“And?” she asked. “What happened next?”
“We decided that walking away wasn’t an option. And we had two things on our side: time and ability. Judd had just quit his job at MI6, I was freelancing, so was Naz, and Ravi didn’t much like working at the bar anyway. Judd rented us a bigger apartment, and we set about learning everything we never wanted to know about the Thai sex-trafficking industry. Starting with another visit to the Angels Playground.” Alaric closed his eyes for a moment, remembering what he didn’t want to. “That place was sick.”
“Did you go as a punter?”
“We all did. It seemed the best way to work out what was going on. Ravi drank too much and puked in the toilet, and his girl made him tea. Naz claimed he’d gotten confused and just wanted a massage. Judd couldn’t get it up. For real. Didn’t even have to pretend.”
“And you?”
“Me? I got Rune.”
Alaric would never forget that first meeting. He’d asked for a girl on the younger side, expecting a teenager. Not barely ten-year-old Rune, cowering on the far end of a dirty single bed in a negligée. When she saw him, she tried to smile, and someone had obviously schooled her in the art of acting coquettish, but not very well. It didn’t help that she was so thin he could see her ribs and obviously exhausted.
Instinct had warred with reason. Instinct told him to find the man who’d shown him into that room and break his fucking neck. But reason said they needed to play the long game, and the thugs who worked at the club were probably as replaceable as the girls.
“What you want?” Rune asked. “Massage? Suck? Love?”
“Let’s talk. I want to talk.”
He crouched down beside the bed, trying to make himself as small and unthreatening as possible.
“Talk?”
Shit, did she even speak English?
“Talk.” He pointed at his mouth. “Words.”
What was he thinking? She was half-naked. Feeling quite sick, he’d wrapped a grubby sheet around her in much the same way he’d done with Emmy earlier. That had scared Rune even more, and she’d tried to pull it off again.
“No, not allowed.”
“You’re not allowed to cover yourself?” He mimed wrapping himself up and shook his head.
“Not allowed.”
Fuck, this was a nightmare. The kid had a bowl of condoms sitting on a table next to the bed. Alaric felt ashamed to have a dick.
“How long have you been here? Worked here?”
“Work here?” She held up a hand, all the fingers and her thumb extended. “Five year. Live here? Always.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I very good.”
Bile rose in Alaric’s throat. He might have retired from the assassination game, but he knew at that moment he’d do at least one more job.
From then on, the men who would become Sirius spent their nights in the red-light district. Daytimes were for research and planning and a few hours of restless sleep. Alaric forked out an obscene amount of Judd’s trust fund for Rune’s company each evening. He became the Angels Playground’s number-one pervert. Handing cash to a pimp was uncomfortable, but as Judd had put it, they were confident of getting a refund soon.
One thing that became evident before long was that Rune was sick. She coughed from a constant cold, she had sores on her back that wouldn’t heal, and each time Alaric saw her, she looked thinner, although he’d taken to bringing her snacks. They no longer had the luxury of planning for every eventuality. They’d have to go in sooner rather than later.
And they had. Naz jammed their communications, Ravi snatched Rune and got her the hell out of there, and the final score had been Alaric and Judd eleven, pimps and traffickers nil. Thanks to the cash they liberated, they’d even made a profit.
“Rune was a prostitute?” Emmy was as horrified as Alaric had been. “She’d have been what…? Ten?”
“Ten years old, but she’d experienced things no adult ever should.”
“You took care of them?”
There was no need to ask who “them” was. The girls and the men who sold them, taken care of in two very different ways.
Alaric nodded. “Most of the trafficked women went back to their families, but Rune had been born in that place. Her mother was a sex worker, and her father was a client.”
“What happened to her mother?”
“One of the older girls said she got beaten to death the year before. Or maybe two years before—time seemed to warp there. Rune had nobody, and she also had the beginnings of type 1 diabetes.”
“So you kept her?”
“We couldn’t just let her disappear into an orphanage. One of us had to claim her as ours. Ravi was on the young side, and she looks nothing like Naz, which left me or Judd. And can you imagine Judd taking responsibility for a child?”
Emmy’s snort told Alaric everything he needed to know.
“So we brokered a new birth certificate with me named as her father and got her a British passport. By then, she was taking insulin, and she’d been living with the four of us for two months. And we’d worked out she was smart. Seriously smart. Her English was getting better every day, and all she wanted to do was learn.”
“So where is she now?”
“At a boarding school in Hertfordshire.”
“You sent her to boarding school?”
“It was her idea—she’d managed to read Harry Potter by that point, and science is her crack. We offered her the choice of living in London and going to a local school, but she had her heart set on Ridgeview Prep.”
“And she’s happy there?”
“She loves it. We take it in turns to visit.”
Emmy reached out for Alaric’s free hand. Took it in both of hers. “You did a good thing, Prince.”
“We did the only thing we could under the circumstances. And strange
