Page 75 of Reaper
I grip hold of the handle on the trailer’s roller door and throw it up.
I pause. I blink.
“Fuck me.”
Behind me, I hear Reaper’s voice. I don’t turn, I don’t look at him, I can’t take my eyes off what’s in front of me.
“What is it?”
“No guns. No drugs. It’s… people.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Reaper
People.
Blindfolded, handcuffed, dirty and beaten, and wearing ragged clothes and looking far closer to livestock than humans, yet still, they’re people.
I hold up a hand as a warning to my brothers behind me. One finger — caution, and keep your fucking mouths shut.
Then I lean in to Adriana. “We can still make this work. Just remember to sound Russian.”
Her head whips in my direction, and her eyes flare with the same vengeful glare that night we first met, when she told me she was going to kill me. Her voice is a snakelike hiss. “Are you fucking joking? These are human fucking beings — not guns, not drugs, not fucking cargo… they’re fucking people.”
“I know. But trust me, OK? I have a plan.”
I don’t, really. More a desperate sense of optimism that flickers beneath the forceful glare from Adriana, a glare that says that she clearly sees me less as the man she loves and more as the conniving criminal I used to be.
Her hand slips around my wrist like a handcuff, and she pulls me further away from the semi.
“A plan? A fucking plan? This is beyond anything we talked about. These are people. I should fucking arrest —” She stops short, but I know where she’s headed. I know how fragile things are between us right now; I’m not just the man she loves, I’m abiker deep in shit with a Russian gangster suggesting that we use a trailer load of people to bail myself out of trouble. It’s criminal, and the reflection I see of myself in her eyes isn’t anything I’m proud of.
“Yes, a fucking plan,” I lie while my mind spins like wheels stuck in mud. Her grip tightens, my brain whirls, and then I grin at her — the wheels are actually turning. Not well, but there’s grit in the mud and things are moving. “I promise I’ve got this. It’ll work out for us and work out for them.”
“This is too much. This is too deep. I mean, is this going to be like Boise, am I going to be caught up in your…” She stops, but looking in her eyes, it’s impossible not to see the anger, the sadness, the thoughts of Vanessa that flicker through her mind.
“This won’t. This isn’t Boise. Trust me.”
She worries her lip between her teeth, while her eyes show a dozen different ways she could hurt me — from leaving me, to turning me over to the cops, to outright killing me. Finally, after a sigh big enough it could power a sailboat, she nods. "Fine, comrade. I’ll trust you. Call me Svetlana.”
Her accent is terrible. But it’s there. And I doubt twenty blindfolded, handcuffed, and utterly exhausted Triad trafficking victims could tell the difference between Adriana and Maria Sharapova.
I take Adriana's hand and we walk back toward the others. Diesel's already peering into the truck, his face gone white as fresh paint. Tank's jaw is working like he's chewing nails, and Mayhem's eyes are wide with something that looks like fascination mixed with horror.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Tank breathes, stepping back from the trailer. "Reaper, what the hell is this?"
"It's exactly what it looks like," I say, keeping my voice steady. "Twenty people. Triad cargo."
"Cargo?" Tank's voice rises. "These are human beings, you sick fuck. We're calling this off. Right now."
"No." I step between him and his bike. "We're not."
Tank's hands ball into fists. "The hell we're not. This is trafficking, Reaper. This is slavery. I didn't sign up to be part of some goddamn human auction."
"Neither did I," I snap back. "But we're here, they're here, and the Triads are coming whether we bail or not."
"Then we call the cops — "
