Tiger Mate (Silverlake Shifters Book 3) Page 11

  Grant grabbed her wrist and stopped her, jerking her around to face him. “You’re willing to do a promo video? One I can show to potential buyers?”

  “Well, not lookin’ like this,” Sophia said, gesturing toward her ratty sweats and unkempt hair. “You couldn’t sell me to a hog farmer lookin’ like this.”

  “But you’d do it,” he said.

  Sophia stepped back, arching her back to subtly show off her assets. “Tell you what, sugar. You promise me that little panther girl’s auction spot day after tomorrow, and a floor of ten million in the bidding, and I’ll fix myself up and do you the prettiest promo video you ever saw. Once you see it, you’ll know you’re doing the right thing.”

  She had him now. She could see the dollar signs flashing in his eyes, like slot machines rolling in Vegas.

  “Agreed,” Alexander said. “I’ll get you something to wear. And a hairbrush,” he added.

  Sophia rolled her eyes. “Sugar, you are so adorable,” she said. “You think a hairbrush and some off-the-rack clothes from Target are going to pull in ten million plus?”

  “What do you need, then?” he snapped.

  She gave another exaggerated eye roll. “My things! There’s nothing in that nasty bathroom but brown laundry soap. Not even shampoo. I need my makeup and my hair rollers and my blow dryer, and clothes that a billionaire’s mistress would wear. And shoes. I’m barefoot, for God’s sake. Do you know how cold this floor is?”

  She sighed. “I suppose you left all my suitcases to rot in the forest in the back of that hick’s truck?”

  Grant hesitated, then strode over to a control panel and hit a button. “Carson, what happened to the luggage that was in Kane’s truck?”

  There was a blank pause, and then a man’s voice said, “Uh, we weren’t sure…I mean, we thought there might be intel…we brought it back and put it in the storage room.”

  “Get it,” Grant said. “Take it to cell 5.”

  There was another pause. “All of it, boss?”

  “Yes, all of it,” Alexander snapped. He took his hand off the button. “Lazy assholes,” he muttered.

  He turned back to Sophia. “I suppose you have everything you need in your luggage?”

  “Why yes, sugar.” She gave him a genuine smile this time. “Yes I do.”

  Jesse didn’t know how long he was out, but he woke up back in his cell. The first thing he saw was Sophia, lounging back on the bed, looking impatient.

  What the hell? Had he really heard her laughing just before he passed out?

  He tried to hone in on her energy, but she was still shut down, and he couldn’t focus. He hurt all over.

  He moved slightly, trying not to groan with the pain. Great. He kept wanting to save his mate, and all he ended up doing was getting beaten to a pulp over and over. Some hero he was.

  His movement drew Sophia’s attention, and she fixed her gaze on him.

  “Hi,” he said, his mouth dry.

  “It’s about time you woke up,” she said in a bored tone. “You’re bleeding all over the floor.”

  The coolness in her voice froze his blood. She sounded—and looked—like she’d been presented with an especially ripe piece of roadkill.

  What the hell was going on?

  His confusion was interrupted by the door opening right next to him. He had to roll to the side to avoid being trampled by three guards dragging a large wheeled construction dolly piled high with expensive leather suitcases.

  Two of the guards began stacking the luggage against the far wall, while the other kept Jesse covered with his taser. Jesse barely paid him any mind; he was too stunned by the small mountain of bags that was growing in the cell.

  The men opened each bag and riffled through it before they stacked it, presumably making sure there was nothing in it that could be used as a weapon. Or as a communication device. Jesse saw that his own battered duffel had been included, and one of the guards was putting his tablet in the “confiscate” pile. Shit.

  When they were just finishing up, Jesse heard footsteps in the hallway, and Alexander Grant strode into the room.

  He ignored Jesse, focusing on Sophia. “Quite the collection,” he said, surveying the stack of bags. “I hope you’re happy now. I’m afraid my men are obliged to take away anything that would tempt to you renege on our deal and escape, though.”

  “Whatever,” Sophia said carelessly. “I don’t see why you have to take the tablet, though. I want to play games.”

  She jerked her chin toward Jesse. “If I have to spend two more days with nothing to do except watch him bleed and heal and bleed again, I’m going to lose my mind.”

  Grant shook his head. “No electronics.”

  Sophia gave a martyred sigh. “It’s not like either of us is some computer hacking genius,” she said. “He’s an Enforcer, for God’s sake. He hits things for a living. And I can barely work my smartphone. If you’re so paranoid, can’t you, like, take that chippy thing out of it so it doesn’t go on the internet?”

  One of the guards said, “There’s no signal down here, anyway.”

  Sophia pouted. “I never seem to be as photogenic when I’m in a bad mood,” she said.

  Grant looked annoyed. “Fine,” he said. He turned to the guard. “Take the SIM card out, and let her play Candy Crush if she wants to.”

  The man pulled the SIM card from Jesse’s tablet and crushed it underfoot. Then he tossed the tablet onto the bed.

  Sophia snatched it up and immediately began tapping the screen. In a moment, Jesse heard the sound of a video game.

  Grant just shook his head. He nudged Jesse with his foot, sending waves of pain through him. “See that, Kane?” he said. “She’s bored with you already. Hopefully Monroe cares about you more than she does. If I don’t get to give him a painful death, I’ll have to drag yours out longer.”

  He went to kick Jesse again, and Jesse shot his hand out, half shifted, and grabbed him in the ankle. His claws drew blood through the leg of Grant’s expensive trousers.

  All it earned him was another excruciating jolt with a taser, but it made him feel better on the inside. Less helpless. Less beaten.

  Grant crouched down, and Jesse looked into his crazy eyes. “I sent the video of your training session to Monroe. Told him to bring me a million dollars tomorrow night, for your safe release.”

  “He won’t do it,” Jesse said. “He knows you won’t let me go.”

  Grant laughed. “Of course he won’t do it,” he said. “He’ll try to break you out, probably tomorrow morning, before dawn. But we’ll be ready for him.” He laughed again, and added, “At least you’ll get to see your friend one more time before I start taking you both apart.”

  They gathered up the pile of confiscated items, added the taser rod Grant had left with Jesse the day before, and departed.

  Chapter 17

  The door clanged shut, and Jesse stopped pretending he wasn’t hurting all over like fire. Or that he was actually capable of jumping up and attacking the next person who threatened him or Sophia.

  Sophia. What was going on with her? Why was she so shut down?

  She came over and looked down at him. “You really are bleeding all over the floor,” she said with distaste. “Can’t you at least get yourself into the bathroom to clean up?”

  “Sure. I’ll get right on that,” muttered Jesse, pushing himself to a sitting position. The damage wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. Except for the cracked ribs, his wounds were mostly superficial. There were just a lot of them, and the repeated shocks had fried his synapses and made everything hurt.

  Sophia rolled her eyes. “Well, if I’m going to help you, I better do it before I change my clothes,” she said. “These sweats are filthy anyway.”

  She crouched down and pulled his arm around her shoulders, hoisting him to his feet.

  “I can walk,” he muttered, embarrassed that she should have to help him, especially when she didn’t seem to want to. He was supposed to be rescu
ing her.

  At that moment his knees buckled, and she took all his weight. “Uh huh,” she said. “Just shut up and walk.”

  He concentrated on getting his legs to hold him up. By the time they got to the bathroom, though, the taser effects were starting to wear off.

  As soon as they got through the door, out of sight of the camera, Sophia’s whole attitude changed. She turned to him and cupped his face in her hand. “God, Jesse, are you okay?” she breathed. “It was all I could do not to go tiger and tear Alexander Grant apart.”

  Her teeth were clenched, and he saw tears starting in her eyes.

  Relief shot through him. She’d been putting on an act for Grant and the camera.

  “Hey, hey,” he murmured, leaning his forehead on hers. “I’m fine. Give me a few hours for my healing to kick in, and I’ll be great.”

  “Yeah.” She dashed her hand across her eyes. “I know. You’re so strong.”

  Right. Strong. Lying helpless on the floor.

  A smile lit up her face. “I followed the plan, though,” she said. “Just like you said. I got all the luggage, not just my makeup and blow dryer. And I even got your tablet!”

  “I know,” he said, kissing her soundly. “I couldn’t believe it when those guards came prancing in here with your stacks of Louis Vuitton. I thought it was a total long shot. How did you get him to go for it?”

  “I told you I could do it,” she said. Her voice turned to southern honey. “I’m Nash Jenkins’ daughter, sugar,” she said. “I told him that I’d get him top dollar at auction if he let me fix myself up. Just like we talked about. That I’d be a—a plaything for whatever more-money-than-God pervert he wanted to sell me to.”

  Jesse heard the catch in her voice, though she tried to disguise it.

  “Listen to me,” he said, putting his hands on either side of her face and looking into her eyes. “That is not who you are. You get that, right? And when we get out of here, you will never have to pretend to be that person again.”

  Sophia dropped her eyes. “I’m going to have to be her for a little while longer,” she said.

  Jesse frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s going to take you some time to do your magic with the tablet, and we don’t want the guards wondering what you’re up to. I made such a fuss over having it; what if they wonder why I’m not playing with it?”

  Jesse didn’t like the sound of this. “What do you have in mind?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Jesse was standing in the bathroom with Sophia. She’d taken a shower, using her own bath products, and now she smelled like a field of wildflowers. She was wearing just her underwear, with a shortie robe over top.

  His wolf was not happy, and neither was he. “I’m supposed to be protecting you,” he muttered. “Not exploiting you.”

  “We’re a team,” Sophia said. “We have to use what we’ve got. You have mad hacking skills. I have this.” She gestured at her body.

  “That’s not all you’ve got,” he said. “And I still don’t like this.” His wolf growled agreement.

  To his surprise, Sophia kissed him in the middle of the chest, right where it was reverberating with growls.

  “Shhh,” she said to his wolf. “We’ll be fine. And then you can break me out of here.”

  To his surprise, his wolf subsided. One kiss and you’re delirious, Jesse said. His wolf said nothing.

  Jesse had also cleaned himself up and put on fresh clothes from his own duffel bag. His spirits had lifted just a bit. This wasn’t over—not by a long shot—but at least now they had a fighting chance.

  Sophia winked at him, and then walked out of the bathroom and dropped her robe on the floor.

  Jesse would have given a lot to see the looks on the faces of the guards manning the security system.

  She was wearing a bra and panties made of peach-colored lace. She ran her hands through her hair in a leisurely, seductive way, and then opened one of her suitcases and proceeded to pull out clothes to try on.

  Picking the perfect outfit in which to be sold over the internet.

  That thought set Jesse’s wolf growling again, even though he was determined it was never going to happen. But as long as the security team was ogling Sophia, they wouldn’t be wondering where he was and what he was doing. So the sooner he got going, the sooner she could put some real clothes on.

  He’d smuggled his tablet into the bathroom and plugged it into the one electrical outlet to charge. It wasn’t your typical tablet/keyboard combo, even though it looked like one. He’d had it specially built to handle the typical security work he did as part of their Enforcement contracts.

  It had the specs for nearly every kind of security system in the world. And back doors for most of them.

  This one wasn’t even a challenge. It had been done on the cheap—wireless cameras dumping their video files into a server in the control room; lights on a central control; electronic locks controlled individually by keypads at each cell.

  The lack of any external security told him this place wasn’t in a high-traffic, vulnerable area like a city. And that Grant was far more concerned about people getting out than people getting in.

  It took him about five minutes to piggyback onto the cameras’ wireless signal and access the security software on the server. They’d taken out the tablet’s SIM card, so he couldn’t use its cellular capabilities, but since their security wi-fi wasn’t internet connected, nobody had considered it a risk.

  He shook his head at Grant’s carelessness. But the man wasn’t stupid, so the only reason for this cheap-ass security job was that this bunker must be in the middle of nowhere, and used to house prisoners that no one would be looking for.

  Grant had never thought that someone would be trying to hack it from the inside.

  Of course, they also thought they had Kane the Enforcer with a tablet that played Candy Crush. Not Jesse Travis, computer science engineer.

  Bad intel can ruin your whole day.

  The security schematics gave him the layout of the building. It was an underground bunker, as he’d suspected, and a fairly small one. The front entrance led down a set of stairs into the guard room, where the central computers and security monitors were. Off that were a utility room on one side, with the generator and the HVAC equipment, and a kitchen on the other side, where the prisoners’ food was prepared.

  The guard room led to this one hallway with a dozen cells, ending in the “lab”—the large torture room at the back where Volkov did his dirty work. And at the back of the lab was an emergency exit—a door leading to a vertical shaft with a ladder to reach the surface.

  Since the walls were solid concrete, the wiring for the lights and door locks ran through conduits attached to the ceilings and walls. That could be useful.

  Next, he accessed the storage folder for the video files. He was hoping that there were some videos that could actually be turned over to the FBI and used against Grant—videos that didn’t show people shifting.

  He didn’t expect what he found.

  The newest files were all shifters. He set them to download automatically to the SD card in his tablet and then started working backwards, glancing at the door periodically. He didn’t have time to check every file—there were at least six months’ worth, though this bunker looked older than that. Much older.

  On a hunch, he went back to the earliest files. What he saw sickened him.

  Instead of each cell containing one or two shifters as they did now, they were full of people. Young women, mostly—human women—dirty and half-naked and terrified. If they fought, they were drugged or beaten. Jesse was happy to see that the faces of the guards were visible, which meant they could be identified later. And, best of all, Alexander Grant was on at least two of videos Jesse watched, examining the girls, talking to the guards—obviously the boss man.

  Pay dirt.

  Real proof that Alexander Grant had committed crimes that could put him away for good.

>   On a hunch, Jesse skipped to the files just after Emma had stolen Grant’s computer and been rescued by Jace and the Silverlake pack. In the two weeks after that, the cells had gradually emptied of women. And after that, they had filled with shifters.

  Alexander Grant had been trafficking humans—and now he was trafficking shifters. Selling them on the black market like commodities.

  Jesse realized his wolf had been growling in his chest for the last ten minutes. He’d never doubted Grant was a monster; watching him slit Emma’s throat out of revenge had convinced him of that. If that had happened any other time, rather than mere hours after Jace’s bonding with her and with Silverlake itself, Jace would never have been able to heal her. It was only sheer luck she wasn’t dead.

  But as bad as that was, it didn’t compare to systematically abducting people—humans or shifters—and selling them into slavery or death.

  He was working backwards again, trying to find the first shifter video so he could delete them all, when he caught sight of a familiar face on the screen.

  Frank Beckenham.

  Beckenham had ventured into Silverlake territory a couple of months ago, hunting Rafe’s mate, Terin—a rare white wolf. They’d believed he’d been working for Grant, but he’d also implied that he had some kind of personal vendetta against Terin. The problem was, Terin had no memory of it. She’d lost her memory in an accident when she was sixteen.

  And they’d been forced to kill Beckenham to keep him from killing Terin.

  In the video, Beckenham dragged a man into one of the cells. He bloody and bruised, barely moving, and it was impossible to tell what kind of animal he was. But Beckenham was beating him to a pulp, despite the fact that he was already down.

  It looked like more than just cruelty. It looked personal.

  Jesse wondered if the man could possibly have anything to do with Terin. Or if Beckenham was just the type of guy who took a lot of things personally.

  There was no way to find out now. Jesse set all the shifter videos to delete off the server after downloading to his tablet. The human trafficking videos he would copy but leave on the server, in case he escaped and managed to lead the authorities to this place before Grant destroyed all the evidence.