“Close the door, Red,” Malcom said.
Lovell glanced over his shoulder as the second guard did as ordered, then positioned himself in front of it. In the grand scheme of things, five-to-one odds weren’t all that different from six-to-one. Still, he wouldn’t have minded if Charnette’s team had been able to grab him. She would have if he’d moved far enough away that it could be done without commotion, but Lovell wasn’t that lucky. Not in this, anyway.
Deciding he’d said enough, Lovell waited for one or the other of them to jump in. In the weighted silence, he scanned the space, his attention lingering on his siblings. By now, they’d know something wasn’t right on the home front. Their security should have stopped him; he never should have made it to their inner sanctum. What he found interesting, though, was that none of the four appeared overly concerned. From bravado or because they had an escape route they were confident in, he didn’t know.
The guards, on the other hand, well, their nervous energy filled the area behind him, bumping into his body, testing his focus. He could smell their fear, too. Nothing about this situation would end well for them. They’d either disappear intothe night the way their colleagues did, or Malcom would hold them accountable for the grievous breach. A punishment they weren’t likely to survive.
“Nothing, Boss. We’re getting nothing from the team,” Red said, his finger to his earpiece. Malcom cut him off with a sharp look. Lovell flashed another smile.
“You don’t have to worry about him telling me something I don’t already know,” Lovell said.
Malcom slid Ken a look. Lovell would give credit where credit was due, his brother was no longer the hotheaded, trigger-happy punk looking to make a name for himself. His eyes promised the same retribution, but Malcom was in complete control of himself.
“Bold of you to stop by,” Chanel said, her husky voice unmistakable despite almost everything else about her having changed. At least the superficial things. Her hair, her skin, her clothes, her makeup. Her monthly aesthetic upkeep probably cost more than she’d ever made back in Trenton.
He tipped his head. “Well, when one discovers his siblings are trying to kill him for an unspecified inheritance and then finds out that they run a human trafficking and sex ring, and a very lucrative one at that, it does beg the question as to why I should enter the belly of the beast. But I’m a curious guy, so here I am. How’d you find me and why come after me when you have all this?” He lifted his hands, gesturing to the opulence of the room. If he had to guess, it was modeled after a room in the White House. Or maybe a château.
“Because we could,” Chanel said, ignoring his first question. Another sharp look from Malcom.
“But could you? Really? Because here I am,” he replied. “Alive and well.”
“For the moment,” Ken said.
“Cliché, Keshaun. You never did have any imagination.”
A tense silence fell over the group. He could stand there the rest of the night waiting for them. He had nowhere to go. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He had Daphne waiting for him in the hotel room.
“So, Nicole Monroe,” he said. “I’m not surprised you finally lost your shit with her. Even as inseparable as you were growing up, you bickered a lot. Like an old married couple. When she finally cut you loose and started doing something with herself other than selling drugs or her body, that must have stung, Chanel. The girl you’d always managed to keep under your thumb had broken free, was making a life as far away from you, in every way, as she could. New friends, an education, a good job, maybe an apartment in a decent part of town, friends, real ones, and a chance to not have to look over her shoulder every three seconds. Leaving Chanel Washington behind without even a backward glance.”
“Little good it did her,” Chanel said, a cold venom dripping from her tone. “She’s dead and gone and, as you say, I have all this.” She mimicked his earlier gesture. “I’d say I came out on top in that friendship.”
“When you kill the competition, that happens,” he said.
Chanel laughed. “Nicole wasn’t competition. She came back that day to convince me to join her.”
He sighed dramatically. “And that’s why you can’t have nice things, Chanel. Or nice people. Because you destroy them.”
She rolled her eyes, reminding him of the girl she’d been. “Nicole was a stuck-up bitch. Thought she was better than the rest of us.”
“So you killed her? Kind of fitting to then take her identity and turn it into everything she was fighting to break away from,” he said.
“She turned her back on everyone and everything she knew,” Chanel said. “She got what she deserved. And before you ask, no, I don’t regret pulling the trigger.”
“In the same way, I won’t regret pulling this one,” Malcom said, withdrawing a pistol from beneath his jacket.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Daphne followed Marcus through a door and into the Sweet Dreams house. She tried really, really hard not to think about the things that had happened there, about the fear, the pain, the hopelessness. They’d liaised with Hershorn when they’d arrived and learned that seven people were taken into care from the house—five women and two men—all either seventeen or eighteen. They’d also stopped every client who’d left after half past twelve. The only update Hershorn had on them was that they were all being questioned.
“You good?” Marcus asked, his voice low.
They turned and headed down a hallway. “I’m good,” she answered, nearly certain that was a lie. How could she be? She was wandering around a house that had been used to essentially torture young people for the pleasure of rich, sick fucks, and she was about to walk into a room filled with people who had guns. She knew better than to voice any of those concerns, though. Not if she wanted to stand beside James.
Keeping her eyes focused on the broad shoulders in front of her, she passed through a kitchen, a butler’s pantry, and another long hall before the FBI team came into sight. Charnette, with her thick blond hair still tied in a low bun, nodded at them, thenjerked her head in the direction of the door. She and Marcus went through a series of hand gestures that Daphne could have followed if she’d paid attention. As it was, though, the low timbre of voices on the other side of the door caught her attention.
She leaned forward, as if those scant inches would make everything clear. “Kill,” “nice,” “bitch.” Scattered disconnected words she made out. A conversation, no doubt, but in her mind, they felt like words drawn at random, like the magnetic poetry set she had in her apartment back in Paris.
Marcus’s sudden grip on her arm startled her, and she jerked back. “Stay behind me, we’re going in,” he said. Her stomach tightened and her chest squeezed. Marcus no longer looked like the laid-back lumberjack she’d first met.