Page 125 of Mad As Hell

“I don’t remember any of that,” Bex murmured, a frown pulling her brows together. “I mean, I remember us all going on vacations together as kids. Your parents weren’t around as much as mine, but they never seemed evil. But then again…”

“Then again what?” Court prompted, his brown eyes narrowed with concentration as he watched her.

She glanced at him. “Then you guys dropped me. Our parents stopped doing stuff together, and then Madelaine hated me. Then it was just me.”

“You really don’t remember?” Linc asked from her other side.

“Linc,” Court snapped, a hard edge of warning to his tone.

Bex’s head swung back and forth as she watched them have a silent conversation. “What? What am I missing?”

“Nothing, Becca,” Court finally said, forcing a grim smile.

She bristled at the attempted brush off. “No, explain what you’re talking about. What don’t I remember?”

Linc cleared his throat, looking tense. “Our dads were doing business together, but things fell apart when you got sick.”

Her lips smashed together. “That’s it? Really?”

Court nodded slowly. “That’s the core of it, yeah.”

Her forehead wrinkled, not quite ready to let it go. “Court—”

He reached over and covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry we just dropped out of your life before, Becca. There was a lot of bad blood between our dads, and I… I’m just sorry. For a lot of shit.”

She didn’t look convinced, but I could see her backing down. For the moment, at least.

I cleared my throat. “Okay, so, your fathers are all into some shady business shit, but how does that translate to human trafficking and you guys creating a company?”

Ash let out a heavy breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “It started with my cousin, Victoria. My adopted cousin, I should say. My aunt and uncle adopted her when I was twelve. She was, like, eight at the time? I didn’t see her much, and honestly, I didn’t really care about her. She was this weird, scrawny girl who couldn’t speak a word of English, and I barely saw her. Not until the night I had to stop by and pick up some tax shit from my uncle’s home office when I was eighteen.”

His expression went flat and cold. “No one was supposed to be home. When I was leaving, I heard this sneeze from the hall closet. I figured someone had broken in and was hiding, so I yanked open the door, ready to kick their ass. Instead, I found Victoria. She was living in a fucking closet. She wasn’t their daughter—she was their servant. They treated her like shit. I hadn’t seen Victoria in years, and the girl was so fucking skinny and had all these scars. My aunt drank a lot and would get violent. Victoria’s hair had been shaved off.” He scoffed under his breath, the noise one of pain and loathing. “My aunt apparently got jealous that her hair was turning gray and Victoria’s was still pretty, so she hacked it off.”

Disgust curdled like sour milk in my stomach. “Oh, my God.”

“Turned out that they’d bought her for two hundred dollars when she was a kid. It was cheaper than hiring someone, and it gave my aunt someone to take out her rage on.”

“Is she still there?”

Ash’s eyes blazed as he looked at me. “Fuck no. I got her out that night. She was scared as shit, still could barely speak a word of English. Luckily Linc took a few years of Russian in high school and was able to translate enough for us to know she shouldn’t go back home. Her dad was a drunk who’d sold her to pay off a gambling debt. We got her out of the country and helped set her up with a place and funds to live off.”

“And your aunt and uncle?”

His lips twisted into a smirk. “What were they gonna do? File a police report to track down the daughter they’d purchased to be their slave? No way in hell did they want that shit going public. But it opened my eyes, and that’s how I started noticing a pattern.”

“A pattern?” I echoed, sitting up a little straighter.

He nodded. “I’ve always been good with numbers and computers. My dad convinced me to spend some of the tax season interning with him, and I noticed payments to an account simply marked X3. My uncle had it, as did a bunch of others.”

“It’s the name of the club inside my dad’s hotel in Colombia,” Linc supplied. “Ash followed the paper trail, and it turned out there was this entire ring of people buying and trading humans like fucking baseball cards out of my dad’s club.”

“Jesus,” I whispered, my hand flying up to cover my mouth.

“There are a lot of people involved, but all of our fathers are big players. Remember Shutterfield?” Ryan gave me a pointed look.

Ugh, yes. The first time I’d met Beckett had been at the dinner where Ryan had secured some deal with a company called Shutterfield in Indonesia. He’d even referenced that the CEO had a thing for little boys. Ryan had found him with an underage boy and blackmailed him into the deal.

Ryan saw where my mind went and nodded. “Yeah.”

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