Page 118 of Bad Enough

“Will he remember it?”

“Yes. Eventually. I don’t know. Possibly. Hopefully.”

There was a sigh. “Well, that sucks. Not for you!” the woman corrected. “For me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sorry. You wouldn’t. We were just so damn close. I have a tracker on me, but they weren’t going to be coming for me. Not yet, anyway. And even with you being taken as well, I don’t know if they’d have come after us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You weren’t part of the plan. We were hoping to follow the pipeline the girls are moving through.”

“You wanted to be caught?”

What the flim-flam was the matter with this woman?! Who wants to be taken by sex traffickers, even if you’re trying to catch them?

“Yes, that was the plan. You’ve sort of complicated things here without meaning to. We need Gendry alive and working. We’ve been trying to redirect things, but it’s difficult to do when you also don’t want to out yourself. But since he took you, Lobo’s going to take care of that, and we’ll be back at square one.”

“I can’t believe they’d just let you be taken.”

“Risks are necessary sometimes.”

“You mean sacrifices. You’re sacrificing yourself, and they’re letting you.”

There was a rustling noise as if Medusa were trying to finagle her way into a position besides standing up and some faint scraping noises. There was a muffled curse and a sigh, then a pointed inhale and exhale as if Medusa were trying to center herself.

“Flame, some things are bigger than one person. Do you know how many people are trafficked every year? Last year, it was over twenty-seven million. Mostly women and girls. Some of it’s labor-related, but a large portion of it is sexual slavery. The conditions are… well, let’s just say most don’t make it out alive. And of those who do, it’s not even a half-life.”

“But if they don’t step in, you’ll be sent to who knows where.”

“Flame, I wasn’t planning on being rescued.”

Sylvan let that sink in. “They’ll…”

“Yes. Probably.”

“You’re crazy! How can you want that to happen?”

“I don’t want it to. And I’m certainly not going to simply let it happen. I’ll fight every step of the way. But the only way to cut down these pipelines is to blow them up from within. I’m willing to make the sacrifice to put a major dent in the numbers.”

“And your men are willing to allow that to happen?”

“They’re not my men. Not like you’re thinking. The triad thing is just a cover so we could move about the club together and not have to involve other members.”

“But still,” Sylvan argued. “To allow any woman to sacrifice herself to sex traffickers is hardly appropriate.” She stopped herself. “That sounded stupid.”

Medusa laughed. “I get it. And normally I would agree. What kind of man allows that? But Loki and Gil have their own connections to all of this, both incredibly ugly, and they’re not really thinking all that clearly about it. Otherwise, I doubt it would have been ‘allowed’ as you call it.”

“And what about you?”

“Why am I willing to sacrifice myself, you mean?” Medusa paused. “Let’s just say that I’m not entirely innocent in all of this. It’s my way to atone for my unwitting part in it.”

Another buzzer sounded. Girl number three had just been sold.

“That’s the third girl,” Sylvan whispered. “There’ll be two more before you. He said those five women were fifteen minutes apart.”

“If I lose this opportunity, we may never get another chance to shut this shit down. What is your countdown at?”

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