Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(17)

When it’s in, I text out with the phone I smuggled in. The hack is live. I pull my cable out. This is going well.

That’s when I see her staring at me. She got the f*cking pillowcase off, and she knows now. Will she talk if pressed? Will she use this information to secure herself favors in this place? To secure her freedom?

I put my finger over my lips, then I finish my job. I wrap the cables, shove them into the fat suit pouch, and carefully replace the panel I sawed away. I use a kit to mix up a pigment of putty and swipe it around, then I replace the dresser.

Fifteen minutes left. I turn to Nikki. Again the fear comes into her eyes. I shake my head and remove her earplugs, but not the gag. “I’m your friend,” I say. “Understand?”

She nods.

“You will say nothing of this.”

She shakes her head no, yes, no, grunting, desperate to communicate.

I sigh and remove the gag. “Take me with you,” she whispers. “You can do it. I can tell you how!”

I kneel in front of her. “If I take you with me, it means I rescue one person. But with what we learn here? We rescue everybody here today and everybody who will ever be here.”

“And I f*cking care about that why?”

“Because I care about it, that’s why,” I tell her.

“Take me.”

“Not an option,” I say. “You have exactly two choices. You keep quiet about what you just saw and we pull you all out in two weeks, or you tell what you saw and you never get out.”

She gives me a piercing look, and I know she’s thinking about the angles. The third and fourth options. This is a type of girl I know well.

“You want to be a fool and try bargaining with these people?” I put my hands on either arm of her chair and get really close. “You think they’ll honor anything? I’m your only hope.”

She just watches me. She knows. She gets it. “I want to go home,” she whispers.

I stand. “I watch you all. It’s not so bad.”

She glares at me. “Yeah, not bad for me yet. But I won’t be in this room after your visit. I go somewhere worse. An underground brothel and it’s not nice like this one.”

“We’ll find you,” I say.

“Thanks a f*cking lot,” she says.

I sit on the bed. We didn’t think of where Nikki would go after this. They will see her as having been used up. Her virginity gone. I can only imagine the type of brothel she’ll go to now.

“This is the best we can do. It’s this or nothing, Nikki. We’ll find you.”

She looks away.

I kneel in front of her. “We’ll come for you.”

She shakes me off with curses.

“Did you meet the other women here?”

She shrugs.

“Have you met the nun?”

She snorts.

“What’s so funny?”

“Her god isn’t helping her much, is he?”

“So it would appear,” I say. “How does she seem?”

“Um…like a nun,” Nikki says. “I don’t know why everyone loves her. Especially the Russian girls. All she knows is the Bible. She doesn’t remember shit from her past.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Amnesia. Like on a soap opera?”

I feel the blood drain from my face.

“She doesn’t remember shit until two years ago when she woke up in some tree on a mountainside. She only knows her name from a tattoo. She thinks Jesus is her savior.” Nikki flips her dark hair from her eyes. “Some savior. I think she should go see Jesus for a refund, if you ask me.”

Tanechka remembers nothing? A nun makes sense as a cover. But a nun with amnesia?

My heart thunders. All this time I imagined she was on a mission. That my hands-off stance helped her. That she could protect herself if it came to it…

“What does she do when they mistreat her?”

“Um…have you ever seen that bumper sticker ‘What Would Jesus Do?’”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a nun, dude. She doesn’t give a crap if they shove her around.”

The room swims before my eyes. Tanechka had a temper. She never allowed people to mistreat her.

These men could do anything to her, and she wouldn’t be able to stop them. Maybe they have done things.

I put her in this place sure as anything the day I threw her into the gorge. Predatel, I called her. Traitor. Betrayer.

“And then there’s what her buyer will do,” Nikki continues. “Though my money’s on Charles in Charge doing the nun way before that.”

I stiffen. “Charles in Charge?”

“The psycho that runs this place. He makes her eat with him sometimes, like this sicko date thing. You know that movie where there’s a devil boy and all the animals run away from him? Add twenty years and Axe body spray and you get Charles. Everybody’s all about the nun. The guard who let you in here with the beard like biker Santa Claus? We think he wants to throw up those black skirts too—they demoted him here to the basement. Who knew the hot blonde nun thing was so powerful with guys? Everyone wants a piece of nun ass, and now here you come—”

“Enough.”

I stand and look at my watch. Thirteen minutes. I gave my word that I wouldn’t grab Tanechka unless she was in danger.