I raised a brow. “That wasn’t the story you fed me Tuesday night, doll.”
“Matthew, as you so judiciously pointed out at Skylar and Brandon’s guesthouse, I am part owner of over fifty houses used to abuse and transport young women across the greater Northeast.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know it!” I blurted out without even thinking.
Something like relief fluttered over her fine features.
“Didn’t I?” she asked softly. “You seemed to think I did.”
It wasn’t until that moment I realized that deep down, I wanted to believe her. I’d been so angry about what I’d found. Felt so blindsided by the measures her husband had taken to traffic what had to be hundreds, maybe thousands of girls to other slimeballs, that even the thought of the woman I loved being a knowing accessory to those actions made me feel physically ill.
But now, a few days after the truth had sunk in, a few days after my skin still yearned for her touch, my heart still hollered for hers, even in my sleep…I didn’t know what to believe. On the bed, when I’d shown her the videos, she had looked horrified. Terrified. And I knew that woman on the screen. I knew her hair, her legs, the shoes she had been wearing the night we met.
But I still remembered her response: It isn’t me.
“I—I don’t know,” I said, sinking into the chair across from her.
Nina unfolded her hands, turning one over so it reached toward me, palm up. I stared at it. I wanted to take it. Just the touch of her, that impossibly smooth skin. But right now, this close, her inimitable scent of roses and light drifting toward me…
No. I couldn’t. I was confused enough.
“Do you—do you still have the video on your phone?” she asked. “The one where I…meet…this Ben Vamos?”
I ground my teeth at the thought of the skeezy bastard whom Derek and I had discovered was a family connection of Gardner’s from back when his name was still its original Hungarian, Károly Kertész. They had been working together for years, with Vamos running the houses through which they had trafficked girls from Eastern Europe into the country. With, apparently, Nina’s help.
Still, I nodded curtly. The IT guys had deleted all evidence from my hard drive, including my access to the secure file server where we could view digitized evidence. But I’d rebelled and saved one to my own device, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the truth. That Nina was a liar. A traitor.
Wasn’t she?
“May I look at it, please?”
I frowned. What was her game here? But I still pulled my phone from my pocket and flipped to the video in question. Nina showed no surprise I still had access to it. I placed it on the table and tried not to inhale that floral aroma when Nina leaned in with me to watch.
I’d seen it at least a hundred times. The black Escalade pulling to the curb of a shitty New Jersey townhouse. The back door opens, and out walks Nina in her prim white dress, her sleek blonde hair tousled around her face. I knew exactly how many steps it took for her to walk from the sidewalk, through the gate, and up the porch steps. She knocks on the door, and it’s opened by Vamos, a thick middle-aged man with gray hair buzzed close, a stained shirt the color of old socks, and a permanent frown etched onto a reddened face.
They talk, and after a few minutes, she enters the house. Later, she leads a parade of girls from the house to the Escalade that will take them to a private airport, where they would disappear from the investigator’s lens.
Knowing all of this, I scowled as Nina greeted Vamos like a friend. Kisses to the cheek. Smiles and touches. The whole deal.
I wanted to punch a hole through the concrete walls surrounding us.
“Pause it.” Nina’s voice was a soft-spoken command, but a command nonetheless.
Scowling, I obeyed and stopped the video. “What?”
“Matthew,” she said, and this time her voice cracked. “How could you not know?”
I stared at the video, which, for all intents and purposes, still showed a woman that looked exactly like Nina. I honestly didn’t know what she meant.
“How could I think otherwise?” I answered, feeling like my throat was constricting as I looked back up and felt the hurt and pain in her eyes.
God, I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe she had nothing to do with this. That this woman, this beautiful siren who had warmed my cold, callous heart over the last six months wasn’t capable of conspiring to sell women like cattle into sex slavery.
And yet, there she was, clear as day, wearing those sleek high heels, at least three inches high that tapered into deadly stilettos, smoothed over her feet in waterfall-colored leather. The exact same shoes she had been wearing the night we met. The same shoes she was wearing now.
The legs of her chair screeched on the concrete floor as Nina pushed back from the table. She strode to the door, then turned to stand in the frame.
“Stand up, please?”
I frowned, still staring at the screen with blood boiling in my chest. Still, I did as she asked, shoving my chair hard enough back that it practically screamed through the small room.
“What?” I snarled as I stepped closer. “You want to look me in the eye when you’re lying, sweetheart?”
“Look at him,” she said calmly as if I wasn’t spitting like an alley cat in heat. “And look at her. Then look at me now.”
I did as she asked. And then did it again. And on the third time, I started when her meaning was suddenly crystal clear.
The doorway next to us was about average—maybe eighty inches tall, just four inches over my
