Page 48 of Keys

“Will do.” Paul shut the door behind us as the guys got to work planning their infiltration of the trafficking ring that simply would not die.

When I got back to my office, Tash had been following me, and the minute I we stepped through the door a ping alerted me to the fact that my search was over. The hack on the lawyer’s office traced back to the Aces High Clubhouse. “Son of a bitch!”

“What’s up?”

“Someone hacked my father’s lawyer.”

“So, they have all the information about you now too?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “There is no way of knowing how much information he got before I shut his ass down.”

“He? His? You know who was behind it?” I tapped the screen and turned to see understanding dawn on Tash’s face. “Quickshot.”

It wasn’t a stretch to assume it was him since he was their computer guru. Still, I grabbed my bag and headed for the elevator that would take me back up to the ground level. “Where are you going?”

“To find out what he knows.”

“How do you plan to pump him for information?” Tash giggled as she made a gesture of holding onto someone’s hips while hammering her own into them. I laughed at her idiocy.

“Well, at least if I have to do it that way, I know it will be good for me too.”

“Shameless!” She called out as the elevator door closed, separating us.

After talking things through with Paul and Dane the other night, I had called the girls in for a meeting and explained the situation involving my parents, what went down – which they mostly already knew – and who they were – the secret I’d been keeping. Then, I explained about the random checks I did on both of them, and how I stumbled across pictures of my father with various women. We were already working toward finding out if my father was a part of trafficking the women, if he was hiring them from a service, or if he had unknowingly been gifted time with them by a third party, possibly to work up a blackmail scheme.

That was what Paul and Dane had been working on when they found evidence that one of the girls continually went back to the same place often. They thought it might be a stash house for some of the more trusted women - the ones who had leverage holding them hostage rather than chains and walls.

Hopefully, the plan worked, and the men would be able to rescue more women and find us a head to cut off the damn organization, rather than the legs we’d been hacking at to no avail. I put all of that out of my mind as I prepared to go face Quickshot with the truth of my past.

Chapter 17

I decided to take a break, grab some food, and maybe a bit of water to go with all the caffeine that was drying me out. Keys managed to shut me down again, crashing yet another laptop that was now trashed. I shook it off knowing that it meant I was getting closer to discovering everything that she had been hiding all along. Imagine my surprise when the lady of hour came storming into the clubhouse just as I was about to carry my lunch back to my lair.

“Quickshot!” She called out and didn’t miss a step as she strolled toward me with a purpose. “We need to talk.”

The only other person in the clubhouse just then happened to be Walker. I tipped my head to the side, indicating that he should leave. Luckily, he did without a word.

“What about?” I finally asked.

“I know what you’ve been doing. What I don’t understand is why?”

“Why would I look into the one person in my sister’s club who seemed to be shrouded in secrecy?”

She sighed. “They already knew my story.”

“Did they?”

Her eyes rolled up to meet my own then. “They know everything now.”

That was interesting. I’d have to talk to Angel Girl again and see if what Keys told them matched up with what I’d found. For a brief moment, I checked her out. Not the way I would when all I wanted was to get into her pants, but the way you do when you’re trying to figure someone out. The woman before me looked worn down. She’d lost weight and the dark circles under her eyes signified too many nights of lost sleep.

“Come on,” I told her as I started heading in the direction of my bedroom instead of the office where all my research about her was scattered about. I kept the place locked up tight when I wasn’t in there, so there was no chance of anyone else stumbling across anything. Curiously, I wanted to see what she would tell me on her won without me having to shove the truth in her face.

When we got to my room, I closed the door and sat my uneaten lunch down on the desk in the corner. “What brought you over here?”

“I told you, I knew what you were doing.” I sat on the edge of the bed and Keys didn’t waste a moment coming to sit beside me. Our legs and arms lined up and touched, that’s how closely she sat to me.

“Okay, what are you doing now?”