Page 9 of Convict's Game

Shade nodded then continued with a warning. “People apply for the wrong reasons sometimes. I’ll let ye know when the next interviewee is coming in, and ye can be the judge. In the meantime, Tyler has something else he needs help with.”

Shade left us, and Tyler took over.

“I lost two of my intercept crew recently.”

I pulled my mind back from the game’s dark reaches and gave him my attention. “Intercept?”

The bear of a man furrowed his brow. “That’s my job. I intercept trafficking rings and bring them down. Did you forget?”

“Shite, no. Ignore that.”

He bought my excuse and picked up the office tablet, logging on to a website. He handed it to me, and I squinted at the video footage of a run-down building in an alley somewhere in a suburb of Deadwater.

There were several feeds being captured, and Tyler tapped between them.

“We’ve been monitoring a property on Milburne Alley for months after it was reported that women had been brought in for unknown reasons. The caller thought it might be a brothel,but the cops don’t give a fuck about those and passed it to us via a contact I have with them. They don’t have the resources to investigate the degree of trafficking we know goes on. Nor can they take the kind of action that I can.”

I got what he meant. The skeleton crew would kill if necessary. The cops had inconvenient laws to abide by.

“We know women are being trafficked into Scotland and Northern England. A year ago, we took down a team in transit and rescued two women and two teenage girls.”

“What happened to the traffickers?”

“All dead. Unintentionally, in the case of the leader.”

“Badass.” I grinned.

Tyler’s lips twitched. “I enjoyed it for the sake of the women we brought out of a container lorry, but it pissed me off that I couldn’t interrogate their captors. I suspect this case could be connected. The one name we extracted from the traffickers before the last stopped breathing was ‘Salter’. We think it’s this guy.”

On the screen, he opened one of the thumbnails of a rangy mutt of a man. Sallow cheeks, a patchy beard, dark clothing. Rings on his fingers caught the light.

“Jan Salter. Mean motherfucker. He’s been seen at this building, as recently as last night when he met one of his lackeys. Since then, a woman showed up, too, apparently for a meeting. Lucky for us, we already had cameras up, as we believed this place is operating as a holding cell. What I need is for you to monitor the footage and see what you can learn.”

I studied the live feed Tyler switched to. “What should I focus on?”

“Watch for Salter but also the woman. I want any clues to her identity. I don’t think she’s trafficked, she isn’t behaving that way. Which makes me think she could be something to do withthe organisational side of it. If so, she’s possibly being coerced. I want to get to the truth.”

He left me to start my task.

Getting comfortable behind the desk, I spooled through the cameras, counting off a view of the front of the building, one down the alley and catching the upper windows, and one inside the building which showed a darkened room where the alley’s neon-purple lights fell over a bed. Holy fuck, he’d done a good job of setting up the spy kit.

I rolled the footage of the clip from yesterday.

On it, a curvy woman in an oversized hoodie and with blonde bobbed hair in loose waves crossed the screen. The camera captured a perfect view of her pert face, and my breathing stopped. Not because she was pretty—she was fucking beautiful—but because of something deeper. Attraction. Need. Recognition?

For the first time since I’d come back to life, my dick woke up and paid attention.

“Yup,” I murmured. “You’re coming home with me.”

I knew her. I had to. Which meant maybe she knew me.

For several hours, I pored over the footage, streaming the street feed live so I didn’t miss anyone showing up. There was no shot of the woman meeting Salter, if she had before she left. They hadn’t appeared in the upstairs room which also had an active sound feed.

At last, after rain began pattering down on the alley, a taxi cruised into the camera’s live scope and stopped by the building’s entrance. A passenger exited.

It was our mystery woman. My pulse sped up.

With her head down against the rain, she cautiously stepped up to the building then went inside, disappearing from view. Instantly, I was overheating again. I switched to the interior camera, tracking her as she went out of sight.