Page 97 of Lure

“So am I,” I said firmly.

“Fine, so ask whatever the questions you have are and I will try not to just jump to some wild conclusion.”

“Very kind.” Yes, I deadpanned the words particularly since she sounded like she was doing me a favor.

“I can be.” Despite the catty little rebellion in her tone, she didn’t stick her tongue out at me.

“Miss Black…” I sighed now.

“Mr. Boy?” She gave me a pointed look.

“Maurizio Gallo is not your problem.” Better to start with the facts. “Did he wish to purchase you? Yes. Though he is more of the customer than the supplier.”

“That’s a horrible thought,” she admitted.

“Agreed. Alphabet will deal with the website. We can use it to track back to whomever the suppliers were that were listing you there.” While that might be an effective next step…

“He never mentioned Amorette.” No. The man had not. “Maurizio didn’t know about my sister before. I never talked about her. But down there, he was saying a lot but he never mentioned her.”

“No.” I kept my head on a swivel. There was a mother out for a walk with a stroller. Cars rolled by. The sounds of town a few short blocks down the hill carried upward. “He mentioned your auction as pending. Also, that he wanted to be the top bidder.”

“Because he likes beautiful things.”

“Yes.”

“Amorette and I are identical.” Her sigh was so deep, I wanted to offer her comfort but I had none at the moment. “He didn’t include her in this.”

“No, either she was sold separately or she is being held in abeyance for a future auction.”

“Or it’s that second group that took her.” She let out a low groan. “I hate this.”

“I know. I wish I could offer you some type of reassurance. This is merely the first mission. We gathered more information. We may yet gather more. If nothing else, we will shut down the website and its owners. We will eliminate that problem.”

I could promise her that.

“But if they weren’t involved with Amorette then we are no closer to her than when I came off that truck.”

“No. The more time that passes. The more likely it is what trail there might have been will go cold. We don’t know who the other parties are. Competitors? Allies? Until we do, we can’t act on it.”

She paused under the shade of a huge tree that seemed to drape over another garden wall like a lover. “You want me to give up on finding her.”

I paused, facing her. “What I want is irrelevant. What I want to ask is how long do you want to devote to this task? We can do everything we can, but if we have an indeterminate timeline, at what point do you accept that we may never find her?”

At what point did she let her sister go.

“It hasn’t been that long yet.”

“No, it hasn’t. We have actionable intel. We may turn up more. As we find it, we will act. But we cannot stay in this state indefinitely, particularly if all leads dry up.”

This was why I wanted to talk to her alone. The guys were not reasonable where she was concerned. They were making moreand more choices around her and for her, not for any plans we might have had or future mission objectives.

That was dangerous for all of us.

“Consider this, Miss Black, how long do you want to take? How much time will be enough? How far are you willing to go?” I held up a hand. “You don’t have to tell me, you don’t even have to know. Eventually, we will need to answer these questions. For you.”

For them.

I needed solid metrics to plan around.

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