Page 10 of Sinner's Secret

Her hand was warm, her skin soft, but she also had a few callouses that told him she had some hand-to-hand training. He liked the dichotomy way more than was good for both of them and had to make himself let her go.

“About six months ago a family came in to report their daughter missing,” Nika began. “She’d been working as a prostitute, at least that was the public story. In reality she was a Ph.D. candidate working on her thesis about sex workers and their place in modern society or some shit like that. She was talking to the women on the street and getting her university friends to pretend to be johns picking her up.”

Baz grunted. As covers went, it sounded well thought out.

“She was in constant contact with her advisor and daily contact with her family. One day she just disappeared.”

“Why do you think someone snatched her?”

“Because once we found out what she was really doing, we got one of our vice cops to chat up the same prostitutes. One of them saw her get jumped by three guys with a van. A couple of days later, two other blonde prostitutes went missing. One of them has a kid she wouldn’t abandon. About two months ago, the body of that woman was discovered dumped outside of a police station in Hungary.”

“How the fuck did she get there?”

“One of the many questions on my list.”

“You have connections in Hungary?” The idea that the NYPD was sharing information with a country so close to where he was from was a bit disconcerting.

“Interpol has been investigating international human trafficking for several years. They share information with a large number of police forces, including missing person cases. We’re attempting to find the New York connection of a particularly shadowy trafficking ring. It is, unfortunately, in several countries.”

“So, what, you’re posing as a down and out waitress in the hopes you’ll get snatched?” The risk in doing it was...insane. “Are you crazy?”

“It’s my job.” Her chin rose, not much, a fraction of an inch, but enough to tell him he wouldn’t be able to change her mind.

“Now who’s the hero?” Baz challenged her. “How the hell can anyone help you if anything, anything at all, goes wrong?”

“I’ve got a tracker implanted under my skin.”

That was her backup plan? “Just one?”

She scoffed. “How many do you think I need?”

He leaned close, so fast she jerked back. “Lots, because if I was doing this highly illegal shit, I’d be checking all my cattle for trackers or id tags like you put under the skin of the family pet to make sure no one could come after me.”

She swallowed hard, but didn’t say anything.

“To the kind of asshole who’d do this, steal women, then sell them as slaves, nothing is sacred. It’s a business transaction,” he snarled, deliberately trying to sound as threatening as possible. She needed to be afraid of what she was doing. She should be terrified of it. “And you’re nothing more than a well-bred dog.”

She stared at him like he was the villain of a horror movie. “Sounds like you understand a little too well.” Her facial muscles were so tight she looked like a wax figure in a museum.

He sat back in his seat. Good, he’d scared her. Unfortunately, he’d also succeeded in denying himself the taste of coconut forever. Idiot. “Yeah, well, I’ve got a few of those kinds of assholes in my family, so I know how they operate.”

“Really?”

“You thought I was kidding when I said it was either buy me out or kill me.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t.”

“Could they be...?”

“No. They don’t target specific people without a good reason, and according to my mother and her obsessive genealogy hobby, the family stopped having anything to do with slavery in the early 1800s.”

“How do you know that?” Nika asked with a frown.

“My mother has the family tree nailed down all the way back to Adam and Eve. She’s a feminist and very anti-slavery. If she found out someone in the family, even someone like me who’s on the fringes, was involved in trafficking people she’d get out her guillotine and shorten them by a head without hesitation.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “You’ve been out of the loop for a while, correct?”

He clenched his jaw tight to prevent the litany of denials and assurances that wanted to stumble off his tongue. But she was right, he hadn’t been part of the family business for too long to be completely certain.

There were other families who, in the not-so-distant past, were involved in the buying and selling of people, though. Other families who were just as dangerous as his own.

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