Page 39 of Kneeling to Candy

Opal’s mouth falls open. “How did you know?”

“Just a hunch.” Candy loops her arm through Opal’s, tugging her toward the patio doors leading out to a pathway to the other homes on the compound.

Before Candy can dart away, I catch her by her other elbow. She looks at where I got a hold on her before looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Have fun. I’ll swing by later to bring you back home with me,” I say, emphasizing the words with me.

Candy can have her space for now, but we’re going to discuss what’s bothering her tonight. If I’ve upset her, I need to know. I need to make it right.

My pink-hair beauty gives me a curt nod, and I release her, watching her walk outside and down the path to Opal and Gauge’s new home.

With my woman taken care of for the moment, I head for the larger of the conference rooms, where the crew is already settling into their seats around a massive table. I take my seat next to Ziggy and wait for Prez to join us.

Atlas hands off the twins to Jo before kissing her on the crown of her head and taking his seat at the head of the table. Jo hustles out with her babies, leaving only the brothers to discuss the last assignment.

“Alright, Ravens. Let’s get this show on the road. Chase, why don’t you and your team start by giving us a rundown of the Sacramento assignment?”

Chase and the rest of our team spend the next hour going over the pilfering operation we uncovered at P.L. Moore Financial, with ties to the deceased mafia don Lorenzo Bianchi. With a lot of digging on the dark web and hacking into international accounts, we retrieved the bulk of the funds. Simone took it a step further and gave the name of the thief—who, coincidently, was Simone’s ex-boyfriend—to the new head of the Bianchi mob, Piero Bianchi. The fucking weasel is dead in a ditch somewhere, and Piero retrieved a vast amount of cash once belonging to his dead cousin.

Atlas nods his approval. “Another successful case in the books, and another ex-asshole out of our hair. Good job, brothers.”

Snickers are heard around the table. Our crew may have a slightly skewed moral compass. We’ll follow the rules, unless justice can only be accomplished by overstepping those laws. This time, we didn’t need to do anything. Piero and his men handled Simone’s ex for us. It’s a good day when we don’t need to get our hands dirty. And thanks to the new Don of Denver, Trent Grills is no longer trying to worm his way between Simone and Chase.

“We’re happy to have you back home,” Atlas says with a slight curl to his lips on his otherwise hard face. He turns to his right where our VP sits beside him. “Bring our brothers up to speed, Gauge.”

Gauge types away on one of our smart tablets, turning on the television monitors around the room. The faces of three young women appear on the screens. The women appear to be college age, no more than early twenties. Happy, healthy, and bright-eyed.

However, young fresh faces on our monitors are never a good sign. I’m betting these are the latest victims of the sex trafficking ring Atlas and Gauge were trying to uncover prior to our tech team leaving for Sacramento.

“Stacy Gander, Jolie Hernandez, and Bree Nowak were abducted near Colorado State University three weeks ago. Last time they were seen was leaving an Italian restaurant near campus at twenty-one-hundred hours, heading home to the apartment they shared. The women were reported missing after they didn’t show up for their nursing clinical two days in a row...” Gauge goes through the profiles of each woman.

Smart, pretty, and unprotected—prime targets for the trafficking rings popping up around Denver. However, these women weren’t taken from Denver.

No. They were taken from our city—Fort Collins. Either someone is stupid for stepping into our territory, unaware we protect the citizens in our community, or someone knows and doesn’t care, making them a dangerous opponent.

Punk shakes his head, crestfallen. “Please tell me this isn’t the case you were working prior to us leaving for Sacramento.”

Atlas nods, with a grim face. “Indeed, it is. Detective Luke Quire at Fort Collins Police Department was working on the case. Nothing was being picked up on the city cameras, and there was no evidence of a break in at the apartment the women shared. Quire wanted to keep investigating the case, confident the women were abducted. However, the chief of police—Owen Dunne—told him the women probably ran off.”

I scoff. “All three?”

Gauge releases an irked grunt. “Smells fishy to you, too? There’s no way three college-aged women in nursing clinical vanish when they had everything going for themselves with no hints of trouble in their lives.”

“Detective Quire almost got himself put on leave when he continued to press the issue with Chief Dunne,” Atlas adds, his voice laced with tints of anger. “When the police said there was no evidence of foul play and they were closing the case, the parents of Bree Nowak contacted us. We’ve been exhausting all leads. Nothing solid has come to fruition.”

Chase scratches his head. “Nothing was picked up on the city cameras? Not possible.”

“That’s what we said,” Gauge agrees. He presses a button on the tablet in front of him, and a video of one of the city cameras appears on the monitors around the room. The image shows the corner of South College Avenue and Garfield Street, near the campus. Though the footage is a tad grainy, you can see three women heading north up College Avenue. The video experiences a moment of static before returning to normal, aside from the three women no longer in the footage.

Atlas looks at Chase. “You think you can clean the video? PT tried while you were away. The college kid is good, but not Chase good.”

Chase’s lips thin as he shakes his head. “The video was spliced—on purpose, by the looks of it.”

“Are we thinking dirty cops are behind this?” Ziggy hedges.

Gauge nods. “We thought there’s been a mole at the Fort Collins PD since we caught Lorenzo Bianchi’s hacker and gave the police all the information on his popper party drug ring. He slipped under the radar after we brought forward all the information they needed to arrest him. No way he could have gotten away without a heads up from someone within the PD.”

“Too bad no one warned him about Mama Holland’s bad driving,” Punk jokes before pretending he’s driving a car erratically and making a splat sound.

---