Page 93 of The Payback

Empty.

Then I hear a giggle.

The hidden door to Dimitri’s studio is open, and murmured voices come from within before Dimitri steps out, leading a freshly fucked Ellie behind him.

“How did it go?” Dimitri asks.

Steeling my shoulders, I turn and sit at his desk, waving a hand for him to join me. “You might want to sit down for this.”

“Oh, shit,” Ellie mutters. “That bad?”

I nod.

Dimitri gracefully sits in his chair, and Ellie takes up the second one beside me. “Ivan and Aleksandr aren’t reporting everything Sergei is doing, which we knew, but this time, it’s worse than before. I had some suspicions, so I contacted someone else for confirmation.”

“He didn’t...” Dimitri says, folding his hands together and interlocking his fingers.

“He did.”

Ellie’s gaze bounces between the two of us. “He did what?”

“He ordered the next shipment be brought over before he had the buyers lined up. He lowered the price for a quick sale on the site since they’re already en route. We were blocking traffic to the website to keep them in Russia until we could get a team there to get them home, but Sergei was faster.”

“So there are more girls on a ship headed here?” Ellie exclaims. “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have put an agency team on the ground in Russia or at least worked with local police to sort it out!”

Dimitri drums his fingers on the desk with impatience. “It wouldn’t have worked. Within those borders, trust is limited, especially with cargo like that. We don’t have the contacts we once did, and Sergei has already paid local law enforcement to look the other way or be conveniently busy if anything is called in from the docks. We checked.”

“But now that they’re at sea?” she asks quietly. Oh shit. I know that tone. That’s theI’m about to lose my shit if you don’t have a backup plan right nowtone. Believe me; I’ve been on the receiving end of this tone a few times.

Dimitri and I don’t answer. They left days ago, and I only just found out. There isn’t much to do when they’re God knows where in the Atlantic. It’s why I tore out of the apartment at dawn to find answers instead of catching up on the sleep I’m sorely lacking.

They shouldn’t have gone yet. We were so close to getting them out of the dockyard. We just needed a safe place to stash them before we could get them home.

“We don’t know where they are exactly. Their departure date is a little murky, so we can’t pinpoint them,” I say.

Ellie clenches her fists on the armrests beside me. “These are people’s children! You need a better plan than ‘wait and see when they arrive!’”

“Eleanor, there’s not much we can do right now. Interpol cannot track down a random ship in the ocean without proper departure times. They’d be taking a shot in the dark and possibly unload the cargo if word got to them of ships being boarded.” Dimitri’s words fall on deaf ears.

She shoots him a withering glare. “No. Last time, they lost five of those girls at sea. I’m not risking it, Dimitri. Give me the name of their origin port, and I assume they’re headed here, right? Any stops?” She looks at me, and I shake my head. Grabbing the back of an envelope and a pen from the desk, I jot down the name of the port and their estimated departure date.

Ellie storms off, determination echoing with every stride.

“Where are you going?” I call out.

Her shoulders inch towards her ears, but she doesn’t answer me. She just rounds the corner and stomps up the stairs.

“Can’t say I blame her,” Dimitri says, rubbing a hand over his face. “We fucked this up.”

“Hey, we didn’t know Sergei would go rogue and send the ship early. We did everything we could to get those girls out, but without having a team to extract them and keep them safe somewhere, attempting it would throw them all to the wolves. Even now, if she gets an Interpol team on it, coordinating with other agencies will take time. The girls will arrive before a team can find them. And worse, the men might have orders to kill the cargo before making a break for it.”

“She’s going to find that out as soon as she makes that call,” Dimitri says distractedly. He wakes up his computer and starts typing, probably filling in the remaining buyer spots to ensure none of the girls are sold to sickos, even with the blocker rerouting traffic from the dark web. “The best thing to do is get ready to intercept the ship as it arrives. But she’s only thinking about her daughter right now.”

Daughter.Ellie has a daughter. I know she has a child, but I never knew the gender.

How old is she? Whose is she? And how the fuck did Ellie get assigned to an undercover operation when she has a kid? That goes against about a thousand policies to keep families from losing a parent for the sake of work.

“You’re right,” I comment. “This has to be hitting close to home for her. But her daughter is nowhere close to the age of those girls,” I venture with an educated guess because surely, if Ellie’s child were older, I would know after being her partner for so long. Her reaction to kids when we worked together was nothing short of inexperienced. Her child must be an infant. Who’s taking care of her?

---