by J H Leigh
I didn’t know what to say but I confirmed Dylan’s statement with a small nod.
For a long minute, Badger stood, uncomprehending, unable to accept what Dylan had shared but then something must’ve resonated with his private fears as the words resonated with truth. He dropped to a crouch, a ball of grief and anger, with a roar that I felt in my soul. Dylan dropped to the ground and held him with a ferocity that’d never seen.
Whoever this Nova was, Badger and Dylan had both loved her.
Holy fucking shit.
With sudden clarity, I saw a brand new version of the woman who didn’t seem to give a damn about anything or anyone but had a whole lot of fucking secrets locked behind that sharp mouth.
Tana wasn’t the only one who’d never left Madame Moirai’s care. The sheer scope of what we were staring down was even more overwhelming than before.
And just like that, without realizing the game was open to more players, another piece had been added to the board.
4
Alice in Wonderland had nothing on the rabbit hole we were tumbling down in Badger’s world. Badger owned a seedy nightclub with a secret entrance into the subway system below where he held court.
Because, only in New York could a street rat punk own real estate without anyone blinking an eye, right?
We followed Badger into a small apartment above the club that smelled like whiskey, stale cigarettes, and bad decisions but at least it wasn’t a hollowed-out church slated for demolition.
“What the fuck,” Badger shouted once we were inside. His nostrils flared as he demanded, “I want names and I want them now.”
“Don’t you think if I had names I’d give them to you?” Dylan said. “All I have is a fucked up situation where I barely got out alive and you.”
Badger shoved his hand through his pink faux hawk, pissed as fuck at Dylan’s answer, impotent rage in every agitated movement. “I want to know every goddamn detail,” he said, pointing at each of us. “I want to know how this all happened and I want to know how the fuck they’re getting away with it.”
He leveled a stubbed finger at Dylan, saying in a low tone, “Starting with you, baby girl. Start talking.”
I held my breath. Dylan hadn’t shared any details with us. We had no idea how Dylan had ended up with Madame Moirai and now that we knew Dylan had taken the deal in an attempt to find whoever Nova was…the plot had just thickened to the point of sludge.
“I need a fucking cigarette and a shot,” Dylan muttered, accepting a smoke from Badger before crossing to the messy kitchen and finding a bottle of tequila. She didn’t bother with a glass. After a quick swig, she winced as it went down and then lit the cigarette, taking a long drag before starting. “I don’t know how they found Nova but the best I can figure out is that Nova listed me as her contact on the form, which is how they came looking for me. They made an assessment on me as a risk and decided I fit the criteria for the auction. They killed two birds with one stone — one, they’d remove me as a loose end to Nova and two, they’d make a little money off my sale.”
“Sale? What the fuck? What do you mean?”
Dylan took another swig before answering in a dead-pan tone. “We were selling our fucking virginities to rich perverts. That’s the deal we were offered. Sixty percent of any transaction would supposedly go to us whereas Madame Moirai would take forty. Seeing as each sale could potentially go for hundreds of thousands, our cut seemed more than generous. The money is the bait and it fucking worked.”
“Why wouldn’t Nova tell me this?” Badger asked.
“Because you’re a dick at best and at worst, her brother. Like you were going to be chill with her selling herself? You never wanted that for Nova. Not on the streets, not for some rich asshole.”
“And she fucking sold herself anyway…” Badger looked ready to punch something or throw up — maybe both. “So…okay, what happened after the sale?”
“We were taken back to the place where we were being held and then…well, I can only assume that they were going to overdose us and then get rid of our bodies.”
“What makes you think that?” Badger asked, trying to piece together the story. “Why not just keep you on your backs for more money?”
His blunt question made me wince, reminding me of Olivia’s offer to elevate. I chimed in. “If you were offered to elevate, that’s exactly what would’ve happened but not everyone is given that offer. Out of the four of us…I was the only one offered.”
“Four?” Badger’s gaze darted between us. “I only see three of you.”
“One of us died,” I answered, swallowing the bile in my throat. “Her name was Tana. I found her body downstairs in a make-shift morgue. It looked like they were going to embalm her or something.”
Badger’s expression screwed into a frown. “What the fuck does elevate mean?”
“It means you remain in service to your buyer,” I answered, feeling sick. “If they want more, they make an offer to keep you. I told my handler, I’d rather fucking die.”
“What if Nova was, like you said, elevated?” Badger supposed, thinking out loud. “You never saw Nova’s body, right?”
“No,” Dylan admitted. “But my gut says she’s gone.”
“You ain’t psychic,” Badger reminded Dylan with a hard look. “My sister could still be alive.”
“Maybe,” I agreed but I had to be honest with him even if he was terrifying. “My handler said that an offer of elevation is rare. The odds aren’t good.”
“Yeah, well Nova was special,” Badger said with a glower as I’d insulted his sister just by sharing the truth. I zipped my lip after that. Badger had the irrational energy of someone marinating in extreme grief and I wasn’t about to mess with that.
“Nova was special,” Dylan agreed, her gaze downcast. “She didn’t deserve this shit.” She looked up, pining Badger’s stare. “None deserves what they’re doing to innocent girls.”
A silent, unspoken conversation flowed between Badger and Dylan. After a long, tense moment, Badger looked away, going to drop into a misshapen recliner, rubbing his forehead. “Fuck,” he said, the single word heavy with grief and rage. “I can’t believe this shit.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Dylan agreed, returning to fall into the sofa beside us. “There’s some kind of network…The Avalon or something like that. Pretty fucking powerful. They’ve got connections in all sorts of places. I don’t know what to do.”
Badger’s gaze roamed our faces, realizing we might have intel worth listening to. He looked to me and Jilly. “You all were virgins?”
My cheeks heated. “Yeah.”
“So some rich asshole popped your cherry and then ran out on the bill,” Badger said, summing up the experience. As if that short, terse statement could possibly wrap up the horrid details of everything we’d been through.
I gritted my teeth, not trusting my mouth. Instead, I jerked a short nod. Dylan could feel my temper building. She interjected, saying, “Look, if it weren’t Nicole, I wouldn’t be here. She’s a fucking savage. She jimmied the locks to our rooms and then set fire to the place where they were holding us. We’re alive because of this chick right here.”
Grudging respect lifted the corner of his mouth. “Yeah? Tell me how you managed that.”
“Picking locks isn’t that hard if you’ve got the right tools. I found a bobby pin in the carpet. The locks were simple. I waited until after midnight when I was sure the staff was at its lowest and then I opened the other doors.”
“They kept you in separate rooms?” Badger asked, intrigued.
Dylan answered for me, bitterness coating her tone. “Yeah, like prison cells with a Best Western hotel vibe. We were locked in every night and fed this disgusting paste that was supposed to be oatmeal. It was pretty clear they didn’t give two shits about our comfort after we’d been returned. We didn’t even get any medical care for our bodies after we’d been beaten and abused.”
Badger’s gaze narrowed. “
Show me.”
Dylan didn’t flinch, just lifted her shirt to show the mottled bruising riddling her ribcage, traveling down her belly and disappearing behind her jeans. We all had bruises. Dylan had broken bones, too. “They didn’t pay just for the privilege of fucking virgins,” she said, her voice clogged. “They paid to do whatever the fuck they wanted.”
I closed my eyes as the memory of Tana’s broken body flashed in my mind. “Tana was beaten to death,” I said. “We don’t know if she died at the house or with her buyer but she died of her injuries.”
“Nicole found her body,” Dylan explained, shifting against the heaviness in the room. Each time we talked about Tana, I felt the energy of her ghost lurking in the shadows. “She was pretty fucked up.”
Badger processed our answers and I knew he was replacing Tana with his Nova, knowing that she probably suffered before dying, too. That red-hot rage returned and I didn’t blame him but he was as unpredictable as Dylan. I didn’t know if we were safe with him but I knew we weren’t safe out there in the open.
We had to take our chances with Badger.
“I want names,” Badger repeated, his gaze hard and brittle. “Someone needs to pay for what they did to Nova.” He silenced Dylan with a look when she started to protest. “I.Want.Names.”
The tense stand-off between the two held the air in our lungs with an iron-grip. I couldn’t breathe, afraid to tip the scales in any way against us. Badger was the key to surviving with Madame Moirai on our heels.
And Dylan was our negotiator.
Just when the tension felt ready to break, Dylan leaned forward with a hard look of her own, saying, “If you want names, you’re going to have to help us. Call in your favors. We’re going to need all of them. If you’re not willing to do that, you don’t really want to know what happened to Nova and you sure as hell don’t want to avenge her.”
Dylan had thrown the gauntlet but what else could she do in light of the circumstances. We didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding out jack shit without some kind of help. If Badger had resources, he had to pony up if he wanted results.
Badger’s mouth turned up, conceding Dylan’s point without saying a word. He looked to Jilly and me, gesturing, “And these two?”
“They’re with me.”
It was the first real indication Dylan wasn’t going anywhere, that she wasn’t going to ditch us at the first chance.
“There’s rules,” Badger reminded Dylan. I wanted to know what these rules were and if they involved this infamous pit for breaking them. I didn’t run from sexual slavery only to land in a pit of some kind in the bowels of New York. “You responsible for them?”
“Yeah,” Dylan answered, sealing some kind of unspoken agreement for us. “You gonna help?”
Badger inhaled a deep breath, considering his position. He had loved his sister, but was he willing to put everything on the line to bring down the people responsible for her death? This could all go sidewise, real quick and he seemed slick enough to recognize the threat.
Finally, he nodded. “Yeah, I’ll help. I’ve got some people I can call up but these two,” he pointed to me and Jilly “they’re gonna have to make themselves useful. There ain’t no free ride. Not even for Nova. Everyone pitches in. You remember.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Dylan didn’t like the terms but we were all up against a rock and a hard place. She countered, saying, “Any job you’re thinking of running with them, you check with me first. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing and I’m not taking the heat for their stupidity.”
Was that a backhanded attempt at protecting us? I grit my teeth against the need to tell her to fuck off. I wasn’t fragile or easily scared off and like I mentioned, I was pretty sure Jilly had a screw loose. I think we could handle ourselves.
But this was Dylan’s world and I didn’t know the rules yet. I had to keep quiet, watch and learn.
Felt a lot like surviving my fucking childhood.
5
Badger left us behind in the apartment. Once he was gone, Jilly announced, “Well he seems nice,” to which Dylan countered with an eye roll that said the opposite.
I regarded Dylan, too many questions vying for time in my mouth. “Is everything you said about Nova the truth?”
"Why the fuck would I lie about that?” Dylan shot back, rubbing at her eyes. Now that Badger was gone she seemed to break down a little, like she had to hold herself together so as not to show any weakness around him. “Nova was my best and only friend. I loved her.”
“Why didn’t you say something about your friend from the start?” I asked, bewildered. “I don’t understand why you kept that quiet.”
“Because I had no reason to trust you and it was my business.”
I suppose that was fair but for some reason, I felt betrayed that she hadn’t been upfront about how she came to be an auction girl. But that information changed things a bit. If Madame Moirai selected Dylan because she was on Nova’s contact sheet, that meant they’d deliberately target Dylan. I shuddered at how close I’d been to putting Lora’s name down as my contact. I couldn’t handle the idea of Lora going through what we had. It would’ve been a death sentence for Lora just as it had been for Tana and however many other girls who’d been baited and trapped.
“How did you meet Badger and Nova?” I asked.
“Nova found me on the street. She introduced me to Badger, said I couldn’t survive without someone to look out for me. She introduced me to Badger and I started running jobs for him in exchange for protection. We got close. All of us. Before too long, I was Badger’s No. 1 runner. Gained a reputation for getting jobs done without drawing attention to myself. Badger liked that about me.”
“Was there ever a thing between you and Badger?” I asked.
“Fuck no. Badger has a strict no-messing-around policy with his runners, says it fucks up the chain of command. I can’t say he’s wrong. Besides, he’s like a brother to me.”
I’ve never had a sibling but having a brother like Badger? Not sure that was a great endorsement. “So, why didn’t Nova tell Badger about Madame Moirai?”
“Badger is like most big brothers — overprotective, belligerent and most the time he just didn't listen to a thing Nova had to say if it didn't jive with what he wanted her to say.” Dylan paused, reflecting, “And I don't know, I think she was looking for an opportunity to do her own thing. Badger is a control freak, even with the ones he loves. He doesn’t trust easily and if you happen to betray that trust, you’re going to end up in the fucking pit.”
There was the mention of that pit again. “What the hell is that?”
Dylan smirked. “Let's just say if you end up in the pit you ain't never coming back."
I guess that's all I needed to know. I didn't have any plans to land in any kind of pit. “I’m sorry about your friend,” I said quietly.
Jilly piped in. “Yeah, that’s so terrible. She must’ve been real special. I’m sorry.”
Dylan shrugged with a whatever energy but I knew it was fake. Even Dylan knew the agony of heartbreak. For the sake of her pride, I changed the subject. “What kind of contacts does Badger have? Does he really have someone who can help us find more about The Avalon network?”
“Badger knows people in all places. He's probably the most dangerous person nobody knows about. He keeps it that way for a reason. But yeah he's got contacts. We just need to lay low until he tells us what and who we should talk to.”
Jilly asked, “What kind of jobs does he want us to do? I'm a little confused. We’re not old enough to work in the club downstairs, right?”
Dylan answered wryly. “Nothing so visible. Badger runs this town. He runs anything from drugs to guns, pretty much anything and everything that is for sale except he doesn’t traffic in people. That's the one line he won't cross. Anything else is fair game. Basically, if he gives you a job here as a runner, the best advice I can give you is if he gives you a job, do as you're told, don't as
k questions and don't screw up. If you do that you'll be fine but I'm gonna try to keep you out of the runner circle.”
I asked, “How do you suppose to manage that? I mean I know you and Badger have history or something but he doesn't seem all that lenient or open to suggestion.”
“Don't worry. I’ll handle Badger. You just do what you can to get answers because we’re on the line.”
“What happens if we can't find answers?” I asked.
I could tell by Dylan's expression that wasn't an option. Even if Badger had some kind of soft feelings for Dylan he wasn't going to let feelings get in the way of his revenge. And if there wasn't someone to pay for what had happened to Nova, we would pay instead.
It was one thing to think you were tough because you lived in a rough area of the city but quite another when the sharp edge of society is pressed against your throat. One wrong move and you’re fucked.
I hope we hadn’t jumped from the frying pan to the fire.
“Badger said we can hole up here for the time being,” Dylan said. “At least it’s not down below with the sewer rats.”
I shuddered, glancing around. “Does Badger live here?”
“Sometimes. It depends on the day. He’s got places all over the city. He likes to have options.”
I bit my lip, wondering if I should ask but I did anyway. The way Dylan appeared uncomfortable and yet familiar with the apartment made me wonder. “Did you live here with Nova?”
“Yeah,” she admitted, gesturing, “We shared that room.”
“Are you going to be okay staying here?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Dylan said but she looked as if that room was filled with poison. She dragged her gaze away from that direction, saying, “Look, now that Badger has given us the green light to crash here, we need to get our stuff and ditch the car.”
I agreed. We still had supplies, extra clothes and food stashed in the car behind the church. If we waited too long, it would all be gone.
Jilly volunteered, raising her hand. “I’ll go with you. I need some fresh air.”
