Page 83 of Surly Sheriff
Then she heard another sound. A soft cry close by. She turned her head.
A girl, only a little older than herself, watched her from inside the cage. “Help us,” the girl said, grasping the wire, fingers reaching through the gaps.
Her eyes grew even wider as she looked around and saw more girls.
They were all inside cages!
“Who are you?” she whispered.
But Mama was crying, and Uncle Vasily was shouting.
She needed to help Mama first, and then Mama could help the girls.
“I’ll be back,” she said to the girl and turned to run to Mama.
And almost smashed into a pile of wooden crates blocking her path. She skidded and tumbled to the floor.
She winced at a new sound reaching her ears. Just last week, Uncle Vasily had beaten a maid with his fists for breaking a vase, and it sounded just like that.
Mama cried out, “Stop. Please stop, Vasily. You’re hurting me.”
Another cry from Mama. On hands and knees, she crept nearer and found a gap between the wooden stacks. Uncle Vasily was kicking at something on the floor.
And then she recognized the blue dress.
It wasMamalying on the floor.
Uncle Vasily waskickingMama!
She scrambled to her feet—
Something closed over her mouth and around her waist. “Shh,” a fierce voice whispered in her ear, lifting her off her feet.
It was Andrei.
And he was carrying her.
Away from Mama.
She bucked against her cousin’s hold, but his arms held her tight. “Shut up, brat,” he muttered. “Do you want to die, too?”
Rae surged upright, gasping for breath. During the last year with Beau, her dreams had revealed more and more of the day her mother died.
And she would’ve died that day, too, if her cousin hadn’t spirited her out of that building and into the trunk of a vehicle. “Not a peep, Inessa, or Father will kill us both,” Andrei had warned her before covering her with a blanket and closing her into the dark space. Andrei then ordered the driver to take him back to the compound. Mercifully, she had fallen asleep to the pounding of her cousin’s music blaring through the speakers. Back at the compound, Andrei had told her to forget what she had seen, reiterating his earlier warning. “Father will kill you, Nessa. Or worse, put you in one of those cages with the other girls. Maybe even Kat and Tati, too.”
And she had done just that.
Forgotten the dreadful way her mother had died.
Forgotten about the cages filled with young girls.
Up until the day Beau unloaded Kismet’s cage, jarring her memory.
When the FBI had built their case against Vasily Liminov, there were two things they could not link to the man — human trafficking and murder.
But she had witnessed her mother’s murder, and what else could those poor girls in the cages have been but victims of human trafficking.
And the address on the piece of paper her mother had held before walking to her death, she now strangely recalled clear as day.
