Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 90769 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90769 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
This wasn’t an earthquake. The whole room was moving.
And the room wasn’t a room. Long, thin, no windows, metal walls beneath the padding: we were in a shipping container! We were being shipped, just cargo in a box. That’s what the padding was for: as well as soundproofing, it stopped us from getting hurt when the container was swung around.
There was a final jolt and the container went still. Wait...not completely still. I couldn’t hear or see any movement but I could feel it. A slow up-and-down that unsettled my stomach. A bobbing.
We were on a ship.
They must have loaded us into this thing while we slept and we’d been unconscious for the journey to the port. That whole time when I thought we were still at the mansion, we’d really been sitting on a dockside. Now our container had been loaded onto a ship and the next stop would be Russia.
I hammered on the padded walls. “Help us! Help, we’re in here! Please!”
But nobody heard.
67
Cal
I COLLECTED UP all the guns and handed them out to the women, then got them to help me hustle all the men, guards and members alike, into the cells in the basement, where we locked them up. The women hugged one another, many of them in tears: they’d been through hell. I was taken by surprise when one of them threw her arms around me. “Thank you,” she sobbed into my chest. “Thank you.”
I looked down at her in confusion for a second. She was a complete stranger but she wasn’t scared of me. I awkwardly patted her on the back, and told her she was safe, now. And then I choked up a little, because I felt the crushing weight of the guilt lift, just a little.
What Bethany said was true. I could make things right.
None of the women I’d rescued knew anything and the club members weren’t any more helpful. But then I thought to ask who was in charge, and everyone pointed me to a guy called Preston Cairns. I pulled him out of his cell and he turned out to be the same guy who’d turned his nose up at me when he opened the door. I threw him on the floor and stood over him. “Where did Ralavich take the women he bought?”
He shook his head and glared up at me, tight-lipped. Even now, with his little empire in ruins around him, he was keeping to some tradition of protecting his member’s secrecy. I could beat it out of him, but I didn’t have time.
I thought for a second. Then I stepped between his feet and kicked his legs into a wide vee. I whistled and Rufus obediently trotted over, coming to a stop between Cairns’s knees. Cairns went pale. I guess he didn’t like dogs, especially big ones.
“Ever see a German Shepherd play with a chew toy?” I asked Cairns. And then I looked meaningfully at his balls.
Cairns’s face went dead white. “They put them in a shipping container. A red shipping container. And loaded it onto a truck, heading for the port of Seattle. They left early this morning, almost as soon as they came back.”
I cursed. Bethany must have left here about the same time I set off from the smallholding. All that time running here had been wasted.
I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up. One of the women I’d rescued was comforting another, putting a blanket around her bare shoulders. My chest contracted in pity. Okay, maybe not wasted. But that didn’t change the fact that Bethany was eight or nine hours ahead of me. She could be at the port by now. Even if I jumped in a car right now and drove like a bat out of hell to Seattle, it would take five or six hours. How long did it take to load a ship? Not that long. I was going to miss her. She was going to be on some ship and gone. Unless….
I picked up Cairns, tossed him back into his cell, and slammed the door. Then I turned to the women. “Call the cops,” I told them. “Local and state and the FBI.” The club might have been able to crush an investigation when it was just the word of a lone witness, describing a mansion she couldn’t locate, with nothing to back up her story. But when the cops arrived and found ten women all ready to give statements, a dozen armed guards, a group of wealthy senators, CEOs and the attorney general, automatic weapons and a basement full of cells...not even the club could cover that up.
I raced upstairs, then found the mansion’s back door and burst out into the gardens, praying I was right. Ralavich had told Alik to call when he’d killed me and he’d send the helicopter to pick him up. Alik had never made that call. So maybe, just maybe—