I carefully lay Polly down in her crib. Her eyes fall shut almost immediately, and I can’t help but smile as I watch her drift off into restfulness.
I’m glad she’s starting to get more comfortable being here with Emil and me. It’s been a couple of days—a couple of days too long, as far as I’m concerned—since it all went down, and Emil has been going all over the city, picking up any intel he can, piecing together what happened and where they might have taken Katie.
Polly struggled the first day, but the second, she seemed to grow a little more comfortable in my presence. A double-edged sword, that’s for sure, because as much as I’m glad that she’s not panicking around me any longer, I don’t want her to get too attached to me. If this whole mess has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t stick around here after Katie has been rescued. My presence is far too much of a threat for the two of them, and I’m not going to inflict anything else like this on them again.
I hear the door click as Emil comes inside, and I head out to see what he’s got for me. We’ve managed to pull together a decent picture of everything that happened that day, though a few details are hazy. Emil spoke to an old enforcer of ours who told us that one of the Maglione men had warned people to stay away from Katie’s street on the night before the attack, so they must have followed me there from the hospital. The thought of them on my tail all that time, planning this attack, makes me feel sick, but it’s not like I can go back and change that now.
But the question remains—where have they taken her? We can’t scout around the most likely spots in the city without attracting attention. When we make our hit, it has to be quick, accurate, and brutal. There are a few places the Magliones use when they’re in the city, but if we approach the wrong one, we could be taken out in an instant.
Emil nods at me in greeting, and launches straight into everything that he’s been able to figure out since he left earlier in the day.
“I met with one of my old friends,” he tells me, gesturing for me to take a seat on the couches surrounding the hearth in my living room. I sink down into one, and raise my eyebrows at him expectantly, indicating that I’m ready for him to come out with it.
“And he told me that he spotted a white van heading out of the city, traveling at high speed, around the time the two of us were fighting the Maglione men,” he continues. “Looks like it could be the same one we saw on the CCTV we pulled from the apartment building across the street…”
I grimace at the memory. Yeah—that. We grabbed as much security footage as we could of the apartment building and the surrounding area, and part of that included a CCTV camera’s rendition of Katie being forced down the stairs and into the back of a van. Despite the grainy footage, the look on her face—the terror written all over her expression—has burned itself into my brain, leaving no place for me to hide.
“And where was it going?” I demand, leaning forward with interest.
“The road they took, it would have been leading to the old warehouse they converted into a holding pen for prisoners,” he replies, pulling out his phone and pushing it toward me. It’s open on a map, and there’s a large red dot on the screen over the place he’s referring to.
My heart sinks when I realize what he’s speaking about. Yeah, one of their prisons—you could call it that. As far as we know, it’s where they keep their sex trafficking victims before they’re moved to their regular businesses in our home city. From what I’ve heard, that’s where they go to break them—where they go to make sure there’s no piece of their soul left to put up a fight after they’re done with them.
It could just be that they’re keeping her there because it’s the only place they have. Or they might be planning exactly that fate for her. With everything I’ve seen of the Magliones, it seems like the kind of thing they would do—take the woman who gave me a child and turn her into some kind of sex slave. The thought of it sends a jolt of rage through me, and I swallow it down quickly. I need to be logical here, and that’s not going to happen if I start freaking out and losing control.
“So that’s where we go,” I reply, getting to my feet. “Now.”
“We can’t go now,” Emil warns me. “We have to think about what might be waiting there for us—”
“I don’t give a fuck,” I spit back at him. “If she’s there, then we’re getting her out. It’s that simple.”
“You know it isn’t,” he counters, his eyes narrowing. “You know they’re waiting for you to walk into this trap. And when you do…” He draws in a long breath. “You need to be ready for what’s waiting for you on the other side of that.”
“You think I’m not ready?” I demand, pushing my face closer to his. “You think I can’t handle whatever they have there for me?”
“That’s what they’re counting on,” he shoots back. “You can’t be stupid about this. You can’t be dumb. You need to think about what they have planned. They know you’ll come after her, and that means they’re going to throw everything they have at you when you get there.”
“They could be doing anything to her in there,” I snap.
“I know what they could be doing,” he replies, his voice dropping darkly.
The two of us stare at each other for a moment—neither of us wants to be the one to say it out loud, but we know damn well how badly this could go if we don’t move fast. If there’s one thing we agree on, it’s how vile we find the shit the Magliones do—and that’s not something Emil would want anyone to go through, let alone his niece’s mother.
“And that means the place is going to be heavily guarded,” he continues. “These women, they’re the prime assets. They’re the most important product they have. They’re not going to let anything get in the way of that, whether Katie is there or not.”
I nod slowly, my mind beginning to come back to a more manageable pace. I can’t imagine how many people they have there, keeping the place safe, making sure these girls don’t get a chance at the real world before they’re broken and turned into products to be sold.
“So we stake the place out,” I say. “Get a feel for how they do things there. Watch to see when girls are being moved out, where they’re being taken to…”
“Okay, yeah, we can start with that,” Emil replies, slightly cautious. He’s still not totally convinced, but he knows I need to make a move sooner rather than later. For all that I want to keep Polly safe, I know the most important thing is getting Katie out of there—we could be running out of time even as we stand here, and I am distinctly aware of the fact.
“I’m calling the apartment manager again,” I tell him. “I’ll get him to bring a nanny over, someone vetted. And I’ll make sure we have security up and down the street. We can drive over to the warehouse, take some notes, figure out how we can break in.”
“Sure,” Emil replies. “I’ll make that call. I think I hear Polly crying…”
He’s right—the sound catches my ears just as he says it, and I head through to the bedroom to check on her. She’s awake again, clearly fresh from some kind of nightmare. Though I suppose, for her, it can’t be too different from the one she finds herself in now, given that her mother has vanished from her world.
“Hey,” I murmur to her, stooping down and scooping her up. “You hungry again? You need changed…?”
But before I can finish what I’m saying, she reaches out and puts her arms around my neck. The way she’s hanging on to me, it’s clear that she can’t stand the thought of letting go. I rub her back lightly, trying to calm her down, aware of Emil on the phone a room over.
“There you go,” I tell her, letting her down into my arms so I can look into her eyes. Her cheeks are still a little wet with tears, but she doesn’t seem as stressed as she did when she first came to.
“Good girl…”
I run my thumb along her forehead, for a moment just marveling at how little she is—it’s hard to believe that I hold a whole human being in my arms right now, that she contains everything it will take to grow up into a full-fledged person. As she looks up at me, I feel a swell of protectiveness.
I have to make sure she gets the chance to grow up. That’s the most important thing to me right now—giving her the space to become the person I know she’s meant to be. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be without danger, but whatever it takes for her to have her mother back at her side to raise her, I will make sure it happens.
I gently place her back in the crib once she has stopped crying, and rub my hand over my face. I know what comes next isn’t going to be easy. I know what happens now is going to come with a whole shitload of its own problems, and I’m going to have to find a way to wrap my head around them, fast. But now that Emil and I have a little more in the way of understanding about what’s going on here, we’re on the path to putting things right. We’ll watch the compound for a while, and in one straight shot, we’ll take them down, and get Katie out.
At least, that’s what I’m trying to convince myself.
