Delta: Rescue: A MacKenzie Family Novella (The MacKenzie Family) (3 page)

They would. Both he and Javier needed that to be the truth. They might have different trafficking targets, but they thought the same way, lived for the same goals. Luke grumbled and opened the door.

Cade stood a dozen yards away. “Let’s go, asshole.”

Fuck it.
He fell in step, and they walked into an abandoned garage that Cade had taken over as a home base for the past few days. Hot air hung heavy with the scent of expired oil and brake dust from years before.

“Didn’t have your ears on?” Cade asked.

Luke flicked the abandoned earpiece off his shoulder. “You know I did.”

“So no excuses then. Not listening for what purpose? I don’t have time to babysit your dumb ass, you get that. Brock sent you down here with a giant fucking warning. You screw up, you’re off the job. I don’t want a body count that includes anyone on my team. I have a damn reason when I say stay on the sidelines. Do you get that?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You don’t come from a background where you’ve been broken down and built up, but you better fucking believe that’s what I’ll do if you can’t listen and follow orders. Do you understand?”

He shrugged and was slammed against the wall so quickly he almost didn’t see it coming.

Cade thrust into his face, their eyes inches apart. “You want me to destroy you? You want to know what the bottom of my fuckin’ boots tastes like?”

“No.”

“Good. Get your head out of your ass and stay on point.” Cade stepped away, shaking his head. But he looked back because they both knew what had to come next.

Some folks drank, others a lot worse. Luke needed the pain.

“Get the fuck out of here, and don’t get your ass arrested,” Cade said.

That was all it took—their agreement, which Brock had negotiated with Cade. Luke would fight when he needed to. He’d take part in that blessed addiction that kept his head sane. He nodded and went to drop his gear and change out of what kept him safe—the gear, the Kevlar, the guns and knives. He wanted to forget it all just long enough to go find a fight and have nothing to protect him but his speed and agility. Sometimes Javier accompanied him—they had the same mindset about the saving grace of brawling—but not today.

Luke didn’t say good-bye as he pushed out the door, walking who knew where. Miami always provided a way to alleviate the pressure, whether it was an organized throw down or just a picked fight. By the time the night was done,
management
would be a distant figure in his memory, and his focus would be on his end goal. Eradication.

* * * *

The Mercier corporate office in downtown Miami was a façade. Maddy hated the desk, hated the job, and would much rather have been at
her
company, Love, Inc. She had two jobs, two lives. They were interconnected, but Mercier was the opposite of Love.

She despised Mercier almost as much as she did her father, who owned the sketchy conglomerate and source of his wealth that made him richer than sin. Some girls wanted to meet a billionaire and be whisked away, but not Maddy. She knew too many of the men who had as much money as her family. None had made it in a way that they should. None spent their dollars on decent activities. And
all
spent their money on pleasure.

Pleasure was something she didn’t understand…at least the sexual kind. Pretty people, beautiful clothes, and a sunset over the beach were simple things that brought her pleasure.

Her mind raced back to earlier. The law enforcement team she’d escaped had DEA emblazoned on their fronts or badged on their hips. Even if Maddy thought her father was neck-deep in trafficking, she only thought he moved women—not that drugs weren’t as bad or worse. But it might be that he was expanding. Her stomach sank. All this time spent to get to the heart of Mercier Corporation, and she missed that?

What good was she as a Trojan horse if she didn’t know the extent of what she wanted to destroy?

The desk phone chirped before her secretary’s voice filtered through the speaker. “Ms. Mercier, your father is on the line.”

Maddy glared at her phone but answered as she always did, her muscles aching from the exertion of her escape. She might have been trained, but she didn’t have to escape and evade in the normal course of her life—though it had happened occasionally before working with the slime Mercier dealt with.

One day, she would take down Mercier and make Love, Inc. her only focus.
After
she destroyed everything her father stood for. “Yes, Papa?”

“I need you to inspect a new shipment. It will arrive to replace the merchandise we lost.”

The merchandise he lost? Meaning the
women
who were saved by American law enforcement, a group of agents who didn’t take Mercier money? She almost hadn’t thought those people existed.

Her father was evil, but was she much better? Mercier was the family business, the only existence she knew. For as long as she could remember, growing up, she’d been sequestered on their estate in the south of France. This was the life she knew. Papa’s business trade partners and her tutors came in and out of the house to give her an English education and erase her French accent. She knew no other children but her brother, knew no other life, nor a mother. Yet somehow she knew the business that she and Lucien, her brother, were being groomed for was wrong. Maybe that counted for something, that she wasn’t inherently evil, just completely messed up in the head—ruined as a woman before she ever had an interest in being feminine. She found it ironic that the family business sold sex—and now likely drugs—yet she was a virgin with not a single smidge of interest in sex.

Many times she’d come to the conclusion that she lacked the gene that would allow her to experience desire. That was punishment for her involvement with Mercier.

Still, she was there. Papa had even helped set up her successful business in Miami. Maddy was talented, with a keen eye for business. After all, she’d had the best business education his money could buy. Love, Inc. was a modeling and scouting company. While Papa saw it as something for her to do to handle the boredom that would come from living in a place as distasteful as Miami and overseeing Mercier corporate offices, she needed Love, Inc.’s income to support her long after she brought down her father.

Between Mercier and scouting for Love, she had her fingers in so many parts of underground Miami that she didn’t know whether to hate herself or be proud. Either way, the life she led had colored a part of her soul, one of many reasons she couldn’t feel anything on the inside.

God, she was screwed up in the head.

Papa needed her to assess what product to keep or, worse, what to sell. Rather…who to sell. Once they were gone, they were gone—slaves to their masters, whores to their pimps. No matter what happened to the sold merchandise, their salvation was impossible. At least right now.

“Madeleine?”

She swallowed away the urge to vomit or scream her rejection. “
Oui
, of course.”

“Let’s see what we have.” Papers rustled in the background.

This was nothing but a business transaction. He was likely looking at their invoices and would expect a full report from Maddy. They diversified their product line, selling as many women into whorehouses as they did wealthy fetish deviants.

“Seven new girls.”

“
Sept
?” The French rolled off her tongue as she cringed, hoping her surprise and disgust didn’t bleed through the call. Long ago, she’d thought about calling the authorities, both at home and in America, but it seemed that even law enforcement was Papa’s friend or on his payroll. She didn’t know enough about the legal side of life to trust it. Nor did she want to end up in prison. She suspected that was the reason her curiosity was so stoked after having escaped the hotel room raid.

Maybe Mercier’s fall was less of a daydream when men like the American agents really existed. She bit her lip, not wanting to get her hopes up, not trusting the tinge of excitement percolating in her chest.

Trust no one. Expect betrayal. Always have a plan to escape.
Those were her father’s words, which had been trained into her for as long as she could remember.

Papa would one day die. He was protected night and day, so she couldn’t help the process along. Murdering her father…? Maybe she
was
as evil as him.

“Yes. Seven.” More papers rustled. “You cost the company money today. Three girls removed into US custody? Two of my men?” He tsked into the phone.

Her head dropped, the battle between guilt and anger raging. “Yes, sir.”

“Tell me. When our men talk to the police, are they going to mention why there weren’t the five girls in the hotel room? Four and you. I believe there was one missing. Because US agents only took
three
girls into custody.”

Her stomach dropped. The other girl was a waste of a sex slave. She wouldn’t have held up mentally, physically. She’d had too much trauma before ending up in Maddy’s care. So she’d done the only humane thing—bought the girl herself and let her go. Fake papers. A new identity. And a doctor who would help her come back from the brink. But all of that, no one could know. If she could do it for every girl, she would.
Soon…

“See, Papa, I thought—”

“Madeleine,” he snapped. “You’ve been caught before, and you promised those days of bleeding-heart help were over. This is a
business
. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

He grumbled. “If they had any intelligence on the female count today, you are lucky they considered you the fourth, not part of Mercier.”

“Yes, sir.” Her eyes pinched closed, and not for the first time, she realized why her father had had her French accent wiped from her English education. He knew, even when she was a child, this would be her life. “I only meant to—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“No one would want her.” She dropped her head, making her shoulders ache, and balled her fists. She ignored her sore fingers, wishing she had something her father wouldn’t refute.

“Someone will always want what we have. You know this.”

The truth hurt. “Yes, sir.”

The market was filled with high-end buyers as well as the ones who wanted scraps. Scrappers reminded her of the fighters in Miami’s underground, the bottom feeders who knew no other life. But amid the scum and dregs of society, she also saw the champions, the athletes, the specimens of raw talent. She loved the brawls and bankrolled several off-the-books brawls, sponsoring the fighters who loved the pain and the egos who didn’t know they should walk away. Watching the dynamics of that world was her entertainment. Some people watched TV and movies. She enjoyed the dark side of life where people made their own choices and no one was put on sale by another.

“Okay, my girl. Check the new merchandise and make the numbers work in our favor.”

“Yes, sir.” Her head back in the conversation, ‘
Yes, sir’
was all she could say to Papa.

The line went as dead as her soul felt after those calls with Papa. The girls—his new
females
—were her age more often than not, late teens, early twenties, though she lived as though she was three times her real age. Living this life made her insides dark and empty.

Her brother had been a sick deviant. The horrors they had seen at their estate, the echoes of awfulness that they’d heard while growing up, all of that had made Lucien aroused—just like her father. Lucien should’ve been the next leader of the family business, but he’d had an
accident
. To this day, she wondered how he really died.

But if he had been alive, then she wouldn’t have her opportunity to make things right as best she could. That was her reason for living, even if she was doing things that made her want to die along with her brother.

Maddy pulled up a screen on her computer and cried on the inside. One day, she would be in a place to destroy Mercier, but until then, she was a businesswoman and a part of one of the most powerful brokerages of human beings. And that broke her heart.

CHAPTER THREE

Luke’s eyes cracked open, letting the break of day ease him awake. He’d been on the job in Miami for two weeks and slept only two nights’ worth. So when he finally got home to Ft. Worth, he went to bed and stayed there. At least a day or two of straight sleep had passed, and hunger and daybreak were calling.

He rubbed his knuckles into his eyes then jumped out of bed and hit the floor. He ran through his regimen. A hundred sit-ups. A hundred push-ups. Two large glasses of water. Then he could start his day.

A protein bar made up his breakfast, and it was almost gone when his phone rang. MacKenzie Security and Delta Team were the only ones that had that number. If it was ringing, that meant work. Good, because he’d had just about enough downtime.

“Yeah?”

“There’s new intel. We’re digging into those trafficking fuckers again.” Cade’s growl made him take notice. “Brock says you’re good to go.”

“I’m ready,” Luke said. Saving women, sweeping drugs, and dismantling traffickers were what he lived for.

“Good. We’re pulling together the plan now. What we know is the son of a rival cartel is in Miami, apparently unhappy with a business transaction with Mercier. We’ve had eyes on him for a while. Chatter from our sources says that they plan to hit close to home. The how and when we’re working on.”

“All right.” He bunched his fists and cracked his knuckles.

“Look, Luke.” Cade cleared his throat. “If we’re right, he’s the one you’ve been looking for.”

Wait…
“
The
one?”

Cade grunted. “Looks like.”

“If you’re shitting me…”

“Suit up. Head back to Miami. Rendezvous location to be provided.”

Luke let out a shaky breath, nerves and anticipation warring within. How would this play out? Could he find the asshole who had taken his girlfriend so many years ago? No peace would ever come from it. Too many years had passed, and surely she was long gone. His only prayer was she went quickly, not having to suffer. However, the man who bought her and the men who facilitated her auction? They would suffer at Luke’s hands, even if he had to take them out one by one. That was the only thing he wanted in life.
Redemption.