Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
“You’re going to move.”
The man’s eyebrows rose. He was tall, just under six feet, with dishwater blonde hair and blue eyes that looked way too light to be real. His teeth were perfectly straight and so fucking white, it was obvious that they were fake. To top it all off, his voice was too high, and he sounded like a woman.
“Yeah?”
His smile was slick and oily, though, and I wanted to knock the grin right off of his pretty-boy face.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I don’t care where you go or what you do, but you’re no longer going to be doing it here.”
“Oh yeah? What makes you think so?” the man crossed his arms over his chest.
I pulled out some papers from my pocket.
“You’re being evicted.”
I handed the papers to the man, and the man took them.
“You can’t kick me out. You’re not my landlord.”
My smile was scary.
“Yes, I am,” I interjected. “And you have exactly twenty-four hours, per your rental agreement, to pack your shit and get the fuck out before I seize the property. Whatever is still left inside will be burned.”
The man’s smile looked a little brittle.
“There’s a house across the street,” the man countered. “I’ll just move in there.”
My smile likely got even scarier.
“I own every goddamn house on this block, and trust me, you won’t be renting any of them.”
The man stiffened.
“You have no right.”
I took a step forward, pressed my face forward until only a few inches were between us, and I said something so softly that Sean likely didn’t hear it. “You did the wrong thing tonight. I’ll let you figure out what that was.”
Then we were leaving, walking back down the street to where we’d left the bikes.
“Ghost, what the hell is going on?”
I took one final look at the house where my whole heart resided and turned my back.
I made a gesture for him to follow, and he did. He got on his bike and rode with me. We rode for about fifteen minutes, but the moment we arrived at our destination, I knew he was finally catching on.
“I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to promise me that it’ll never, ever get out. If you tell anyone, even your woman, it could mean their death.”
He stayed silent and waited as I told him everything.
And I did.
“When I was a young kid, barely out of high school, I met my wife,” I started. “The first day I saw her, her mother was cleaning our house.”
He didn’t say anything, and I gestured for him to follow me.
I stopped in front of the familiar grave, and wasn’t surprised to find my partner in crime there waiting for me.
“When she was eighteen, I knocked her up, and we got married.” I nodded to the man that was leaning on my empty grave. “We lived happily for almost two years. Then my mother and father decided that I was needed, and I wasn’t allowed to leave the family until they said so.”
“And what did they do?” Sean asked.
“They threatened my family,” I told him bluntly.
“Tunnel’s parents kidnapped their child, took pictures of her with her clothes off, and then sold them to the highest bidder…as a warning for what they could do. The baby had no clue that anything was wrong. They delivered her back safely to her home with no one the wiser—at least until he got the pictures,” Silas butted in.
Silas. My old president. The man I’d tried to murder because it would’ve helped keep my parents off my back, and give Mina and Sienna a little more time.
My stomach churned.
“My parents run one of the biggest distribution rings in the whole goddamn state.”
“And what do they distribute?”
That was Sean, again.
I swallowed thickly.
“Children.”
Sean stiffened.
He knew what I was saying.
“They what? Kidnap the kids? Sell them?”
I nodded.
“Those are the good cases.”
“And why haven’t they been caught yet?” Sean asked forcefully.
He looked pissed.
Hell, he had no clue. He had nothing on me.
My kid had been stolen. There were still pictures of her out there on the hard drives of filthy men who got off on child porn.
Sure, we thought that most of them had been found and destroyed, but there was no guarantee that Jack and his wife—a couple who did illegal computer hacking—had gotten everything. They’d tried, yes, but some bastards were sneaky, and there was one man in particular that I knew of who still had access to the photos. Not that he had accessed them, though. But the second he did, I would be on him. If he ever gets on the Internet with those pictures of my baby, I will know. I monitored everything that my father did, and had been since the fucking second he decided to play a game that I wasn’t initially willing to participate in.