And me? I had two knives shoved into my boots, which I grabbed from the safe house kitchen, and a small pistol that Colin had given me secured in the waistband of my jeans. My hand was within inches of always grabbing a weapon, and I kept my gaze trained on the mirror behind the register.
I might not be great with weapons, but nobody would get the drop on us again.
Cas declined the plastic bags the cashier offered and instead pushed all our food into his backpack. He kept his hands free that way.
“Alright, let’s go,” he said as he slung it over his shoulders. I followed him out of the store and across the small parking lot to where the nondescript truck Colin had let us borrow waited. I jumped into the front seat when something caught my eye in the alley next to the corner store.
A skinny young woman with straw-blonde hair stared at the ground while a much larger man in a black hoodie yelled at her. She wore a skimpy outfit with a sequined jacket, and it wasn’t that difficult to imagine what she was doing late at night in a back alley. I sucked in a breath as he lifted his hand to hit her.
“What’s wrong?” Cas asked before he followed my gaze to the woman. His hands clenched the steering wheel as he realized what was happening. “I’m so sorry, princess, but we can’t interfere. We cannot draw attention to ourselves right now.”
I couldn’t even look at him, still completely locked on the woman and the nagging feeling that Ineededto see this. The man hit her again before yanking her arm. For a split second, I caught a glance at her face, but then he jerked her farther down the alley to a waiting van. My heart froze in my chest, and I gripped the armrest as my eyes went wide. The man pushed her inside and shut the door.
“I know that woman,” I whispered. The straw-blonde hair. The jacket. Alarm bells rang in my head. “She was the woman I spoke with at Goodwill.”
Cas frowned, looking back at the van. “Really?”
“Cas.” I grabbed his arm. The van jolted to life and drove out of the alley. “We have to follow that van.”
He hesitated, but I reached across the cab and twisted the keys in the ignition.
“Follow the van!”
He put the truck in gear and quickly maneuvered us to tail the van about four car distances behind and one lane to the right. “You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?”
“I knew that woman in New York. She used to beg outside the gas station near my college. I saw her again in Goodwill. She wouldn’t tell me how she got from New York to Philadelphia.” I pulled the gun from the back of my jeans and laid it on my lap. “At Goodwill, she wouldn’t stop checking over her shoulder, like someone was watching her. What does that sound like to you?”
He stared ahead at the van, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. “Trafficking.”
I nodded. “We have to follow her. See where they’re going.”
“Look, I hate to be the asshole, but trafficking is not an uncommon thing. We’re literally on the run for our lives. Why this woman?”
When I was about fourteen, I asked my father to start including me in the Family business so I could do the same things that Max and Cas got to do. I wanted to be involved, not so much because I wanted to learn how to handle weapons and run the business and shit like that, but because I just felt so lonely. My father was starkly against it, but I wouldn’t let up. I asked my father again and again to bring me into the Family.
One day, he sat me down and explained that women in our world were targets for the skin trade. He told me, in excruciating detail, what it would be like to be kidnapped, sold, and raped over and over again. He told me that if I started involving myself in the criminal world, that’s what would happen to me. But I’d be fine if I just listened to him, stayed safe, and stayed out of trouble. I was a mafia princess, and it was my job to be guarded and to build our Family’s reputation—notput myself at risk and become a target. After that day, being sold into the skin trade became my worst nightmare.
I could not let this go.
“I just have this overwhelming feeling that we have to see where they’re going. And we have to help her if we can.”
He sucked in a heavy breath but said nothing.
“Iknow, Cas. It’s not safe. But please, humor me.” The van changed lanes and made a right turn. We followed shortly behind them.
With enough distance between us to not look immediately suspicious, we tracked the van for at least thirty minutes more as it drove around a rundown part of town, periodically stopping to collect two more sets of young women with one accompanying male before continuing its drive. Suddenly, the van turned leftdown an industrial avenue and finally into the parking lot of a decrepit and abandoned warehouse.
“There’s two other vans parked in the back,” Cas murmured as he drove straight past. “I didn’t see anything else.”
“Cas—” My gut had been steadily sinking further as more women climbed into the back of that van. It wasn’t just anxiety about what had happened to them. It wasanger.
The Five Families were strictly against the skin trade, an agreement they all made two decades ago when the current heads took over from the previous generations. Drugs, guns, gambling, money were all on the table, but that’s it. When it came to buying and selling people, they agreed everyone was hands-off.
We needed to do something.
“I know, princess.” He pulled the truck into the lot of another empty building a block away. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“I’m coming with you.” I gripped the gun and opened the door to my side of the truck.
