Page 4 of Convict’s Game (Skeleton Crew #1)

Fury descended on Shade’s expression, and his tattooed hand flexed over where I instinctively knew a knife was hidden in a holster at his side.

“Chief Constable Kenney came here and told us ye were dead. He didn’t have the DNA evidence to prove it, which makes me think he did it for his own sick pleasure. ”

“I’m going to fucking kill him.” Arran braced his hands behind his head and tipped back in his hotel room chair, then came back with resolve in his eyes.

“It’s not enough, but I’m going to right all the wrongs you suffered because of my bad decisions.

You saved Cassie in that cellar. You nearly lost your life as well.

I can’t change that, but I can make up for it as best I can.

You have the run of the warehouse and any work you want, when you’re ready.

Shade, Tyler, take care of our boy. I’ll be back next week. ”

I murmured my gratitude, because no way did he need to make up for anything, but the call was over, and I had two men to convince I was ready for work.

Still, I couldn’t help the nagging sensation that Arran was wrong. I didn’t deserve his respect. I just couldn’t remember why.

I t took another two days for Shade and Tyler to agree to discuss tasks with me.

Time in which I met a grateful Cassie and her boyfriend, and familiarised myself with the warehouse again, putting more names to faces and sleeping long bouts in my sex-adjacent room.

I even managed a shower, binding my arm in plastic so I didn’t have to take off the bandage.

The scar on my head was evidence enough of my history.

I didn’t want to see ruined tattoos and mangled skin from the burns.

The next afternoon, I was back in the skeleton crew’s office and pleading my case. “I’m dying to get back to work. You’ve gotta give me something.”

Shade sharpened a blade, the edge of it glinting in the light. He swapped a glance with Tyler. “We can’t utilise most of your main skill set, not until that boot is off and you’re fully mobile.”

“What are my main skills?”

“Ye work well undercover, plus breaking and entering, stealing. Not so great at avoiding arrest.”

Heh. That must’ve been how my nickname came about.

I steepled my hands. “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t have anything to offer. Let me earn my keep.”

Shade grumbled but gave in. “I’m partway through organising the next game we’re running. I have a couple of people left to interview.”

I sat back, my heart thumping.

I’d assumed he was going to offer me guard duty with Manny’s team, or something less…compelling.

The game. I remembered it, the dangerous fun we had in our basement.

If things were murky going from the buzzing nightclub on one side of the skeleton crew’s building across to the strip club on the other, then upstairs to the brothel with live performances and anything-goes sex, what happened in the basement turned up the dial to an extreme.

The game was a predator-prey chase where we caged men then released them on a siren to hunt women. Everyone who played did so voluntarily, and live cameras displayed the action to paying customers. It was violent, sex-fuelled carnage.

The description stirred my blood more than any naked bodies could’ve. Had I taken part? I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I’d wanted to.

“I’ll help.”

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 with the 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.

F or 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.

It took a solid twenty minutes until she reappeared, this time in the upstairs room, visible to me on the wide lens. Alone, she perched on the bed, her legs bare under that same oversized hoodie, the picture of a vulnerable lass.

Was she waiting? The car dropping her off felt like she’d been delivered to this…whatever it was. I hadn’t caught sight of who she’d met.

Dead certainty consumed me, and I wheeled my chair back to raid the desk. From a hidden drawer, I collected a knife, then a skeleton print bandanna from the cabinet. If I could get a phone and borrow a car, I knew exactly what I was doing this evening.

Leaping with both feet into my assignment.

I’d find out who she was, either by remembering or simply asking. The only way to be sure was to go to her, and if I was lucky, she might have something to say about me.