Page 36 of Sold to My Ex's Brother
A surge of fury rushes through me, and I bring my hand back and land a sharp slap to his face, that sound echoing out around the room. He cries out, blood spattering on the floor belowwhere I have re-opened the bloody mess on his nose, and I grasp his hair and yank him back roughly.
“Don’t bullshit me, Sergei,” I hiss. “Tell me the truth, and you might get out of here alive. So, I’m going to ask you again—what do you do for my brother?”
His gaze flicks back and forth between mine, as he tries to parse the best course of action here, tries to figure out if there is a hope in hell of him getting out of this place. But he has another thing coming if he believes that he can just walk away from this as though it’s nothing.
The rage in me has taken on a new form now, having laid eyes on my child for the first time. Because they’re what I’m protecting, with everything I have, with every inch of power I have to my name.
It’s not just about me, my father, the family business any longer. No, it’s about crushing the threat that stands against my family, even if it comes from the very same blood that pulses in my veins.
“I... I broker the women that he brings in,” he admits finally, and a hot rush of acid rises in my throat.
Brokering women? What, like they’re nothing more than objects?The thought makes me sick to my goddamn stomach, but I know I’m on to something, and I can’t back down now I’m getting close.
“What does that mean, exactly?” I demand. “You get them for him? You identify the women who you’re going after next? What, exactly?”
He tries to take a breath, but I yank hard on his hair, his scalp straining as a few strands are nearly pulled out.
“Answer me!”
He finally manages to speak again, though I can hear the enormous weight in his voice. “He finds the girls and gets me to do recon on them,” he tells me, at last, the words spilling out of him in a great rush like he doesn’t want to risk keeping them to himself any longer. “I find out if they have something we can use, some kind of debt, and gets me to meet with them to offer a way out of it...”
I drop his head roughly, and he goes careening forward, nearly toppling the chair over with the sudden change of gravity.
Jesus fucking Christ. So, this is a focused thing, then, what my brother is doing—tracking down women who are desperate and have no way out of the circumstances they have found themselves in, when he comes swooping in to offer them a chance to begin afresh.
I can only imagine the relief they must feel, thinking that they have finally found a way out of the mess that they have landed themselves in, no matter how it came to be. Only to discover that my brother is auctioning them off, to the kind of men who will not see them as anything other than a piece of meat they have the right to do with what they want.
“But you have to understand, he has stuff on me, it’s not like I would have chosen to do this out of my own?—”
I spin around to face him again and slam a fist into his jaw before I can think twice. Pushing my face close to his, I lock eyes with him again, finding his terrified gaze staring back at me.
“Don’t try to feed me any fucking excuses,” I snarl at him. “You do what you do because you want to. So don’t think that you can make me feel sorry for you, you hear?”
He gurgles slightly, swallowing down a thick wad of blood that has formed at the back of his throat from my onslaught. I stare at him for a moment and wonder if I’m looking at the very man who got Maya pulled into all of this in the first place. The thought is enough to make me sick, but I push it aside. I don’t have time to get pulled into emotion right now, I need to focus on the facts, what I can shake loose before I grow too furious with him to continue.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, blood and saliva bubbling over his lips, but I can hardly hear him.
I pace back and forth as I try to make sense of it, try to figure out what I can make of this. “You have names, then?” I demand. “Of the women he’s targeted?”
He nods slowly. “A few...”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t have them on hand, I would have to go back to my apartment to?—”
I catch his hair again, dragging his head back so hard I’m surprised his neck doesn’t snap. “Tell. Me.”
And this time, he gives up on trying to stop me. He must sense that I’m not going to let this go, no matter how badly he hopes I might, that I’m going to make him pay for everything he has done over the last few years. Whatever justice he has been evading all this time, it has finally caught up with him, and there is nothing he can do about it.
“Ruby,” he replies, finally. “I know one of the girls is called Ruby, and she used to work at the bar before she had to leave to take care of her mom. That’s one of them...”
“Who else?” I insist.
“Kyra,” he continues. “Kyra Kelso, she’s one of the ones he’s keeping an eye on. And... and Iris Langford, she came from a wealthy family, but she ended up hooked on pills, she ran up a big debt with him and he’s trying to make good on it now...”
He spills as many names as he can, clearly hoping that if he tells me enough, I might be willing to spare him the hell that I want to rain down on top of him.
I gesture for one of my men to come in and order him to take note of each and every name before I send him out to try and track down as many of those girls as he can.
