Page 32 of Scary Suitor

Dara Holt. Her name didn’t ring a bell.

She wasn’t a product, but her wife was in my records. Every vital piece on her wife was harvested: blood drained, organs collected, corneas removed, and limbs amputated.

I sell them, sometimes taking special requests for something not common on the purchase list, and what the buyer does with the products is not my business.

Cops are one occupational risk. And rarely do the victims’ families find us. Holt’s wife is a runaway on court documents, like most other missing people. Either the police have a hotter tail on my business, one or more traitors, or she has outside help.

Bounty hunters and private investigators come to mind. I’ll find the truth later; my sole priority is to deal with this mess.

Holt had taken Alina, parked behind an abandoned building for ten minutes, then she drove off. The truck was stopped by my men, who boxed her in and nearly ran her off the bridge. Alina wasn’t in the truck, so it meant Holt hid her somewhere between the abandoned building and the bridge.

Alina was found in the building filled with asbestos particles, plague rats, and whatever the hell was in the air. Though unharmed, she was shaken up and crying.

I can breathe better, knowing she’s safe.

“Boss,” my right-hand man says, passing me the same tablet again with a paused video. “This was about to be sent to you from the woman’s phone.”

I’m in the car being driven to the location where Alina is, the same place where Holt will understand her meaningless existence.

I play the video, carefully scrutinizing the details. It starts with a fumbling screen facing the truck’s roof, then it lands on Holt’s face. She has protruding bones from her hollowing cheeks, unblinking eyes, her neck is unnaturally thin, and words spilling from her mouth are nonsensical.

I separate the rambling and essential points. She begins similarly to storytelling. She speaks to Alina and the camera simultaneously, her eyes flicking back and forth.

She was likely going to send this to the police too. The video will spark an investigation because the specifics are too feasible.

Her lover runs away after one big argument, which she disputes as a small disagreement, and her wife wouldn’t abandon her or their families.

She rants about the police’s incompetence for a minute. Then she explains how she paid a bounty hunter and a retired ATF agent to go through her wife’s case. They said they suspected something was weird, requested more time and money, and they found many missing people’s cases that matched her wife’s circumstances.

A signature, she calls it.

If they only know the number of ways I’ve utilized to make people disappear without raising the government’s attention.

I’ve been in the business for fifteen years. Two armatures with main-character syndrome won’t crumble my empire.

The video continues with her journey to find her wife, and she’s wailing about the atrocious way her beloved has left the world. I pick up on a strange detail in her sobbing.

She said someone had come to her, spelling out the lay of the land inside the organ trafficking trade. She describes the man as an angel disguised as the devil sent from heaven.

I remember crushing a rising organ trafficking organization three years ago, and their leader’s face was inked with the devil’s features. It was supposed to be a countermeasure from being identified by the police, but he got onto everyone’s radar immediately.

His face and because he was stupid enough to poach on claimed territories by other powerful affiliations.

The dots are connected, so it should be easy to destroy them.

As the car stops in a secluded area, I finish the video in the dark vehicle. Holt screams at Alina, shaking her roughly to get her point across. She says I’m a criminal, spitting out her allegations, and her story about her dismembered wife sounds convincing.

Alina is smart, but she’s too naïve. It makes her susceptible to doubt.

I hand the tablet over to the man sitting beside me. Without another word, I step out of the car and walk deeper into the shadows. The rustling of clothes and leaves sing in the dark winter night, wind chiming on the crackling branches, and the air reaches a low groan.

I enter an old home, down to the basement, and into a hidden corridor that leads me down a long hall. A man is waiting at the end of the hall, bows his head, and opens the reinforced steel door.

The underground interior is divided, with the front being concrete rooms to hold people, the back made up of glass panel dividers to harvest tissues.

I open the door to one of the concrete rooms, finding Alina huddled in the corner, so terrified. She buries her head between her legs, sobs shaking her small body as I gingerly walk to her.

Kneeling in front of her, I frown at the violent flinch as my shadow swallows her.

---