Closing my eyes, I focus on something, anything, trying to conjure a song I love and a melody I can get lost in while I’m being appraised by a man who looks like he’s old enough to be my father.
Sadness wells in my eyes, but I choke it back and start singing. The words of a song by Birdy take hold, and I get lost in the lyrics. My voice bounces off the walls, and the gentleness of the tune makes the tears I’d been holding back trickle down my cheeks.
By the time I finish, I’m crying. The man who brought me in here is still staring at me. He hasn’t moved closer, which I expected him to. His eyes sear through me as if he’s trying to piece together a puzzle he can’t work out.
“You have talent,” he tells me after a long bout of silence. He straightens in the chair, then pushes up to full height. Slowly, he makes his way closer, and my breath catches in my throat when he stops inches from me. The warmth emanating off him has my lungs struggle to work. He doesn’t just take over a room — he imposes himself on the people in it. As if he owns every person he comes into contact with.
“Thank you,” I quickly whisper, realizing he’s waiting for my answer. His touch lingers on my face before slowly dipping down my neck. When he reaches the neckline of my dress, an involuntary shiver races through me.
“Your skin is the color of chocolate,” he observes. “I wonder if you taste as sweet.” The moment the word is out of his mouth, he leans in and ever so slowly traces the tip of his tongue over my cheek, then moves his mouth toward my neck before sucking the flesh hard.
I stumble backward in shock, my eyes wide at what just happened, but he doesn’t seem perturbed at all. His tongue snakes out, licking his lips as he regards me with fire blazing from his eyes.
“You’re delicious.” The smirk that graces his expression now is pure evil. “Come here,” he commands in a tone that means business. His eyes glower when I don’t move. “If I have to make you, it will only hurt more.”
My feet shuffle toward him as more tears streak down my cheeks. He smiles, his hand gripping the back of my neck, holding me in place when he suddenly pushes me to my knees.
My eyes widen as I stare up at him, pleading silently for him not to do this, but I know it’s pointless. He’s not going to listen to me. I’m here to please the clients. I want to be strong. I want to fight back. But the moment I do, I’m only going to be hurt even more. In that moment, I try to go somewhere safer in my mind.
“Those pretty, plump lips are going to do things to me that a girl like you has probably never experienced,” he warns me before he pushes my face against his crotch.
As the tears fall free, I realize today, my situation is going to break me down.
Chapter Sixteen
JD
Even though it’s only been twenty-four hours, the tension that’s got a hold of me is slowly twisting me up in knots. When Jackson and Mark agreed to bring me on board for Autumn’s search, I dove right in. We’ve been in the office; tracking, searching for any security camera footage, but we’ve come up with nothing.
I contacted a few of my dad’s colleagues. While we wait for them to come through with something, anything, we have to go through files and files of traffickers who mainly focus on the New York areas. We’ve narrowed it down to a handful of names, but without confirmation, it could take longer to find her.
My phone buzzes on the desk beside me, and when I pick it up, I tap the answer button before pressing the device to my ear.
“Hello?”
“James Montagu.” The deep voice of Timothy Sutherland comes through the line. The man who worked with my father for close to fifteen years. He was someone my father trusted, and now I’m asking him for help.
“Mr. Sutherland, it’s good to hear from you,” I tell him, hoping he’s calling with news, with information I can use to find my girl.
“I wanted to let you know I’ve spoken to your father’s superiors, and they’ve agreed to help you with the search. We have a team on standby as well as the information about the last seen whereabouts of the man who killed your father. When your father didn’t check-in, we tracked his phone to a place in Brooklyn, New York. The warehouse was abandoned years ago, but there are no records of it being bought, so we’re thinking our man may be using it as a storage facility.”