“Long story short, a few months ago a little girl showed up half-dead on our doorstep. Her old master almost killed her and she’s been living with us since then and now she’s ours.”
“Sounds like something Lindberg would do,” the man muttered.
“I swear to god if you interrupt me again I will hunt you down and slit your throat.”
“Not likely,” Taj countered, and he was probably right. You didn’t survive being a SEAL by being weak or stupid, and Ian regularly got taken out in video games by being reckless and impulsive. The odds were definitely not in his favor. “But go on, I promise to keep my comments to myself.”
“She went missing. Didn’t take her phone or any of her things, didn’t leave a note. We think he took her and we don’t fucking know where.”
“Christ.”
“Exactly. And this monster is decent at covering his tracks. Used fake names, burner phones, dummy accounts. Thorough. To us anyway.”
Yeah, to them. Ry knew his way around tech, but he wasn’t a hacker. Taj on the other hand might look like a meathead but actually had some brains in that thick skull of his and used them to do some serious grey hat shit.
“Taj, it’s Ryker. This guy has habits like everyone else. I did some digging and got Cyrus to let me into the archives of that old kink chat site of his. Asshole used a similar handle to the fake profile he gave us and I found his old conversations with our girl. That’s all we have to go on, and… We hit a wall. We need your help.”
Taj sucked air through his teeth and if death glares were actual lasers, Ian’s phone would’ve been incinerated on their coffee table. Ian wanted to reach through the phone and strangle this motherfucker but he was their best hope.
“Why should I? Maybe she left on her own.”
“How fucking dare you?”
“And there’s the Hulk. Hey, Lindberg.”
“Fuck you, Taj. If you’re not going to help us just say so and we’ll find someone else.”
“No you won’t. Not anyone as good as I am. But seriously, give me a reason to think this girl didn’t just get tired of being your fucktoy and walked out.”
Hudson didn’t turn green but otherwise he totally looked like he was Hulking out. Took a lot to turn the teddybear into a rabid grizzly but Taj had a funny way of saying precisely the wrong thing, and they were there. Shit.
“Look,” Ryker broke in, his voice low and controlled in the way of a snake about to strike. “I swear on my mother’s grave that if we find her and she’s happy, we will walk away, end of. But this guy… He meant to kill her before and he’s going to finish the job this time.”
“How do you know he hasn’t already?”
“He could have,” Ian conceded, his heart hitting the floor as he said it. “But if he took her we don’t think he has. This asshole is a sadist, and not the fun kind. If he was going to kill her, he would’ve left a bloodbath and her dismembered body in the loft to fuck with us. He didn’t and we’re hoping his fondness for torture is going to come in handy for once. He’s gonna want to draw this out.”
Saying it out loud made visions he’d been blocking from his mind flash before his eyes: Cosy beaten and bloody, skin hanging in tatters because he’d literally flayed her alive, pixie hair matted and filthy. Broken bones and black eyes, his beautiful little babygirl curled up in a ball or chained to a wall in some revolting basement, crying for her daddies to come save her. Anguish and fury tore at him in equal measure while he waited for Taj to say something, anything.
“He sounds like a real sick fuck,” his old buddy finally muttered. “Send me everything you’ve got and I’ll see what I can do.”