into my pants. I went into the bedroom and strapped on my bulletproof vest, pulling a shirt on over it.
Once I was done, I walked back out into the living room.
“Don’t use my phone again,” I said to her.
She stared up at me. “How’d you know?”
“You moved it.”
“I put it back where it was.”
I grinned at her. “I’m very observant.” I walked over to the door.
“Fine.”
“Do me a favor. Put those panties I like on.”
She shook her head. “Not like you’ll see them.”
I grinned at her. “Maybe, but I sure as fuck do like thinking about you in them.”
I turned the knob and left before she could respond.
Fuck she was driving me wild. I could barely keep my thoughts straight as I headed down the stairs. That was bad, because I needed to have a clear head for this job.
But the thought of Emma in nothing but a T-shirt and panties, like the night I first found her, made me fucking hard.
* * *
I met up with Dante and a few others back in the deli not long later. From there we took two large black SUVs out toward the edge of the city, out toward the old industrial park. We stopped outside a large abandoned warehouse.
Our footsteps echoed as we got out of the cars and walked inside. The place was full of men already, mostly muscle just standing around, smoking or checking their weapons.
I knew about half the guys in there, most of them hired goons. There weren’t any other hit men like me, which was surprising. I guessed Gian only specifically requested me for this, which meant I had to be on top of my game.
“Ready for this?” Dante asked me.
I turned and looked at him. He grinned at me, wearing his bulletproof vest. He had an oversized gun with a silver inlay handle tucked into his track pants, and he looked totally ridiculous. The man had probably never fired that toy gun in his life.
“Sure,” I grunted. “Ready as I can be. What’s the plan?”
“We meet the girls here soon. Then we transport them to the club. Easy.”
“If it’s so easy, why do you have so much muscle? I mean, shit, Dante, there’s like fifteen guys here.”
He laughed. “It’s overkill, but we lost a shipment last month, and the boss wasn’t happy about that.”
When he said “shipment,” the fucker meant a bunch of women escaped slavery. He said it like it was a bad thing.
To men like Dante, these women were nothing but money. They weren’t human at all. They were just the potential to make money. These girls came from mostly Eastern European counties and were incredibly poor. Sometimes their families sold them into slavery and sometimes they sold themselves. Sometimes they were simply stolen off the streets, though.
But once they were taken, there was nothing they could do about it. Nobody gave a fuck how they ended up in the slave trade, only that they shut their fucking mouths and did as they were told.
They were trained like fucking dogs from the moment they were captured. More often than not, they were also forced to get hooked on drugs just to have something else hanging over them. They were transported illegally into America on cargo ships in horrible conditions only to get shoved into some sex club, fucking hundreds of guys a week.
Needless to say, their lives were short and miserable. Very few of them ever earned their freedom, and the ones who did were so scarred and broken from their experiences that they ended up dead or arrested soon after.
I wasn’t a fucking saint. I killed and I killed often, and sometimes I fucking enjoyed killing. I liked putting a bullet in some dirtbag’s skull, and I even liked hunting down those dumb fools who decided to run or fight back.
But at least I had a code. I didn’t hurt women, and that was it. The fucking shitheads that worked in the brothels and in the flesh trade were heartless monsters, the sort of bottom-dwelling scum I despised the most.
Unfortunately, we worked for the same bosses. I didn’t like it, but I shut my fucking mouth