Page 90 of Release Me

The heels are the first thing to go, and I moan my appreciation at being released from footwear hell.

“Nadia,” Sebastian says, his tortured voice leaving me with no choice but to open my eyes and look at him. He’s on his knees with my right shoe still dangling from his fingertip. “Don’t make sounds like that when you’re sick.”

“I’m not sick.”

“You just?—”

I hold up a hand. “Don’t! Don’t say anything that even alludes to what I just did to that potted plant.”

He gives me a look that calls me ridiculous but eventually gives in. “Fine. I won’t say it, but we both know what happened and what it means for our night, so no moaning, okay?”

“I’ll try my best, babe, but you’ve still got to take me out of this dress, and the strapless bra, so you might hear a sigh of pleasure or something.”

He bites back the smile trying to tip up one corner of his mouth and offers me his hand. I take it, allowing him to lift me off the bed and whispering a silent prayer of thanks that being on my feet doesn’t come with another wave of nausea.

“Turn around.”

Moving with a world of caution, I spin in his arms, and his fingers go to the hidden zipper holding my dress together at the back. I don’t moan when he finally gets me out of it, but I definitely let out a relieved breath or two. Those sounds of contentment are the soundtrack for the rest of our night, playing on repeat while Sebastian wraps my hair, washes me under the steam of water raining down on both our naked forms, and finally, after completing my seven step skin care routine, lotioning my entire body and putting me on my favorite pair of silk pajamas, puts me to bed.

“I’m sorry if me being sick ruined the end of your night,” I whisper.

Sebastian lays a tender kiss to the top of my head. “You didn’t ruin anything, precious. Go to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

I’m swaddled in the comforter and the warmth of his body, already half asleep when his words reach my ears, so I do as he says, falling into a fitful sleep that’s filled with dreams of Bianca and Beau.

31

SEBASTIAN

Nadia doesn’t feel better the morning after the gala. Or the morning after that. For two days, she’s been sick. Throwing up off and on and sleeping when she’s not hugging the toilet. I don’t know what’s going on with her, what stomach bug she’s caught, but as I’m sitting in my office at Ludus, listening to Russ give his update on Beau Montgomery, I’m wondering if maybe I caught it too.

Because I do feel sick.

But that probably has more to do with the words that just came out of Russ’ mouth.

“What do you mean he’s not in LA?”

Russ is the toughest motherfucker I know. I’ve never seen him look so much as worried about anything in his life, but when my fists slam into my desk and my voice booms over his head, he flinches. It’s a small flinch, but a flinch nonetheless, and that’s how I know this conversation is going to go to shit real fucking fast.

“I mean that after Nadia disappeared, Beau left LA to find her. He went to Florida first because that’s where she was supposed to be with her…” he hesitates, and that annoys me. Everything he says and does that isn’t giving me a solution to the threat Beau Montgomery’s existence poses to Nadia’s safety annoys me. I narrow my eyes at him, and he continues, abandoning his broken sentence. “He left LA and went to Florida, and we don’t know where he went or what he did after that. It’s like he fell off the face of the Earth, completely abandoned his operation in LA, left several of the girls living in his house. No one has seen or heard from him in months.”

“You think he’s dead?”

It would be the preferred outcome, but I doubt that’s what’s happened. Nadia called Beau a snake, and snakes like to hide out underground when the conditions above become unfavorable. Losing his living, breathing punching bag that he holds responsible for every bad thing that’s ever happened in his life, would constitute as unfavorable conditions for Beau.

Russ shakes his head. “No. There are no bodies in the morgue in Los Angles county or any of the surrounding counties matching his description.”

“What about the girls that work for him?”

“What about them?”

“Have any of them heard from him? Seen him? Are they at all concerned about how they’re going to make ends meet without him?”

“They’ve all moved on,” Russ says. “Even the girls living in his house are working for someone else now or doing it on their own. As far as I can tell, the consensus is that Beau isn’t coming back, so they’ve all figured out new ways to survive.”

His words make my chest tight, and for the first time in a long time, I feel fear run a circuit through my system. I, admittedly, haven’t been operating in the world of sex work for long, but I feel pretty confident in saying that Beau abandoning his only source of income is virtually unheard of. Traffickers like him put a lot of time into building their roster of girls and spend even more of that time manipulating and abusing those girls to get and keep them under their control, all in the name of money. That Beau would walk away from everything he’s built, leaving no safeguards or procession plan in place, to hunt down Nadia speaks of a dangerous level of determination.

I’ve dealt with men who operate with single minded focus. That doesn’t scare me. But that focus is normally money, and when I prove that I can give them what they want, they walk away happy, never to be heard from again. The problem with Beau is that the one thing he wants is the only thing I’ll never let go of.

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