Chapter 76

* Janie *

The closer I got to my destination, the more nervous I became. I’d been driving for hours, only stopping for gas and to grab some snacks here and there when hunger broke through the high of the pills I’d finished a while back. I was surprised that I’d made it this far since I’d had that gnawing feeling of being hunted since leaving California, what must’ve been days ago.

But now, with the lights of the city up ahead, I felt like I could relax, but first, I had to find a place to stay. There was no way I could stay in the city without being recognized, and I didn’t know how much money I had left. I gave some thought to heading to Jersey and my parents’ home before I remembered that it was no longer theirs.

I started to panic, but then the thought hit and stuck that maybe no one had taken possession of the place as yet. I have no idea how that stuff works since I’d never bought a home before. When we got married, I’d just moved in with Ryder and never had to pay any bills. Just thinking about all I stood to lose if I didn’t get to the bottom of this mess made my chest hurt, and if that bitch Elena had been in my sight, I’d have run her over ten times.

This was all her fault. If she’d just stayed gone or disappeared forever, none of this would be happening. I felt all the hate and anger I had for her over the past few years building up inside me until I wanted to scream, and so I did. I didn’t stop until I noticed the people in the car next to me watching, one of them with a phone in the air, no doubt recording me.

I rolled down the window and screamed at them to get the fuck away from me, but they just laughed and drove off when the light changed. As I made the turn, I thought I recognized the car that made the turn behind me, but that couldn’t be. I don’t know much about cars, so maybe that’s why this one looked similar to the one that had been following behind me in California, because the shape of the lights was similar.

Since they weren’t paying me any attention, I decided that I was overthinking things and went on my merry way. I was tired as hell, only now realizing that I hadn’t really slept, or if I had, I don’t remember doing it, and my arms and ass were starting to hurt.

Thankfully it was almost dark out by the time I reached my old neighborhood, and I drove by the house first to make sure the coast was clear. Do you know that feeling you get when something is within your reach and all the hard work you’ve put in is about to pay off? That’s how I felt. Almost like when you have to use the bathroom in the worst way, and just as soon as you see the toilet, you start wetting yourself; it was pretty much like that.

I wasn’t tired before and hadn’t felt the fatigue of pushing myself both physically and mentally for so long until I saw the house and knew I could soon take a break. It was as if all the pent-up emotion I’d been holding onto chose that moment, the moment when safety was finally in sight, to release itself.

I parked a few houses down before jogging back to the house just to be on the safe side. I didn’t know if my old key would work and started to fret, wondering about security and what would happen if I had to break a window but, in the end, it didn’t matter because it did.

I hid my car in the garage though no one would know the old heap was mine, but I didn’t want the neighbors to know that anyone was here, or heaven forbid a realtor should come by or something. I was proud of myself for having these thoughts and the fact that my mind was so clear. It was only after I’d done it that I realized that maybe I shouldn’t have had all those pills.

On the other hand, they’d kept me wired and alert most of the ride, so maybe it was a good idea after all. The fact that I felt fidgety and out of sorts now was caused by the long car ride and lack of sleep, I’m sure. Nothing else was going on because my mind seemed so much clearer than it had in days.

I felt like laughing and skipping when I walked inside, but then a wave of depression hit right on the heels of that when I saw the condition of my family home. The house felt strange. It was empty, bare, and nothing like I remembered from my childhood.

It’s strange how I once thought this place was a thing of glory. It had been the envy of most of my friends and enemies alike, but after living in Ryder’s mansion, I came to know that it was just barely upper middle class compared to the wealthy mansions my friends in L.A. had grown up in.

The walls were a shit color of plain beige, and the rooms seemed so small. Were they always this tiny? I looked towards the staircase that I used to run down every day in my youth as I bounded off to somewhere or the other, and it was barely twenty stairs if that.

How had everything that had seemed so grand in my youth turned into this dump? I felt none of the joy I once did between these walls and was already missing the grandeur of the home I shared with Ryder and the many lavish places I’d been invited to because of my association with him.

That got me thinking about the Hudsons; I hadn’t thought of them this whole trip; my mind was too preoccupied with Ryder and that bitch who thought she could just steal my life. Another bout of irrational anger hit me in the gut, and I started screaming again.

Once I was drained, I slumped to the floor and looked around the empty living room, feeling a bit lost. A pang of sadness left me when I recalled the memories my family and I had made here.

I wasn’t aware of the tears that fell from my eyes until they itched. I caught myself looking around the room like a cornered rat, that hunted feeling attacking me again. Then my mind started jumping from one situation to another, with none of them making sense.

Each time my mind started to wander into a place of depression and self-pity, I dragged it back from the brink. I have to keep my wits about me now more than ever. I’m in a fight for my life here, and I know it. Everything I had worked for was crumbling right before my eyes, and worst of all, I missed Ryder.

It had been way too long since I’d seen him or been around him, and I was beginning to feel the loss. I refused to accept that things were going to end like this and felt myself regain some of the mental strength that had been waning in the last few weeks.

That’s right; I’m the wronged party here. Ryder is my husband, so if he’s taking selfies in her pajamas with that bitch, she’s the one who’s cheating with my husband. I pulled out my phone and was surprised to see that there were even more posts and comments.

The latest one enraged me, Ryder, and Elena at some restaurant in the city holding hands. I scanned the comments feeling the anger build with each word. Once again, people were offering them congratulations, some going so far as to say they were happy for them, and it was about time.

There were scathing mentions of me, and someone even uploaded the video of me losing my shit on camera when I left that stupid hospital. People were laughing at me, calling me crazy, and of course, talking about how I had had to trick him into marriage and took him away from his one true love.

There were a lot of stupid comments about twin flames and all that hoodoo bullshit, something the magic woman had mentioned way back when. I remember her warning me how things could go wrong when someone tried to come between two soulmates and how the backlash could be astronomical, but at the time, I had ignored it because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I tried to remember everything that had been said but couldn’t, and a tinge of fear ran up my spine. My chest felt tight, and I felt that nasty feeling of rage climbing up my throat again. The screams started in my head and made their way up my lungs and filled the room with a booming echo.

The pain in my hands and the blood running down onto the floor brought me back to my senses, and it took a few minutes for my breathing to get back to normal. I looked at my hands, a bit confused as my mind raced.

The one thought that kept flitting around in my head until it stuck was that Elena had done this. She’d no doubt found a way to sink her claws into him, and he’d fallen for it.

I kept going back to that last picture of them at the restaurant and the way he was holding her hand and gazing into her eyes, and it hurt. They looked like they were part of the in-crowd, and once again, I felt like that poor insignificant little girl looking on from the outside while everyone else lived extravagant lives.

I’d tried so hard, fought so long for the life I’d had with Ryder. I’d given up myself, lost my own sense of identity, and done everything I was meant to, to have the life I dreamed of. Why does she get to have everything? Why couldn’t I have this one thing when she got to have everything else?

She was loved and adored by everyone, and now she was trying to steal my life, my whole world. I won’t let her. No matter what anyone else says, Ryder is mine, and I won’t let her or anyone else have him.

Looking around the empty room with the dingy walls brought a moment of clarity that scared me to the core. I don’t want to end up back here. I wouldn’t even have that anyway, now that Dad had lost the house. I have no home; I have no money; I have nothing….

The anger that has fueled me thus far once again helped me to see past the fear of what was looming up ahead. I’ve been so focused on my hatred of Elena and my rage at the thought of her being close to Ryder that I’ve overlooked other more glaring issues.

There was no way I was coming out of this whole thing broke. Ryder owed me, everyone owed me, and I was going to collect.

***

* Mengelini *

“She went back to her old childhood home.”

“Oh, goody. Let’s have some fun.” I looked through my notes of ‘what ifs’ and told Uncle Shane what I wanted him to do, and even though he hemmed and hawed for a bit, I reminded him that the house was now mine, well, the Squad’s at any rate, but I had been the one to buy it, and so I could do whatever I want.

I didn’t have to worry about him telling Daddy about what I was up to because he was too busy on the other side of the world and couldn’t do anything but grumble. “Is it your aim to drive this girl crazy?”

“I’m not the one driving that car; she’s been there. And besides, there’s a difference between crazy and evil. She started it.”

“She started it? Sometimes I forget that you’re only ten. What’s my daughter up to?”

“Who, Lily? Nothing. We’re trying to solve an equation; why?”

“What sort of equation?”

“We’re triangulating air travel and space divided by maritime.”

“Come again?”

“It’s nothing, Uncle Shane. Oh, Lily said to bring back cannoli for everyone from the place where Uncle Gabriel gets it.”

“Fine, I’ll get cannoli; what about the other place in the Flat Iron district?”

“We’re still going to need that place; Uncle Gabriel already took care of everything.”

“He did, did he? What exactly did he take care of?”

“You’ll know when you get there.”

“Who was it that taught you not to let your right hand know what your left hand was doing?”

“I don’t know what that means, Uncle Shane.”

Uh-oh, he’s too smart. Lily did warn me to be careful with him. I signaled her, and she came over to take over the call. The thing is, we’re both very good at wrapping our own dads around our fingers, but neither one trusts us. Meaning Uncle Shane does not trust me, and neither does Daddy trust Lily or Nia, come to think of it, though she gets away with much more because she’s very good at being cute and adorable.

I listened as Lily talked to her dad while I filled Nia in on this new turn of events. I hadn’t spent much time on the thought of Janie going to her old childhood home since it was so far out of the city, but it was on the list of possibilities though very low on the list. But I love a challenge, and this one wasn’t as bad as most. In fact, it would be fun now that I think about it. Gives us more room and time to play.

I wasn’t lying when I said we were trying to triangulate air space, travel, and maritime law, but he didn’t have to know what exactly I was referring to. Knowing Daddy and his team, they’d be on their way back before long, and there was still a lot left to do to bring this thing to a close.

I couldn’t make any mistakes because when Daddy loses his shit, as Grandpa likes to say, I’d have the fact that we pulled it off without a hitch on my side, which should be the gateway to him letting us do more in the future.

It’s not my fault that my mind doesn’t stay still long enough for me to rest; it’s always going in a million directions at once, but Daddy refuses to listen and is always treating us like babies, so this was the only way I could prove myself to him. The uncles already see it, but Daddy’s being stubborn as usual.

The truth is, I didn’t think it would go on for this long or that we’d get so deeply involved, but the more we learned, the harder it was to just walk away and leave everything to the men. Besides, my sister’s wedding has been put off for too long, and if I help Daddy with this, then he can come back sooner, and we can get Caitie married so she would stop sulking.

* Lyon *

“Are you telling me my kid orchestrated this whole thing?” I kept my eyes closed and tapped my finger on the table in front of me as I listened through the headphones to the rest of my team doing their thing. Across the way, Mancini was busy tapping away at computer keys while staring at the screen.

“Yup. Not bad, huh!”

“Walk me through the whole thing.” I didn’t grit my teeth so hard that you’d notice, but my eye was starting to twitch, which is a good giveaway that I was about to lose my shit.

This jackass was happily tapping away at keys, unaware that I was about to throw something at his head any second because I knew that no matter what came out of his mouth, he had something to do with this shit.

“Well, it started while we were in the Midwest with Lorde and Saunders Sr. made a trip to the island. The girls overheard him talking about the Ryder situation and went digging; that’s where they ran into the trafficking situation and freaked.”

“The boys thought they passed it off to them, and that was that, but apparently, they were doing their own thing behind the scenes.”

“I know all that; I’m asking about this, where we are now.”

“Oh, well, I was getting to that. So, she had Russo and Track compete against each other to see who could hack into these people the fastest, and you know how those two are.”

“Go on!”

“You want the condensed version? Cause this would take all day.” I gave him a look which only made him grin and go back to his tapping shit.

“Fine, once they got what they needed from the hacks, she had Janie programmed in that hospital, had the SEALs drop her off in the middle of the reporters, and yada-yada-yada, you know all that.”

“You’re telling me Mengele knew how to set that whole thing up?”

“Yeah, she fed one of the reporters on the scene questions to ask, which included some kind of trigger that set the whole thing off, and that’s why Janie mentioned all that stuff. It was so they could panic and do what they did.”

“So, she knew they would panic and send the girls to this place together, which would make it easy for us to grab them all at the same time?”

“Yeah! From what I know, she used the hack to send them false information that seemed as if it was coming from one to the other. In other words, she planted the idea among them since she had control of their devices.”

“And how did she get that control? Did Track and Russo allow my ten-year-old daughter to get involved in this after I told all of you not to let those kids get close to this kind of shit?”

“They didn’t let her do shit; she played them.”

“How so?”

“While they were competing against each other to see who could hack the fastest, Nia was hacking them. They were seeing everything in real time. As soon as Russo or Track hacked into an account, she came in right behind them.”

“Are you telling me Russo nor Track knew she was in there?”

“I’m sure they did, but what were they going to do? She already had as much control as they did.”

“I don’t believe you one fuck. You’re behind this, aren’t you?”

“I’m not sure why you’re always accusing me, but lest you forget, I was in the Midwest with you when this whole thing got started, remember?”

“So, how did they come up with this place?”

“From reading through the shit they found on the computers. Apparently, this place is where they have their sick parties where they pass the kids around or some shit.”

The good thing is we’d found more kids that we didn’t know about, more than the ones that had been taken from the concerts, and had they not been herded together in this place, some mansion in the hills of Tuscany, we wouldn’t have known they existed. So, instead of seven or eight kids, there were fifteen.

“There’s only one problem with her little plan; where the hell are the perps?”

“She said she sent them somewhere.”

“I know that, but where?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me. Said she wanted to run the Op herself. We just have to do the grunt work.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Before I could dig him a new asshole, there was static in my ear.

“We’re clear.” Logan’s voice came through the headpiece, and I spoke to him for the first time since we split up.

“Move them out.” I finally opened my eyes and looked at the screen on the wall, where I could see the end of the Op being carried out.

I didn’t need to see them breaking into the mansion and taking down the staff that had been tasked with watching over the terrified kids who no doubt feared that they were there to be used and abused as they had been for the sick pleasure of the assholes who had stolen their lives.

It was the anger of imagining that shit that had led me to order my squad to kill every adult on sight, which from the infrared images, I could see had been carried out. There were four bodies on the floor inside and two on the ground outside, deceased from the looks of it. All headshots are good.

“Copy!” Logan answered before signing off. Mancini and I had been guarding the perimeter from a van we’d parked out of sight at the bottom of the hill in case of any hiccups, but there were none, and the coast was clear. Since it was under cover of dark, there wasn’t much foot traffic, and things had gone as easily as possible.

Thorpe was waiting at a nearby airfield with part of his medical team who would take the rescued kids back to his place in the States to be looked after until it was time to send them back to their homes.

It’s not as simple as just taking them back home; sometimes, it takes months for those kids to be ready to face life and get over the trauma of what had been done to them. It’s a long, grueling process, but thankfully, we were equipped to handle it from beginning to end.

I wanted to wait at least until she became an adult to let my kid get involved in this mess. I’d long stopped hoping that she’d find an interest in something else and set a different course for her life, but I at least wanted her to have a few more years of innocence. But I’d forgotten how like her mother she is, how fucking stubborn and set in her ways.

Mancini’s computer dinged, and he switched gears. “What’s that?”

“I’m not sure. It’s from Catalina. She’s sending live feed.” He sounded way too excited as he pulled up something on the screen on the wall, which he switched to picture in picture mode.

“What the fuck is that?” The scene came in a bit cloudy at first, but once it cleared, there was an image of a yacht in the middle of the ocean. Mancini tapped some keys, and the words Seychelles with the coordinates appeared.

“What the hell is going on?”

“International waters,” Mancini answered. In the background, the sound of an aircraft could be heard before it came into view. On the screen, the people on the yacht, who looked to be having some kind of party on deck, looked up at the plane as it came into view.

We couldn’t hear what was being said as they pointed, but there was obvious panic as the craft got closer and lower to the aft of the ship, away from the partiers, some of whom I recognized as the perps I was just asking him about. “Is that a military aircraft?”

“Looks like, maybe out of commission.” That twitch in my eye got worst.

It ramped up some when the hull opened up, and something was lowered to the deck. Since it was covered, there was no way to tell what it was until a figure roped itself down low enough to remove the covering to reveal a cage. The figure scampered back up the rope into the aircraft, and a latch was opened on the cage to reveal three large animals.

“What dafuq are those?”

“Lions,” Mancini said with a bit of awe, and it was then I heard my daughter speak for the first time.

“Not just lions, Uncle Hank.”

“If they’re not just lions, what da…what are they, Mengele?”

“Daddy, have you ever heard of Tsavo?” Mancini choked on the sip of water he’d just taken from the expensive bottle of crap he’s so fond of, but I didn’t have time to question her further because, on the screen, pandemonium broke out as the lions made their way along the deck to the crowd of people all dressed in their formal best and started attacking.

It happened fast, just a flash of movement, and then there was blood, guts, and screams of terror as I sat rooted to my seat, trying to make sense of what the hell I was looking at. “What the fuck did I raise?”