Page 49 of Never Enough

“This is… I don’t know what this is,” Waters whispered.

Haskell swore under her breath. “My Middle English is rusty, but it’s good enough to see that this particular file is an order of purchase. White women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Clean bills of health, no underlying conditions, no history of genetic disease markers. Preferably women with few family ties and few connections to miss them.” Her eyes were glassy as she turned to look at the others in the room. “Bloody hell, they wanted three hundred women.”

“This is why my father disappeared. He was chasing the Salieri long before Mythos. I’m willing to bet that each one of these articles he stored in his cloud is publicly hidden communications between the Salieri and prospective clients. I’m convinced that they figured out he was closing in on them, or at least closing in more than anyone else had in the past. Now I’ve been poking around in his files again, as well as digging into new areas, and it looks like I inadvertently announced my presence to the Salieri.” She cringed. “I’ve no one to blame but myself for becoming this easy of a target. I broke one of our biggest rules by eating at that café every Friday.”

“Cherry,” Demon groaned.

“I know, I know! No repetitions! Don’t go to the same places; don’t go the same routes. Haskell almost paid the price for my mistake.”

Waters finished the chastising, “There’s no use worryingabout that now. What’s done is done. But Cherry, you understand?—”

“That my father’s most likely dead? Yes. But I can’t stop looking, Waters. This is a huge piece of information I never knew I had until Flame. It’s been years without any leads, and now there are thousands of reviews, articles, and all sorts of files he downloaded off the internet. There are even some video files. I don’t know what those are for?—”

“Advertisements,” Midas conjectured. “I bet that’s what they are. Maybe for the services of the Salieri. Possibly advertisements of specific people they had for sale. There are probably embedded images inside those video files.” He looked at Waters with fire in his eyes. “Each one of these files needs to be gone through and translated, reformatted. Who knows what information is in there.”

Waters stared at the screen. “Something tells me we need this information translated yesterday.”

“I’ll put Nova on it immediately and go over whatever she finds.”

Waters nodded tightly.

Steel walked over to Waters and put his hand on his team leader’s shoulder. “Jefe, we’ve just all had a shit ton of information dumped on us and no time to process it. Maybe we should take a break, then come back together when we’re in a headspace more prone to taking on the more pressing issue at hand.”

Haskell watched Waters grind his teeth, then, after a moment, his eyes closed. “Agreed. I need to… call Kubrick.” She watched him come to a resolution internally as he hit the security button on the starfish, putting the room back to its normal protocol. “Reconvene at eighteen hundred. Demon, you’re on protection detail for Cherry. Nemo, you’re in charge of Haskell. Both of you—do not, under any circumstances, allow these women to leave this building.” He ripped the door open and slammed it so hard behind him that it didn’t close, just bounced back from the doorframe.

Demon took hold of Cherry’s arm and guided her into the hallway. The rest of the team followed close behind. Haskell felt a tug on her hand and looked up to see Nemo trying to help her up from the chair. “Come on. Let’s get you settled in. You’ve got to be exhausted, but it’s nothing compared to how you’re going to feel in a few hours.”

18

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Haskell

The ride in the lift was silent, but Haskell had to admit she was more than a little intimidated. After all, she was basically crammed into a box with Nemo, TB, Steel, Demon, Cherry, and Scheherazade. The latter stood in front of her, back to the door, front paws on top of Haskell’s feet, her head cocked to the side. She wasn’t sure who was the biggest threat. Somehow, she thought it might be Cherry.

Demon hustled Cherry off the carriage at the fifth floor, a whispered argument starting before the doors had even slid closed.

TB snorted with a shake of his head as the lift closed and started up again. “Those two need to figure out their shit.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Steel murmured. “Demon has to clean his shit up first. She won’t be with him unless he cleansup, and he won’t clean up because that’s how he keeps himself from her.”

Haskell looked over her shoulders at the men. “A medic who is an addict seems a bit counterintuitive.”

Steel turned his cold eyes on her.

“I see the signs. He’s a functional addict, but an addict just the same.”

Steel offered, “Sometimes people choose the lesser of two evils to cope with the things they’ve done and seen.”

Holding her ground, Haskell replied, “I’m not judging him. We all have our own ways of compensating, and we do what we need to do to survive.”

“We all have our coping mechanisms.”

She watched as Steel directed his gaze to Nemo, who was not paying any attention. When Steel’s eyes slid back to Haskell’s, she saw the message in his stare, equating Demon’s drug use with Nemo’s own personal choices for how he coped with his choices in life.

The door opened on the seventh floor, allowing Steel and TB to exit to their private apartments. Just as the doors were about to close completely, TB stuck his hand between them. His head followed as soon as it could, and he hit Nemo in the chest with a foil wrapper. “Don’t forget to wrap it up!” With a finger cocked in a gun motion, he winked, made a clicking noise with his mouth, grinned, and backed out of the doors, allowing them to close.

Nemo glanced at Haskell with a grimace, and he quickly put the packet in his pocket. “Sorry about that.”

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