Page 77 of The Vigilant

“No. If Mara thought she was in imminent danger, she would’ve told me. Instead, she only warned me about you. Give her two more days to make contact,” Rob insisted. “The men holding her are already on high alert. If he spooks them and her cover is still intact, he’ll jeopardize everything we’ve done to stop the Wah Ching from kidnapping and sex trafficking these women.”

I jerked and then let out a curse, more from my realization than the pain that snapped across my chest. “It’s not the fucking Wah Ching you need to worry about?—”

“Dammit, Tynan.” Rorik stepped up to the bed again, frustration making his temple thump like a freight train chugging along his skull. “I’ll sedate you again if I have to.”

“Come near me with another needle, and I will test the bounds of our friendship,” I warned him with a glare. I didn’t have to tell him to move aside because Rob pushed her way in front.

“What do you mean it’s not the Wah Ching?” Her lips drew in a tight line. “Kang is a Blue Lantern. The White Pearl is a known gang hotspot. The men who came after Sutton were classic?—”

“And it was Brock Carson who Kang got into a car with the night he brought Mara to the White Pearl,” I snapped.

The way Rob straightened, I was surprised the snap of her back wasn’t audible through the room.

The color drained from her face. “Carson. Are you sure?” Her voice hardly had any tenor.

I nodded. “Give me my phone.”

When she did, I opened up to the stills I’d saved from Creed and handed it to her.

“Creed got these from a security camera facing the alley the night they took Mara.”

“What?” Sutton’s eyes went wide, and she moved next to Rob so she could look at the photos, too.

Rob flipped slowly through the images, taking her time to confirm what I was saying. Her throat bobbed, and the silence in the room was the kind that accompanied a death.

“Who is he?” Sutton demanded.

I didn’t respond. Unfortunately, there was more. It wasn’t just Carson’s association with GrowTech as their new COO that would weigh on her, and I needed Rob to understand the true gravity of this situation before breaking the news to Sutton.

“It’s not just Carson, Rob. We think…I think he’s been using the site to find women for Uzair Shazad.”

I’d seen men take bullets with less pain on their faces than the kind that stained her expression now.

She blinked slowly and then finally looked up from my phone. “I see.”

Even Sutton, who clearly had a bottleneck of questions lining her throat, kept silent in the presence of Rob’s smoldering fury.

“Carson and Uzair go way back, and I think he leveraged his relationship with them to get the position at GrowTech—to be the collateral link between the two men.”

“Shazad has been wanting to break into the North American market for a long time,” she said hollowly. “If he’s working with Carson and GrowTech to bring the heroin in and distribute, the Wah Ching and other Triad gangs would be the perfect candidates to deal.”

“I know Mara could be okay—could be getting close to the truth. But the danger she could be in?—”

“Send Creed to the apartment. I’ll meet him there,” Rob said with a look that promised to raze the entire city if that was what it took to get Mara out of their clutches. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She spun and stalked from the room, no doubt to reach out to every finger of her organization to find where they could’ve taken Mara.

“Who is Uzair Shazad?” Sutton asked when Rob left.

“The son of Pakistan’s most notorious criminal organization…and a man whose sexual preferences usually end up with a body count.”

“Then he was definitely the man I was chatting with.”

I sucked in a breath. “How do you know?”

“Because it was only the promise of recalibrating my definition of pain that turned him on.”

Chapter Sixteen

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