As soon as the operator answered, he said, “A woman’s just been abducted. She’s in a black Ford Expedition heading north on Canal Street, license plate 6V7 8A9. Her name is Lacey Adams. Red hair, green eyes, five foot two inches, one hundred and five pounds.” He hung up the phone without giving the operator any more information—at this point, he didn’t know who the hell he could trust in the NOPD, so he figured the less info they had, the better. At the same time, he wanted them looking for Lacey. Looking for those bastards who had taken her.
Before the security guards could say anything to him—or hopefully remember anything about him but his shirtless state—he took off. The cops would be here in minutes, and he was pretty damn conspicuous as he was.
Booking it back to his apartment, Byron ignored the cuts and bruises on the bottoms of his feet as his mind circled around itself. Again and again, he tried to figure out how to get Lacey back. Again and again, he came up blank.
All he knew was that he had to act quickly. If he’d learned anything these last couple of days, it was that these guys were experts at making girls disappear, and disappear fast. He refused to let that happen to Lacey.
It didn’t matter what he had to do, or who he had to take on; he would find her. And when he did, the men who had her were going to pay for hurting her.
Lacey came to slowly, unsure of where she was. Her head was throbbing, her stomach rolling and her mouth tasted so bad she was afraid something had crawled in there and died while she was asleep.
Did she have too much to drink? She remembered pouring herself a glass of wine after her fight with Byron, but one glass of wine wasn’t enough to make her feel like her entire head was going to explode. Or at least, it never had been before.
Maybe it was the crying jag or the fight or the fact that she’d never been so miserable in her life. She didn’t know, and at the moment, as the room spun around her, she didn’t particularly care. She just wanted it to stop.
With a low groan, she reached for her nightstand in the hopes of turning off her bedside lamp before she opened her eyes; the way she was feeling, the first glimpse of the light would send gigantic spikes of pain through her head.
“Hello, Lacey.” She froze at the unfamiliar voice. Could she possibly have gotten so drunk the night before that she’d gone out and picked up a guy she had no memory of? Muttering a prayer that that wasn’t the case, she cautiously opened her eyes.
The first thing that registered was that she’d been dead-on about the spikes. The second thing that hit her was that she wasn’t in her room. And the third realization she had—and it was a big one—was that she was in serious trouble.
Adrenaline surged through her, and she jerked up in the bed. But as soon as she did, her stomach turned and she was desperately afraid that she was going to puke.
“Take it slow,” the low, lightly accented voice told her. She struggled for a minute to place the accent, but she was too disoriented to figure it out.
Taking a deep breath, and with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, she gingerly turned her head toward the voice. Her first glimpse of the man’s face made panic race through her. She recognized him, remembered his face, though she wasn’t sure from where.
Wherever she knew him from, she knew it wasn’t good. The instinctive adrenaline rush that had hit her as soon as she saw him told her that much. “Where am I?” she demanded.
“At one of my houses. I thought it would be more comfortable for you than the warehouse.”
“Warehouse? What warehouse? What do you mean?”
“Come on, now, Lacey, don’t play coy. I know you’ve been investigating me for quite some time. I thought I would speed up the process a little. Give you the answers you’ve been looking for.”
His words had her heart pumping even faster, had the bile in her stomach boiling into her throat as she recognized him. He was the man she’d seen last week—after she’d had her meeting with Veronique. The one who had been watching her from the top floor of Seductions.
Oh, fuck. Dismay slammed through her, followed quickly by a shot of terror that had a scream rising in her throat. She was totally screwed, and more than smart enough to know it. Too bad she hadn’t been smart enough to figure out that the guy she was looking for had been in front of her all along.
“What do you want with me?” She tried to keep the quiver from her voice, but from the pleased look on his face she knew she’d failed.
“Come on, limaya moya,” he murmured in Russian as he lit a cigarette with a fancy lighter. “Let’s not play these games. I think you know exactly what I want you for. You’ll be a nice change of pace from the teenagers I usually get around here.”
He ran a finger up her arm, and it was all she could do not to shudder in revulsion. “So, what do you say? I promise I’ll take much better care of you than that laborer you normally let touch you.”
“Do I have a choice?” Her head was spinning, every part of her screaming in horror at the predicament she’d landed in. But the drugs were still in her system, confusing her. Making her weak.
“Of course. There’s always a choice, Lacey. In this case, your choice is me, or ending up like all those other girls—a whore in some brothel until you piss someone off and end up dead. Or you OD and end up dead. Or—”
His alternatives were just making her sicker, which, of course, was exactly what he intended. “I think I understand.”
“I thought you might—you seem like a smart girl.”
He smiled smugly as he spoke, his voice charming, intelligent and absolutely, positively remorseless. The combination was more chilling than anything she had run across in eight years of writing true crime.
Think, Lacey, she told herself. There had to be something she could do, some way she could get out of this. Some way she could escape. But she was too sick, too disoriented, too petrified to do anything but panic.
She wasn’t ready to die—and certainly not like this. Tied to a bed, forced to endure being raped and drugged and brutalized. She wanted to scream, to rage, but some instinct she hadn’t known existed warned her that to do either would only make things worse.
“So what’s it going to be?” His hand ran over her shoulder, down her arm, before cupping her breast. His thumb flicked against her nipple, and she had to bite the inside of her lip to keep from crying out.
She itched to hit him, to claw the smug look from his face with her fingernails. But with the drugs in her system, she didn’t have the strength. Better to wait until she had her strength and a snowball’s chance in hell to escape.
“You’re not fighting me,” he said as he massaged her breast a little harder. “Is it because you like that?”
She hated it, hated him, and didn’t know how much longer she could hold it in.
Pictures of Anne Marie danced in her head, and pictures of the other girls who had been killed by this monster. She knew if she had any chance of surviving, she had to put up a good front.
But when he ripped open the buttons on the front of her tank, she cried out. She couldn’t help herself. Then wanted to die when she realized her fear excited him.
“Ti tak Aya kras Ivaya, Lacey. You have lovely breasts for such a small woman. Very full. And your nipples are gorgeous.” He reached down and roughly squeezed one between his thumb and index finger, and in that moment, she knew she was going to be sick.
She looked around desperately for something, anything, to throw up in. Her captor must have figured out her distress, because he shoved a small bowl on the floor beside the bed before crossing the room to stand as far away from her as he could.
“That’s the drugs,” he said with distaste. “It happens to everyone. They should be out of your system by tomorrow, and then you’ll be feeling better.” He nodded to the nightstand. “There’s water there, if you want to wash your mouth.”
“Thank you.” For a moment she thought she was going to choke on the words, when what she really wanted to do was tell him to
go to hell. To beg and plead for him to let her go. To tell him what a vile bastard she thought he was. But none of those things would endear her to him, and she had told herself that she would have a better chance of escape if he thought he had her cowed.
“You’re welcome.” His voice was low, pleased. “You have impeccable manners.”
Too bad she couldn’t say the same for him. “Thank you,” she repeated through teeth clenched so hard, she was afraid she might crack one in half.
“Still, with that red hair, I expected a little more fire. Hmm.” He shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow, when you are feeling better.”
She nodded, but wasn’t sure how much fire she had left. She was terrified. The images of the girls who had gone missing, only to turn up dead, ran through her head in a brutally graphic montage. She wanted to fight him, wanted to do whatever it took to escape. But this was real life, not fiction, and she had never had call to fight someone in her life.
As her captor left the room, she gave in to the despair whipping through her. Violent sobs shook her body as she wondered how she was going to get out of this.
The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach warned her that she didn’t have a chance in hell.
Chapter Twenty-three
Byron paid the ten-dollar cover charge to get into the strip club, ignoring his jangling nerves as he did so. Coming here was a long shot—he knew that—but it was the best chance he had of finding Lacey.
He’d spent the morning poring over the evidence she had left at his apartment, speaking to the police who had been assigned to Lacey’s case after his frantic phone call the night before, and generally trying to figure out how to find her. He’d even gone down to the area around his workshop and asked for Derek, the guy she’d been talking to when they had had their fight. But no one he’d spoken to had been willing to help him. Not that he was surprised; they could barely help themselves.
It hadn’t stopped him from trying, though. He’d talked to everyone he could find working the streets on the seedy side of town, had called every escort service in the yellow pages and hassled them. So far he hadn’t had any luck, and it tormented him that she’d been in these bastards’ hands for twenty-four hours now. God only knew what they’d done to her.
His hands shook at the thought, and he shoved them in his pockets as he looked for a place to sit. Finally settling on a spot at the bar that surrounded the stage—better for him to watch and be watched—he ordered a stiff drink that he had absolutely no intention of drinking. If things worked out here the way he planned, he’d need all his wits about him.
As soon as his drink was delivered, he took a quick sip, in case the bartender was watching, and then dumped the rest of it in the abandoned beer mug beside him. He ordered another one and did the same thing. Then another one, until it was entirely plausible that he was drunk.
“Hey, bartender,” he yelled loudly, so that he could be heard over the music. “You’re watering down my drinks.”
The man’s eyebrows hit his forehead like an exclamation point. “Excuse me, sir? Is there a problem?”
“Yes, there is. And I want to see your manager. I’m paying ten bucks a drink here, and I’m getting nothing but flavored fucking water.”
“I’m sorry. Let you get me another one.”
Byron knocked the glass out of his hand. “I don’t want another one. I want to see your fucking manager.”
“He isn’t around right now. But if you’ll let me—”
“No! I don’t want another one of these fucked-up drinks.” He reached out and swept a hand over the bar, knocking over a couple more drinks as he did so.
“Hey, man! That’s not cool!” The guy next to him, who had been watching the show, jumped up as his drink hit his crotch. “I ought to kick your ass!”
“All right, let’s go.”
“No one’s going to be fighting, not in my establishment.” Byron froze at the smooth, cultured voice that sounded behind him. Turning, still pretending to be inebriated, he stared at a large man in a suit, who was flanked by two hugely muscled guys. One of them he recognized from the other night. The other was brand-new to him.
“Now, if you would like to come with me, I’ll be happy to refund your money, with the understanding that you take your patronage elsewhere. You are no longer welcome here.”
The man escorted him to the door, where he handed him thirty dollars. “Ivan, see this man out, if you please. And impress upon him the fact that we don’t want to see him in here again.”
“Sure thing, Jim.”
Byron didn’t like the sound of Jim’s instructions, and as Ivan and his no-neck buddy took him to the back alley, he knew his instincts had been right on. Expecting the beat-down of his life, he was pleasantly surprised when all he got was a meaty fist to the gut and another, less couth, warning.
“Stay the fuck out of this bar. The next time I see you I’ll rip your balls off and feed them to you. We clear?”
Byron was too busy trying to catch his breath to answer. But he’d gotten what he’d come for; he now knew who the guy in charge was, and if he had to, he would hang around the bar all fucking night, waiting for him to leave. Praying that when he did, the guy would take him straight to Lacey.
Settling into the back of the alley, his truck parked right around the corner, he waited in the dark for the bastard to come out. About forty-five minutes later—earlier than he’d expected—his patience was rewarded. The guy in the suit—Jim, the bouncer had called him—strolled into the alley from the club’s back door and climbed into one of the black BMWs that were parked in the alley.
Byron watched him leave, then ran for his truck and started to follow him. He could only hope this worked, hope that the guy wasn’t knocking off early for the night but instead was going to meet someone. Even if it wasn’t the right place, Byron was willing to follow this bastard all over the fucking city if it meant he had a shot at finding Lacey.
The guy’s first stop was another strip club a couple blocks up the Quarter. He stayed there for about half an hour or so, then climbed back into his car and made a quick U-turn, heading toward uptown.
When he stopped his car a few minutes later, it was in front of a big house on one of the side streets off St. Charles. There was a lot of activity on the street—frat boys coming and going, as they were close to Loyola and Tulane—and for a minute, Byron was afraid the guy had driven home.
But when he looked more closely at the men walking by his truck, he realized they were all coming from the same house. The one his guy, Jim, had just gone into. A closer look at the men made him realize they weren’t all college kids, after all.
Excitement and horror hit him as he realized he was probably looking at one of the houses set up specifically to sell sex. That there were girls in that house who were, very likely, being forced into prostitution.
He was out of the car in a flash, grabbing a baseball cap from the back and pulling it over his head, to cover as much of his face as possible. Then he was joining the line of men—young and old—waiting to go into the house with twenty-dollar bills clenched in their fists.
Bile rose in his throat, even as he pulled out a twenty. Adrenaline was racing through him, combining with the fear that was a tight fist around his gut. What if Lacey wasn’t in there? What if she was? The questions tormented him as he waited his turn; the idea that one—or more—of the men in front of him might end up raping her before he could get in was a sickness inside him.
Finally, finally, it was his turn. He paid his twenty bucks and followed the directions they’d given him. Inside, he found a bunch of cubicles set up, a different girl in each one. He walked up and down looking in each one, praying he would find Lacey, praying he wouldn’t. Not here.
All of the girls were young, a lot younger than Lacey, and they all looked drugged-out, spaced-out and just completely used up. His stomach turned, and for the first time in his life, he was ashamed of his gender.
He kept looking, figh
ting back his horror at what he was seeing, but Lacey wasn’t there. Then he realized that there were more rooms at the top of the stairs, and that a few men were headed up that way. Adrenaline coursed through him and he started to follow, but another no-neck guy stopped him at the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s your ticket?”
“What ticket?” he demanded, as he tried to look like every inch of him wasn’t straining to get up those stairs. To see if Lacey was up there.
“These are VIP rooms. You want in, you gotta pay more.”
“How much?” Byron pulled out his wallet.
“Two hundred bucks.”
“Sure, okay.” He shoved the money into the guy’s hands and started up the stairs, forcing himself not to run. “What do I do?” he asked the guy as he passed him.
“Pick a room—each one has a girl in it. Decide which one you like.”
“All right.” Figuring he’d start at the last room and work his way down, he got to the top of the stairs and headed to the end of the hallway.
He opened the first door and nearly freaked out; a girl was handcuffed to the bed, dressed in nothing but her underwear. Next to the bed was a whip and a riding crop. Judging from the bruises and welts on her body, he wasn’t the first one to open her door tonight.
He was shaking, shuddering, when he slammed the door, so disturbed that he thought he might lose it right in the middle of the fucking hallway. Only the thought that Lacey was here, in one of these rooms, kept him from getting the hell out as fast as he could.
Taking a deep breath, steeling himself, he opened the next door gingerly, his hand shaking with the fear of what he would find.
“She’s taken!” A gruff voice sounded from inside, and the door slammed shut in his face. But not before he’d seen the drugged-out blonde in the middle of the bed.
He continued down the hallway, looking in each room. Finding something more depraved, more horrifying, in each room he entered. Normally, he didn’t consider himself squeamish; he was all for two adults doing whatever made them happy. But this—this drugging and raping and abusing of girls—there was nothing consensual about it, and it turned his fucking stomach.