Page 138 of Beautifully Ruined

“No. I won’t lie as say I haven’t hooked up in clubs because I have. I like that anonymity, and I don’t have a high profile job. I’m a nobody. A ghost.”

Vi gives me a suspicious look that makes me want to laugh and hug her close.

“I don’t want you working that club, Vi, even if you could avoid sex.” Then I sigh. “And if you wanted to fuck others as the only way to keep you, we’d make it work, I’d choose them for you, clearly.”

“Clearly,” she says, a sweetness in her tone. And I don’t confuse it as her wanting to sleep with others. I honestly don’t think she does. It’s more I think she likes I’m there to keep her safe. Protect her.

“It’s not about the sex,” I say. “I don’t want you hurt. And I think we can get all the answers we want without you putting yourself in harm’s way.

She slides her arms around me and rests her head on my chest where my heart thuds deeply.

I’ll do anything to keep her safe. Anything.

Then she looks up. “Tacos would be good.”

“Anything for you.”

It’s late,and dinner’s done, and Vi’s asleep in my bed.

I sit on the sofa with her phone and my laptop. I’ve got Macy’s number now, and I hack into it.

I trust Vi, but I don’t know this girl, and that means I don’t trust her. So, I hack her. This way, I’ll know if trust is on the table or not. And the more I think about it, the more I’m positive there’s some kind of training center.

No way a club as exclusive as The Dungeon doesn’t train the girls. Trafficked or entering the club’s workforce of their own free will, there’s just no way.

And he wouldn’t have them trained at one of his lesser clubs. Just like he wouldn’t take girls who’ve worked the industry elsewhere.

Places like this are all about fresh meat, breaking in their girls and making them exclusive to that one place.

There are a few places in her GPS tracker that could be it, places she went to a lot after one visit to the club over a year ago. And now, she goes to them sporadically. I don’t know if they have different sites or what, but I’m going to find out.

Luckily, this girl’s security is worse than even Vi’s.

Maybe she’d have given the information of what these places are to Vi if she’d pushed this Macy, or maybe not.

But I don’t know her, and I’m also pissed that she suggested my girl work there.

What the fuck is up with that?

I plant a tracker on her phone so I can watch where she goes. Seriously, it’s so easy to do. What’s up with girls like this one and Vi exposing themselves to every half decent creeper hacker on the Internet?

Shaking my head, I start running some basic programs I developed to look inside the spots she visited. I don’t care about the cover names. One’s a dry cleaners, the other a nail salon, and one says it’s a fishing store.

But only one is impossible to hack remotely. The fishing store… And that’s the place it seems Macy visited the most.

Especially at the beginning.

The main training center and the others are what? The real deal? An actual salon and dry cleaners? It looks it.

But try as I might with the fishing store, I can’t get into it.

“What are you doing?” Vi asks, sleepy and warm sounding from behind me.

She’s thrown on one of my shirts, I notice as she approaches.

I shoot her a glace. “I thought there was a rule about naked?”

Violet stares at me and without missing a beat, pulls it off and drops the shirt on the ground as she comes up, pulls my laptop off my lap, and puts it next to me. She slides onto my lap in its stead, and I’m pretty fucking sure she’s the most perfect woman in the world.