t been caught, but at what price? The vile little man pushed me towards his desk, closed the laptop, and pushed assorted papers and pens to one side.

  “Bend over.”

  “You’re a cockroach.”

  “No, sweetheart, I’m a snake.”

  He forced me down across the shiny wooden surface, and I yelped when his hand landed on my ass. Don’t give him what he wants, Cora. I willed myself to stay still as he picked up a ruler. How did the girl in Fifty Shades ever find this sexy? Being spanked was about as much fun as swallowing barbed wire while rolling on a bed of hot coals. If it hadn’t been for Leandro, I’d have been praying for the hit squad to turn up. As it was, I prayed for a miracle. Something, anything that would prevent me from being violated for the second time that day.

  And someone up there delivered.

  It was Nevin’s turn to yelp as water cascaded from the ceiling, and he abandoned me in favour of shoving his laptop into a drawer as the torrent continued. A high-pitched alarm sounded too, and I sent a silent thank you to whoever installed the sprinkler system.

  “What the hell…?” he started.