“Talk to me, Andrii.” Her voice was very soft. Persuasive. Loving.
“I can’t lose that.”
“What can’t you lose?”
“The way you look at me. That tone in your voice.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me you’re out of here the moment you’re able to fend for yourself,” he admitted. “The widows are coming with Doug and Carlton to see for themselves that their little chick is alive and well. You know they would do anything to be the ones to take care of you through this.”
“And you think I’d want to go with them?”
He couldn’t read her this time. Not even her speculative tone. “I told you I’d protect you, and I didn’t. I thought Billows was dead and you were safe. They pulled your protection and didn’t tell me. I should have checked that Rock was still on you, but I went to the debriefing with the thought that once it was over, I could get back to you. It didn’t occur to me they’d send Rock to look after the women.”
She didn’t ask who Rock was. She didn’t ask about the women or what that meant. She looked at him, her eyes looking like two bruised flowers pressed into her face.
“You haven’t asked a single question, Solnyshkuh. Not one.” He ran both hands through his hair in agitation. “It stands to reason you aren’t asking because you’re leaving me. You don’t want to know because, like with Billows, you know things I do aren’t exactly legal.” Harshness crept into his voice.
She sighed. “I haven’t asked you any questions, Andrii, because I’ve been in so much pain and I didn’t want to think about what happened. I know my fingerprints are in the club, and once the cops sort through everything, they’re bound to think I was involved with whatever the Billows family had going on. I wanted to enjoy the way you were spoiling me, not making me think about anything that happened or was going to happen. I figured you would talk to me about everything given time.”
He turned away from her, swearing at himself under his breath. “There you go again, baby. The voice of reason. That’s supposed to be me.”
He got her laughing with that absurd statement. The sound was low and cut off with a gasp that had him swinging around to face her again. “Don’t laugh, Solnyshkuh.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
“I love you.” He blurted it out like an idiot. “As in real love. The real thing.”
Her expression changed. He got that look from her he craved. So loving. Almost adoring. She didn’t seem to think he was being a pussy when he confessed insecurities to her.
“I didn’t know I was capable of feeling love. I didn’t even know if such a thing existed until you came to me. I saw Czar with Blythe and Reaper with Anya. And others with their women, especially Savage and Seychelle, but I still didn’t get it.” He knew she had no idea who he was talking about, but he wanted her to understand how overwhelming, just how big it was that he realized love was real. That she was real.
“We’d been tracing a human trafficking ring for well over two years. We finally got the names of a couple of people the women were sent to after they were taken. Billows’ responsibility was to train them as sex slaves before they were auctioned off. After they were trained, they were shipped to the next rung in the ladder, the man holding the auctions.”
“That’s where I came in,” she murmured.
He nodded. “We got into the clubs but couldn’t find a way to get to the underground rooms. In researching, we discovered you. We focused our attention on you, and after three weeks, I made my first contact with you.”
“But you still had your suspicions I was involved.”
“You were the bookkeeper. Your office was below the Adventure Club. It stood to reason that you knew what was going on. But then I met you. I was already halfway falling before I ever made my approach. Just watching the way you were with other people convinced me you couldn’t possibly have anything to do with human trafficking.”
“You asked me out to look for the key to the offices.” There was no accusation in her tone, just a neutral acknowledgment.
“Full disclosure, when you would leave your apartment, it was searched by various members of the team. No one could find the key. We were afraid if we waited too long, if Billows did have women he was training, he’d ship them off before we could find them. Once they’re gone, you don’t have a very large window to retrieve them, and at that point, we didn’t have any way to track them.”
“Were there women in the rooms I couldn’t get into?”
“Yes. There’s a tunnel system leading to that subterranean floor. The women and teens were brought in through the tunnel. They never went through the club.”
She looked down at her hands. He followed her gaze to see her twisting her fingers together until they were white.
“I left her there.” She said it softly. With sorrow. “That woman I heard screaming, I just left her there. She was probably sold and is in a situation she can’t ever get out of.” She lifted her anguished gaze to his. “If they were treating her the way they did me and then sexually assaulted her, she would have been desperate. I felt desperate. I was terrified that they wouldn’t just kill me outright.”
He should have known she would feel guilt for not being able to rescue the unknown woman. “If you had gotten to her, the Billows brothers would have taken you too. They couldn’t afford to allow you freedom if you knew they were sex traffickers. We don’t give up on the victims, Azelie. We’ll continue to look for the ones they sold. It takes time to sort through the information we acquire and find a new direction to get to the top, but we don’t stop. All of us experienced atrocities at the hands of offenders, and we’re committed to stopping as many as possible.”
“We don’t even know who she was,” Azelie said. “I can’t even give that to you as a starting point.”
“Have faith, baby. That’s all any of us can do.”
“Thank you for risking your life to help those women,” she whispered. “I know you must have felt you were risking your relationship with me. I love you even more that you would make such a personal sacrifice. I know those decisions had to have been difficult for you.”
She was his everything. She seemed to be able to be there for him, no matter what. Wrong or right decisions, and he had no clue sometimes which was which. When he felt insecure, weak, the pain of his past swamping him, she was there, standing for him. Loving him. How could it be?
“I did my best to give you truth. To give you the real me. I didn’t want you to ever wake up one morning and feel used. I want you to feel loved, Zelie. I may not always go about it the right way, but I want you to feel loved even when I’m a complete ass.”
She started to laugh and gasped again, her hand covering her lip. “Stop making me laugh. Seriously, Andrii, I thought we were going to be positive about ourselves.”
“No. You’re supposed to be positive. I can say whatever I like about myself. And most of my brothers and sisters call me Maestro. We call one another by our club names. We left most of who we were behind when we escaped Sorbacov’s school.”
“But your birth name is Andrii?”
“Yes. You’re the only one who has called me that in a long time.”
“You know the cops are going to question me. You killed the Billows brothers. You can’t be anywhere near the cops.”
“Baby, even the women we freed will give a different description of their rescuers. We wore silicone masks to alter our appearances. You were rescued by the same men. You have no idea who they are. When you’re questioned, you’ll have a lawyer present. He’ll shut down anything he doesn’t want you to answer. I’ll give you a full description of what I looked like, what Keys and Player looked like. They were the only ones you saw.”
