Page 39 of Caught in the Crossfire

My heart clenched inside my chest.Wynn. I wanted to get home. I needed to see that he was still alive.

“What if we want to go home?” a younger girl asked.

“They’ll make sure you get home, or give you enough money to get firm on your feet, or you can go stay at their compound.”

“Their compound?”

I nodded. “This is what they do. They provide safe homes for other women who have been hurt like you.”

“Like us,” Penny responded while she stared at her clasped hands.

Bile coated the back of my throat. I pressed my lips together to hold it in. I hadn’t been through near as much as they had. “You’re free. Just tell them what you want to do, and they’ll make it happen.”

“What about money?” another woman asked.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about the money. We have plenty of it.”

Wynn and Willow used their own money to fund this group, but so would I. So would the Shadows. We’d pour as much of our money into this as necessary to get these women to safety. They deserved that.

They deserved so much more than what happened to them.

Penny eyed me. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and all these guys, but…they came for you, right? Not for us?”

I nodded, trying my hardest to choke down the tears building in my chest again. “They’re my men. They came for me.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Leona Vero.”

She didn’t react to my name. It’s not like she had any reason to know me, but she nodded like she was committing it to memory.

She stood, and I met her face to face. “Okay. We’ll go with them. But if anything weird goes down, we’re leaving.”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “If all they do is give you medical attention, and then you decide to walk away on your own, that’s fine.”

We walked together toward the gangway at the stern, where my guys stood awkwardly around the railing of the boat. Obi stood on the other side of the gangplank talking with Willow’s crew.

“Ryu,” I called. He instantly turned in my direction. I held out my hand. “Can I have one of your knives?”

His face went hard, questioning, before he pulled one free and handed it to me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I responded before I turned to Penny. I pressed the hilt of the knife into her palm. “Take this. Use it when you need it.”

Penny clasped the weapon, turning it from side to side. “Maybe you should come with us.”

The idea sounded like a recipe for emotional disaster, and I was already on the precipice of collapse. No, the only thing I wanted to do was get back to our plans and figure out how we were going to tackle the mountain of problems ahead.

“I’ll go home with my guys.”

She pursed her lips. “There were a lot more of us before the ship.”

“What?”

One of the younger girls pressed their shoulders together, and Penny looped her free arm around her. “They had an auction, with a big group of girls. Not just us, but we saw dozens of other women. Our group didn’t sell, so that’s why they were taking us out of the country.” Her voice went low, and she tilted forward. “I overheard them saying they thought we might sell better somewhere else.”

My mouth went dry, and I glanced up into Ryu’s hardened face. He looked just as angry as I felt. “Where was this auction?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.”