Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
I'd been outnumbered a few times.
I'd been outnumbered in a nearly fatal way twice.
Once, I only lived because I'd been saved.
And the second time because I had needed to do the unthinkable.
I jumped ship.
Literally threw myself out a second-story window and ran like fucking hell because I knew what would happen to me if I got caught.
I'd called the police anonymously.
Those women did get saved.
But the men had cleared out.
I'd never gotten a trace on them again.
Even just thinking of that night put a sour taste in my mouth.
I'd always been competitive. I always liked winning. I wasn't the best loser. These were traits I always allowed in myself because I thought they served me. Now more so than ever.
I wasn't entirely sure I would ever rest easy until I finally tracked down those bastards and put them down like the animals they are.
"You lucked out, buddy. We just got a new boat in this weekend."
As a whole, you found American women being trafficked on American soil. It was too hard to get girls in from other countries, unlike other parts of the world where women and girls were just driven over country borders in the backs of trucks like chattel.
But there was a subset of American men who had a fetish for young, petite, quiet, doll-like Asian women. Massage parlors were still very much a thing in modern culture, stocked with women dragged from their home continent, or swept up when their work visas expired and they had nowhere to turn to.
Tonight, I was Austen who had a thing for Asian women.
Austen also liked groups of girls.
Austen was all-too-happy to pay for them.
Which was why the night was slow. Because I was a big spender who was going to occupy a lot of the girls' time.
I hadn't come across a set-up like this one in a while. A place where girls were being held and you could rape them on premises. It had been a lot of catching guys trying to ship out American girls for the past year or two. I had spent a lot of time in coastal towns just waiting. You never had to wait too long.
This, though, this was a case I had been tracking for a while. Just because the guys who ran it were so ballsy. It was a hard as fuck time to get anyone without papers into the country. The fact that these guys were doing it said they were really friggen smart. Or they had important people in their pockets.
It would surprise exactly no one to know some of the worst criminals are those we, the public, have given power to. Because power makes people ugly. And it makes them think they can get away with anything they want to because they so often do.
It was easy, after all, for men in power to say they were hitting another country for political reasons when, in fact, they were going to places to indulge in their sick need to force themselves on women and girls.
Men like that, well, they tended to help make it easier for other men to traffick women.
So it was hard to get women on our soil from other places to exploit, but it wasn't exactly impossible.
These assholes were proof of that.
The guy who led me down the hall was tall and lean, Chinese in heritage, but American-raised judging by his accent.
"And they're not drugged," he added, carefree about the implications of his words, the hell these women had likely already been through in such a short period of time. "I know you said you like them more... reactive."
I had told them that I liked a fight.
Because they loved hearing that.
Because they were the fucking scum of the Earth walking around in the flesh of men.
"Perfect," I agreed, using as few words as possible. Despite trying for years, Holden informed me that even my man-voice sounded too soft to be believable. So I used as few words as possible. Just to get me in the door. Just to get me into the space.
Each step was a cannonshot in my head, each sleazy comment from the trafficker making my rage bubble up to a rolling boil.
By the time the key was in the lock, my hand was around the handle on my blade. A sizzle accompanied the touch every single time. Like the wood and metal and I were connected, like we recognized the rightness when we were in contact.
It was over in the span of one breath.
Before the door could push open, making an audience of the women, increasing the chances of screams that would make this harder than it needed to be, I closed the distance between us, grabbing his hair, and yanking back and to the side, elongating his neck, exposing the weak spot, then slicing hard and deep and ruthless, catching the body so it didn't crash to the ground.