Page 35 of Conner's Luna

10 - Pink Flags, Red Flags

Conner

We drive until it's nearly morning. Each of us takes a turn at the wheel. I have to wait until the distance between Lydia and I has increased, so my leg of the trip is last.

I pull into a street that houses several old, abandoned textile factories. The slight hint of dye still lingers in the air under the stench of decay and rot. Most of the walls sport graffiti, but only small, random tags. This place is mostly vacant of humans. Truly vacant. The clothing mill closed down and breweries opened up on the other side of the town, closer to the good farmland.

It wouldn't surprise me if Uncle Alex owns the entire block. He likes to diversify ClearHowl's land holdings as much as possible.

The warehouse that we are aiming for is in slightly better shape than the surrounding ones. Nothing too obvious, but all of the 36-paned glass windows are intact and the doors of steel look old only at first glance. On closer examination, they lack rust and the locksets are newer and in good working order.

I pull into an alley and park behind an SUV with dark-tinted windows. In the tight space, it's impossible for passersby on the main road to see the vehicles.

I send a quick text to Braxton telling him to check on Bailey and make sure she gets her car back today before we all climb out of the truck.

"Whose car?" Sarj asks me in a low voice as we walk past the SUV to get to the warehouse door.

I look closer and see the official State of Montana plates. "No idea," I tell him. I don't recognize the vehicle and Montana doesn't have an established pack that I know of. Unless RustClaw is expanding out of Canada even further south, which wouldn't shock me.

The door opens before just as we reach it.

"Uncle Dev?" I ask in surprise when Dad's younger brother opens the door to the warehouse Uncle Alex directed us to. "I thought you were in Oregon?"

"I was," my uncle slaps my back in greeting before moving to greet Sean and Sarj at my back. The deep shadows of the building can completely hide the scars and tattoos covering his face and I can see the drawn, pinched look of stress around his eyes and mouth. "Came here tracking a group of females taken from California, actually."

"That's why Uncle Alex wanted me to come here?" I ask him as we walk inside the pitch-dark warehouse. My stomach churns slightly, for once not because of Lydia. This place is hidden away for a reason.

"The whole team is here," Devel cautions me before he pushes open a door where a thin stream of light filters through the cracks. Familiar faces, the whole team as Devel said, are the first things I see. My wolf catalogs them all, sorting them into my packmates, my family, or the known and unknown males and females that are part of Devel's anti-trafficking unit.

Then I see the bodies. I have to hold in the vomit when I see what the room contains. Three bodies are splayed out on portable tables that morgues use for autopsies. I can smell the grossly-sweet scent of death and blood as soon as I step into the room. The bodies are half-covered in sheets soaked red with blood and what I can see of the remains are sickening to the core.

Half of the face of the first body is missing. The right ear has been cut off leaving nothing but a small dark hole surrounded by tissue and bone. The rest of the head is shaved and at the top, the skull is split open. I move closer, my attention glued to the body and not paying attention to anyone else in the room.

Most of the skull cavity is missing its contents. I retch a little when I reach the corpse and see that its eyes have been removed, too. Lips and nose remain, making it seem like a grotesque mask has been pulled over a normal face.

The scent around the bodies still holds the hint of pain. My wolf snarls, crouched low, his focus on one singular fact; the girls are wolf shifters, not humans.

"We raided an illegal brothel two weeks ago and struck it lucky when we turned the place over and found a partial accounting oflas niñas," another wolf on the team, Nico, tells me quietly. "We found that five girls had been sold off in the last three months. Not unusual, and we didn't think anything of it,sí?But the latest girl was sold just the week before, so we got the scent. Her," he nods toward the corpse in the middle.

"Fuck," I breathe, walking to the second girl. Her body is mutilated very similarly to the first. I lift the sheet, holding back the bile when I see that her hands were removed, as well as a long cut in her lower abdomen that is covered in dried blood.

"They removed her reproductive organs," Devel says grimly.

"Her hands," I mumble, "did she fight and have DNA under her fingernails?"

"Hands, reproductive organs, eyes, ears, and their brains," Uncle Alex walks into the room with my Dad next to him. Both males look grim and disgusted. Their gazes stark with the knowledge of decades of this weighing them down. "All removed with an efficiency that suggests knowledge of the body, but without the surgical precision of medical knowledge," Uncle Alex continues.

"Did Uncle Mattie see this?" I ask, horrified at the thought of my omega uncle being exposed to this.

"Pictures are all Carmichael allowed," Dad chimes in, the hint of approval for Cassie and Mattie's alpha mate ringing in his voice. "Mattie is the one who gave us that assessment."

Devel moves forward again. "We found six corpses dumped at the same location after Sam received a tipoff about an odd odor in a refrigerated storage locker. We got there just before the Feds. Five girls purchased from the brothel. The three human girls were killed, throats slit, and nothing else was done to them."

"Five purchased, but six bodies?" I ask.

"She disappeared from Colorado State six weeks ago," Dad grimly nods toward the third body. "Jolena Powers. She was a lone wolf, eighteen, looking to join a pack." He swallows, regret shining in his eyes. "She was very vulnerable." He passes me a picture of a smiling girl with light-brown hair and blue eyes. I pocket it but shake my head. I don't recognize her. Maybe Bailey will? They're both freshmen, although C State is huge so the chances that they've run into each other aren't the best.

"Powers sounds like a witch's surname," Sarj points out quietly.

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