“You better tell me every goddamned thing you know right now, Magnolia.”
“It’s bad. Real bad.” Her voice is a whisper. For a woman who’s seen what Magnolia Maison has seen—and done what she’s done—to say something’sreal bad, it has to bereally fucking bad.
“Tell me.”
“I didn’t know.” She sounds like she’s choking it out.
“Fucking tell me.”
“They’re running human cargo.” Shame drips from her words as my blood turns to ice.
“Fuck.” I rise from my chair and grip the back of my neck with my free hand. “Tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”
“I wish I could. I didn’t know. I would never have hooked him up with the job if I’d known. You know—”
“I don’t know shit, woman. You sell pussy. Why the fuck should I think you’d stop short of human trafficking?”
There are some people I truly fucking hate in this world, and one category would be human traffickers. Scum of the earth, and every single one of them deserves the fate they subject others to.
“I didn’t know! I would never. You have to believe me. I’vebeensold. I wouldn’t do that to someone I hate, let alone someone I’ve never met. Please, Saxon. You have to help me fix this.”
I tilt my head back to stare at the beams above me. “This is fucked, and you know it. Ransom wasn’t gonna smuggle people. You set him up for this. Was that the plan? Did you want him dead?”
“No! I love him!”
“Jesus fucking Christ. Like I believe you.”
“Then don’t believe me. Just find him before they do.”
I almost tell her that the people she hooked him up with are already paying me a half million to bring him in dead or alive, but I don’t. Magnolia can’t be trusted. She’s proven that.
Instead, I say, “Call me if you find out anything at all. You understand me?”
“Only if you do the same.”
“Agreed.” I hang up the phone with the lie still hanging in the air, knowing I’ll have to deal with her sooner or later, but I can always hope for later.
Because right now, this entire fucking game has changed. Magnolia set Ransom up to traffic human cargo, and that explains why they want him dead.
He didn’t deliver. He won’t be delivering. Knowing Ransom, he’s already let every single one of those poor fucks go with cash in hand to make their own way in the world.
And in doing it, he left himself and his sister wide open.
I glance up at the monitor to the left and fix my gaze on the spill of dark hair on the pillow as Temperance curls toward my side of the bed.
How the hell am I going to climb between those sheets and breathe in the sweet scent of her skin and be able to fall sleep, knowing she’ll never be safe until I put them all in the ground?
I can’t.
I need a plan.
Neither she nor Ransom will ever breathe easy while a single person involved in this mess lives to order them dead.
I can’t believe Ransom would run now, though. He has to know they’ll come for her if he does. He might have questionable morals, but he’s not a complete piece of shit. The fact that he wouldn’t deliver human cargo is proof enough of that. There’s no way he’d let his sister pay for his mistake.
No, he knows I’m covering his ass. We made a deal a long fucking time ago. If anything ever happened to me, he’d cover my mom, and if anything ever happened to him, I’d watch over his sister.
Well, Ransom, I’m watching over her. I just didn’t plan on getting hooked on her.