Page 37 of Ruthless

Ginger was right when she’d said that she only owed me four thousand.

I knew that I should have told her the truth about the money and let her off the hook. But if I'd done that there would be no reason for me to stick around, and I wasn't ready to leave just yet, not after running into her again after all this time. Years ago, when I'd finally returned to my apartment to find her gone, I'd made an attempt to find her. Starting at the bus station had been a good call, but there hadn't been much after that. After a while, life got in the fucking way.

I'd moved on.

That didn't mean that I hadn't looked for her when I was on the road, that I hadn’t asked around about her, even if I'd given up on ever seeing her again. I'd never stopped thinking about her, maybe because she'd been such an innocent, maybe because I'd been the one to take her cherry. Hell, I didn’t know why or what made her different, but something about her had gotten into my blood.

Not my heart.

Because I knew better.

I wasn't the settling down type, I wasn't looking for that special someone to get serious with and have a family. None of that shit was in my future, yet I couldn't fucking leave her alone. She'd said that she hated me, but I knew that she was scared over what I had made her feel. Fuck, she should be afraid of what she made me feel. If she knew, she would have fucking run. Women were a means of stress relief for me, and nothing else. No strings attached, no emotions, no repeats, unless they were club whores. The kind of women I liked used me as much as I used them.

They weren't the forever-after-kind.

They didn't expect anything in return.

We both got off, and didn't look back.

"Should we have some pizza?" Della was the one who asked, and she was already making her way toward the boxes that I'd placed on the counter.

Before I could answer my phone buzzed. I dug it out of my back pocket and glanced down, seeing Jace's name. Fuck. He wouldn't be calling me unless he had news. I watched as Della opened the first box, eagerly reaching for a slice. My gaze swung to Ginger. "Go ahead, I have to take this call."

I stepped outside the apartment, closing the door behind me.

"Yeah?" I ran my hand through my hair.

"We have to make plans, brother. I just got wind that Marcus Duponte rented an estate on A1A. He's planning an auction tomorrow night."

Fuck. I'd heard about Duponte. He operated under the cloak of philanthropy, jet setting around the world and holding elaborate parties under the guise of garnering donations for various charitable organizations. He incorporated human auctions while he moved around, but the locations and times were kept closely guarded. The guests on the invitation list were filthy rich and exclusive. Of course, they were pillars of society, but no one knew who they were. He must have pissed someone off for one of them to have betrayed him.

"Fuck." That didn't leave us much time to plan shit. "The girl will be there?"

"My contact couldn't confirm that, but it's highly likely. I've been in touch with Moody. Froggy's is still open another hour, I need you two down there five minutes ago."

I released a heavy sigh. "On my way."

The fact that Duponte had rented an estate told me that he must have been planning this for a while now, and he must have rented the place under an alias. Usually his auctions were held in abandoned warehouses or underground. Once in a while he went all out and held the auctions in a much more extravagant location, which he only did when he had a larger inventory of girls, the kind who brought in the big bucks. Most of his clientele wanted them young and beautiful, but his specialty auctions focused on virgins. They brought in big money, and he was obviously counting on a huge payout this time if he was renting an expensive property to house the girls and prepare them for sale.

I hoped that the Politician had given Jace enough money to play with, because something told me that getting his daughter back was going to be expensive. Unless Jace didn't plan to buy her back.

I would learn soon enough what his plans were.

---