Page 7 of Dirty Ex-Mas
“Thanks.” I take a long sip. “I can’t believe that you think I can handle myself better as an assassin than as a bartender or waitress.”
“I didn’t say you would make agoodassassin.” She smiles.
I twirl my glass in the condensation dripping from it onto the bar top. “So, how long do you think you’ll keep up this vigilante stuff, anyway?”
“As long as it takes.”
“You can’t kill every bad guy, Dar.”
“Of course, I can. Or at least I can try. Each trafficker we take out of commission saves countless lives in current and future victims. The man who took my sister, he had seventy-five women working for him. And that was justthatday. Who knows how many he’d already gone through or how many more he’d plan to take? Seventy-five women, Quinn. It’s disgusting.
“Think about it,” she continues. “I’ve been hunting these people for over five years. I’ve had the girls working with me for two years. We still take out at least one a month. And now, with the help of the girls, we are growing our list of informants, I could kill one man a week who victimizes women in this way and not run out for years.
“Meanwhile, these scums just keep getting richer and kinkier. They are like those bugs in trash, always growing back, unless we kill them outright. And California is the number one state in the nation for the greatest number of trafficking victims. Doesn’t it scare you that there are so many? That I never run out of targets?”
She’s on a rant now, I hadn’t meant to get her worked up about it. Human trafficking and modern-day slavery are hot buttons for Daria. Her sister was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. It was by chance that Daria ran into her on the street one day about a year after she’d disappeared. Her sister, drugged out of her mind, was being dragged down the street by a guy. For some reason, that she’ll swear is fate, instead of saying anything Daria followed them all day, only to find her sister was living about thirty minutes away, held captive in a residential brothel as a sex slave.
Daria came up with a plan on her own to rescue her sister. She went back a few days later to free the women and kill the men. She would have succeeded too, but her sister had OD’d the day before. To this day, Daria regrets not confronting her sister on the street, even though that would have gotten them both killed.
That kill was just the beginning and launched Daria’s side business/hobby: killing bad guys. Specifically, anyone involved in human sex trafficking.
“So, what? You just keep killing bad guys indefinitely?”
“Yep.”
“And you aren’t worried about running out of money?”
“Nope.”
“I wish I had rich Russian relatives who left me a bunch of money.”
“No, you don’t.”
Not only is Daria crazy wealthy, but she’s a total badass. I’m not. Rich or a badass. I’d like to be both, but I’ve got a few things working against me. She’s tall. I’m short. She’s thin. I’m curvy. She has eagle eyes. I wear contacts. She owns two very successful businesses. I’m under-employed. She can take down a man twice her size with one hand. I can barely count on one hand.
Okay, I’m totally exaggerating with that last one. But you get my drift. Daria is like an Olympic gold medalist at life and I didn’t even make it to the tryouts. What’s worse is she’s got a handsome ex who’s still madly in love with her and constantly trying to win her back. While I’m perpetually single, salivating after the one who got away. I say got away as though I once had him. But I didn’t. He, Reed Roberts, friend-zoned me a long-ass time ago after we first met, and I’ve never recovered.
Technically, my boyfriend at the time introduced Reed and I—and the two of them are best friends—so back then being in the friend-zone made sense. Guy code and all that. But David, that’s the ex, he and I broke up a while ago and we only dated for a few months. So, I figure anytime now Reed will come to his senses and realize what a catch I am.
Daria’s handsome ex, Mack, and Reed are partners in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Sector (CIS). Which is how I still get to see Reed from time to time, when Mack sees Daria and I’m around. Unfortunately, it’s always with the same outcome. I try to get his attention; he doesn’t acknowledge I exist.
I return my attention to Daria; she can be close-lipped about her life before she came to the US. But her story is fascinating. Making me want to be just like her. Prompting me to ask, “What would I need to do to become one of your Darlings?”
“Train.”
“Okay.”
“And train. And train.”
“I’d have to know how to shoot, right?”
“Shoot, stab, strangle, also self-defense, boxing, martial arts. My girls train three hours a day before they come to work here at night.”
Daria has four women she employs to work at the bar who also work for her as contract killers/vigilantes. But the bar is really a cover for her Dirty Darlings, the name she uses to refer to her group of trained killers. It doesn’t hurt that they are all crazy attractive and in shape. It’s like Coyote Ugly met Charlie’s Angels and they morphed into Daria’s Dirty Darlings.
“I’m not very interested in training three hours a day,” I admit to Daria.
“I didn’t think you would be.” She continues to move around behind the bar, wiping the counter, checking and rechecking alcohol bottle levels, stacking glasses. The same things she’s been doing for the last hour.
