Colton Showdown. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ reaction. “He tried, but the other man—” What was it that she’d heard the dark-skinned man called? “Nathan,” she suddenly remembered. “Nathan pulled him off me and hit him. Nathan said that no one would pay for me if I was ruined.” She raised her head, a glimmer of defiance in her eyes, as if these were odds she’d managed somehow to beat. “You paid for me.”

      Tate paused. He had no doubt that there was probably a camera in the suite somewhere—possibly several—watching his every move, recording his every word. Anything he wanted to convey to her would have to be almost inaudible if he wanted to have a prayer of getting out of here alive—and ever coming back to rescue the girls.

      “Yes,” he answered. “I paid for you. Or at least made a partial payment,” he qualified. The rest he was to bring to the “party” that was being given. A party where he and other so-called pillars of society were to be coupled with their bought-and-paid-for virgins.

      A party that, rumor had it, the mastermind behind this ring was also to attend.

      She didn’t quite follow him. A partial payment? “So do you own me?” she asked, still unable to grasp the concept, even as she heard herself ask the question.

      “I will as soon as I make the second payment,” he corrected her, playing to whatever audience would eventually be sitting on the other side of the camera and observing this.

      Hannah paused, her head spinning. The conversation didn’t seem real to her, like something in one of the books that were forbidden for her and young people like her in the village to read.

      “And when you make that second payment,” she finally said, “then what?”

      “Then you’re mine,” he said as matter-of-factly as he could. He saw another glimmer of defiance in her eyes before it faded away again.

      Good for you, Tate thought, pleased. They hadn’t broken her spirit. This meant he had something to work with. And that, hopefully, would help her get back to normal once he brought her back to her village.

      Watching him intently, Hannah was frantically searching for something to cling to, something to give her hope that there would be an end to this nightmare and that the end she was seeking wasn’t tied to her demise.

      There had to be more to this than what there was on the surface.

      There had to be, she silently insisted.

      “Why did you call me what you did earlier?” she wanted to know, focusing on the name the stranger had used. How could he have possibly known she’d been called that as a child?

      Unless …

      Unless he had actually spoken to Caleb. Had Caleb sent him, as the man had claimed? It didn’t seem possible. Caleb wouldn’t have left Paradise and walked among the outsiders—

      He would. For me, she realized and knew it was true. Hannah looked at the stranger expectantly, waiting for an answer. Then, in case he’d forgotten what she’d asked, she said, “You called me Blue Bird.”

      “Blue Birds look pretty against the sky when they soar,” he said evasively, doing his best to recall exactly how Caleb had explained the reason for the nickname to him. “It just seemed to fit you,” he concluded, looking at her pointedly.

      Willing her to make the connection between the nickname and what he’d whispered to her the last time he’d seen her.

      Had she heard him then?

      Or had she been too drugged or too despondent at the time to understand what he was saying to her?

      Tate watched the young woman’s face for some sort of clue. Unlike his own stoic expression—his “game” face—Tate saw a myriad of emotions wash over Hannah’s heart-shaped face.

      And then, he could have sworn that what looked like enlightenment entered her eyes—just before she shut down again. Shut down as if she was afraid to believe him. Afraid to get her hopes up, for fear that she was only going to have them dashed again.

      “You don’t have to be afraid,” he said to her as gently as he dared. “I’m not going to do anything to you. I just want to talk.”

      “Talk?” she echoed, as if she didn’t understand the word. As if it was just too much for her to hope for.

      “Talk,” he repeated. “I want to get to know you.”

      She still looked as if she didn’t comprehend the word, or at least was confused by it. “They said …” The words felt as if they had gotten stuck in her throat and she tried again. “They said I should be ‘nice’ to you.”

      There was no mistaking what the euphemism actually meant, though she refused to think about it.

      “Who’s they?” Tate asked, doing his best not to put any undue emphasis on the question. He wanted it to sound like nothing more than an idle query, one of many that could crop up in the course of a conversation. “Do you mean the two men outside the door?” he asked, trying to get her to talk to him.

      She shook her head. “No, another man. I’d never seen him before. He and the man with him said if I wasn’t nice to you, I’d be sorry.” Either way, she lost, Hannah thought.

      Picking up the slender thread, Tate continued, doing his best to sound almost uninterested, just mildly curious. “This man you didn’t know, did you hear anyone address him by name?”

      But Hannah shook her head again. “They just called him ‘Boss,’” she told him.

       Jackpot!

      Kind of.

      Subduing his excitement, Tate lowered his voice and asked, “What did he look like?”

      Instead of answering him, Tate saw apprehension return to her eyes as she looked at him nervously. “You are trying to trick me.” It was half a question, half a statement.

      “Trick you?” he echoed in surprise. Why would she think that?

      “Yes,” Hannah insisted. “You are here. He is the man who arranges these things. You must know what he looks like.” Suspicion rose in her voice. Was he trying to trap her somehow? She didn’t understand any of this, not the abduction, not why she had to be here, nothing. “Why are you doing this to me?”

      “I’m not trying to trick you,” he assured her gently. “And the only men that I’ve dealt with are those two gorillas outside in the hall. Them, and that man I first spoke to on the telephone,” he added.

      The first step in the operation had been finding the website. The one that had advertised “a cleaning service that will leave you swearing that you’ve never been serviced so well in your life.” It had fairly screamed sex trafficking. Tate was almost certain that the voice he’d heard when he dialed the number had belonged to the man in charge. And that that man wasn’t just some ingenious nobody off the street. Rumors and suspicions pointed to the head man being someone high up, not just on this food chain, but on the social food chain as well.

      Someone with dark secrets and a darker soul, who satisfied perversions that made anything Tate had previously come up against СКАЧАТЬ