Phantom
The alert woke me.
Getting up from my bed, I walked over to my computers and spotted a lone rider entering the compound.
They were back.
They’d been gone for close to two weeks now.
A lot could happen in two weeks.
I should know.
Lives can change forever. In my case they did but I didn’t want to think about that. I couldn’t. It was too painful. Every time I did, all I could think about was what I lost.
And I lost a lot.
Seeing St. James, I knew my time was up. I never wanted my new family to know of my past. It was mine alone. Reaper only found out by accident. That was shortly after I arrived. I thought he would make me leave but he didn’t. What I really liked about Reaper was that he didn’t press me for more information and I didn’t offer.
We seemed to fall into a simple kind of friendship and over the years, that friendship turned into mutual respect. I respected his position in the club and he respected that my life was my own. He only had one request. To let him know if my past was going to affect the club.
Over the last three years nothing. Everything was great. I could breathe again. Then slowly, like a snail moving across the road, the bad shit began to build.
What most people forget is that eventually the snail will make it across the road.
And after ten years, my snail had finally arrived.
I’ve played a long, hard game. Even back then, I knew there was only way for my story to end.
What I did to him left him no recourse.
He would find me and he would kill me.
Nothing and no one would be able to stop him.
My brothers all believed they could protect me and I loved them all for that. No one could save me from the devil himself. If they knew the whole truth, they would understand. The fact was, I only gave them the cliff notes version, the scrubbed clean Disney princess version.
No sense in everyone having nightmares for the rest of their lives.
Not even my own biological brothers knew the real truth. There was only one man who knew what really happened.
Someone I trusted.
Someone I knew would never betray me.
The one person who went against orders and moved heaven and earth to save me. I wished he was here with me now. He would know what to do. Because I didn’t.
Life was funny sometimes. After everything I endured, I returned to civilian life and disappeared. Not because I wanted to but because I had to. I couldn’t hurt those who meant the most to me. I had become a living, breathing reminder of their failure. I’d seen their faces, saw their disappointment, regret, disgust. It became too much for me. So, I left. I disappeared into the darkness where I lived for a few years. Never seeing any of them ever again. Until my baby brother James found me. Refusing to leave my side, I put him to work.
He became my eyes and ears out in the real world. He was also the one who held me at night when my terrors became too much. He took care of me, accepted what I had become, when our family couldn’t.
He was also the only one who knew my secret.
When Player found me on the dark web, I thought he was just a poser, some kid playing at being a hacker. He was funny and he made me laugh. Which I hadn’t in a while. We quickly formed an online friendship and helped each other when we could. What Player doesn’t know was that while his club was gearing up and began to actively seek out human traffickers, I had been doing it for years.
The shit I knew would destroy governments, rip families apart, change the face of the world we lived in today. The Golden Skulls may believe they are making a difference, but they barely scratched the surface. If they ever found out that their own government, the United States Government was in the human trafficking business and had been since the beginning of its creation, it would destroy them.
What everyone didn’t seem to understand was that Human Trafficking had been around for millennia. The majority of American’s believed human slavery started with the first African slave ship that landed in Virginia in 1619. The ship called White Lion, was owned by Robert Rich, the 2nd Earl of Warwick and that because of the Civil War, slavery was abolished in the United States.