Page 64 of Unhinged Cravings
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. If he didn’t have someone dismantling his empire piece by piece, I would never have met him. It seemed ironic and I still couldn’t convince myself to forget that our situation may have changed, but our dynamic hadn’t. I was still the hostage, he the warden. Closing my eyes, I tried to forget that fact and what it entailed. The possibility that Greyson Tides would kill him, with my uncle at his side. Revenge for taking me. Or that he wouldn’t and Emerson would send me home, too many miles to count separating me from him. Either way, I lost, and I didn’t want to lose.
Footsteps brought a smile to my face, and I stretched, my eyesstill closed. “Did you grow hungry and leave your meeting early?” I asked. My body may have been sore, but I was more than willing to deal with a little more soreness if it promised the ecstasy Emerson brought me.
A hand came over my mouth and my eyes flew open.
The guy with the face tattoo and beady eyes stood over me. “No, but you keep that pretty body ready. I have buyers who will pay extra to own Cade Slaughter’s woman.”
I scratched at his hand, but a pinch to my neck had my muscles going slack and my world going dark.
Chapter Twenty-One
EMERSON
The pictures were grainy, but they were more than I’d had. I sat back and scratched my chin.
“So you think they’re holed up in Ludburough?” I asked Rudy, a man I kept in my pocket for surveillance and special ops projects. He was ex-military, tough as nails, and an expert at finding people who didn’t want to be found. Only now admitting I’d been unsuccessful in my hunt, I had asked for his help. Pride was a dangerous thing.
Pack stood behind me, focused on the picture of Henley, the man who had been a thorn in my side for too long.
I’d been hunting the bastards who had escaped my grasp. When the rumors about the trafficking didn’t disappear, I knew they had set up shop somewhere else in the territory. But they went underground, too deep for me to find. The more they smeared my name and had my enemies thinking I had gotten sloppy, the harder I looked. After the debacle with the Donelli’s, I called Rudy in. He’d been digging for two months and I’d almost had him call off the hunt.
“Yeah. They’re using the warehouse as a front. I’m sure of it.”
I sat back, flipping the photo on the desk. “We checked thatwarehouse. Everything checked out as legitimate and we found no trace of them.”
“Because they know how to hide,” said Pack. “We trained them, Cade. They’re shadows, like we trained them to be.”
Like we trained every one of our men. Ghosts to go unseen and do my bidding. It differentiated me from other families and left them terrified of me. My men could infiltrate any family and unravel them from the inside. They were efficient, skilled, and deadly. And these assholes had taken that gift I’d given them and turned on me.
My fist bunched, my knuckles straining against my skin.
“What’s the second location?” I asked, gnashing my teeth.
Rudy held his phone out. Another picture, this time detailed. A house in the hills, hidden enough to go unnoticed in the dense forest.
“Kingsport, about thirty minutes out from the warehouse.”
I knew Kingsport well. It was where I first planted roots in Seagate before I built enough power to run down the other families and settle south where I now lived.
“What do you want to do, boss?” Pack asked.
I wanted to run them down, destroy them, leave nothing behind to even know they had existed.
“Thank you, Rudy. Keep up the surveillance. We’ll strike soon. I want to know every move they make until then.”
“Got it, Cade.” He put his phone away, adjusting his leather jacket. Creases forming in his forehead, he said, “They’re running the trafficking from below ground. There’s no sign of them moving victims in or out. No meetings, no sign of buyers. It’s like they have tunnels below and we haven’t found where they empty. If we hadn’t spotted Henley emerging when we never saw him go in, we would have never found them.”
My jaw ticked. No wonder we hadn’t found them. If they were running their business underground, it would be impossible to track them. That it had taken Rudy this long to pin themdown told me how entrenched they were. Henley had been one of my best men, so it made sense. But he’d slipped up and now I had him.
“All the more reason to act swiftly,” said Pack.
I nodded in agreement. “I’ll be in touch with the next step. And I’ll wire your bonus today. I’ll add another for keeping them under your sight until we flush them out.”
With a curt acknowledgment, Rudy left, closing the door behind him.
Rubbing my temples, I said, “I know what you want to do, but we don’t have the men.”
“If you hadn’t killed two the night they brought Ava, we’d have more,” he said.
