Special Forces: Operation Alpha: Protecting Beauty (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Bounty Hunters: The Marino Bros. Book 5) (3 page)

After the trial was over, and all of the rescued victims testified against their captors, he couldn’t deal with the protocol anymore. Leaving his new career had been the best thing he could do for himself. His parents continued to show their support when he’d announced his decision to join the Navy and train to be a SEAL. He was ready for action. He needed it. He needed to feel that what he was doing meant something. He was a man who wanted to take a stand. He didn’t want to be the man who let little girls and boys get raped on his watch. Not anymore.

And now Melody wanted to know all about that. She was his wife. His soul mate. She, more than anyone, had a right to know the kind of man he had been.

12 years earlier . . .

MUFFLED MOANS CAME in through the ear piece. Tex tapped on the keyboard in front of him, and glanced at the monitor to see which one of the rooms he was listening in on now, while transcribing what he heard. He fiddled with a nob on his right and then the moaning stopped.

Now he heard cries, soft cries interspersed with grunts. Shaking his head morosely, Tex fiddled with the nob again. In this room, he heard nothing but silence. Either the young girl who occupied that room had no client at the moment or she had left the room to go wash up in between clients. Usually the men were brought up stairs after being directed by whichever handler was on duty that evening. The women were given just fifteen minutes to rest, wash up between clients. Tex hated the night shifts. They were the worst. But it was necessary. The girls and boys in these locations needed to be kept safe; they never knew when the owners would show up and they could get information. Even though it was usually during the day that they got their best information, he was here. Again. And he had his job to do.

Tex didn’t turn the dial to the other two rooms just yet in this Maryland bordello, flop house, whatever the hell the Greek man who ran it was calling it now. He wanted to be sure the young girl who occupied this room was okay. She was so young. Tex strained to hear something from Cat’s room. Anything to let him know she was all right. The other four women were suffering. That he knew. They cried at night. Or raged quietly vowing revenge, and sometimes they snuck into each other’s rooms in the early hours of the morning and commiserated about their evening usually congregating in Susan’s room. But not Cat. She was the loner. Rarely did she communicate with the other girls. Well, not on his watch anyhow. And if she did it was of no significance. The only times he’d heard her speak for any length of time was to the men who visited her room. And even then her voice never gave anything away.

At just twenty-five himself, the case was killing him. He had signed up for this because he thought he’d be helping people. And he was, but this case, even more than the two he’d worked on before, turned his stomach. He was beginning to doubt that he was cut out for this type of detail. Gathering Intel was fine and well, but he hadn’t been prepared to wait months to act on it. For the past three months, he’d listened to the girls get raped, whipped, and perform sexual acts no human being should have to. To him it was rape even though the women didn’t say no on tape. They were kidnapped victims after all. That meant they were there against their will. All for the pleasure of some very sick twisted man’s fantasy. It was so wrong, and not how he pictured his career in the FBI. It sickened him.

He heard a door open and then close. No words were spoken. He heard the woman assigned to the room sit down heavily on the bed as evidenced by the creaking box spring. The sheets had been changed before she left and dumped in the dumb waiter in the hall that went directly to the basement and the laundry in this two story colonial. Tex didn’t have much longer to wait. There was a soft rap on the door before a man entered the room.

“Hello Cat,” came the gruff voice from the doorway. It must be a return customer, Tex thought. The man’s voice sounded vaguely familiar. He glanced down at the notes Patrick had left when his shift ended. Saw the notation he made about a certain politician.

His suspicion was confirmed when she answered. “Hello Mr. Jenkins.” The young woman’s reply was stated softly but devoid of emotion. She was either well-trained or completely and utterly hopeless as Tex and many of the other agents feared when they’d discussed her. They had dug up her history, and it wasn’t a pretty one. This young woman, nearly eighteen had been a slave for close to seven years as far as they could tell. It was practically the only life she knew. And God knows what her life had been like before that.

“Cat, I’m in a bit of a hurry tonight. I’d like to take you from behind. Please be as tight as you can for me. And wear the baseball cap with the hair tucked inside.” The man’s voice was a high pitched whine. He sounded almost desperate and Tex could tell just by his breathing he was a heavy man. He sounded like he was out of breath as she removed his clothes.

“Yes, sir,” came Cat’s quick retort. He heard her move to the bed while the man finished removing his clothes. Mr. Jenkins was the name he used when he visited one of the five bordellos in the area run by Demetrius Makas. But in Washington he went by the name of Congressmen Klosterman, an in the closet, but very much married right wing conservative. He visited Cat once a week, and liked them young, and usually male. He also visited one other location on Virginia Beach frequenting Hamid, a young Iranian boy who was quite popular with the Washington crowd. Tex shook his head in shame. He didn’t understand some people’s sick and twisted desires.

He hated the assignment. Yet, he also agreed with his superiors. Patrick Stoker, his immediate supervisor, kept reminding him of the importance in getting to the top of the chain in this sex scandal, or the ring leaders would just kidnap others and start their nefarious business from scratch once more. But meanwhile there were forty victims within a twenty-five mile radius that he knew of, aged sixteen to thirty, who were being abused nightly. Hell, hourly. With him listening every night. He was only allowed to interfere if it looked like someone would be killed. And then he had to go in as a pretend John, or drug addict and try to end the situation without blowing the entire undercover operation.

Tex couldn’t take the sounds coming from Cat’s room any longer. She was grunting, not because Jenkins was hurting her, but because he liked it when she made noises while he took her from behind. She was doing it to please him as was expected of her by her handlers. If she didn’t please the clients, she’d pay for it the next day. The sounds of him slapping against her were too much. Tex changed the dial and listened in on Donna’s room, a nineteen year old from Spain, then Lucia from Greece. Donna’s room was silent. Lucia was changing her sheets and humming softly in her task.

And then he started over again. Listening in on Geoff, the young Irish kid; he was twenty-three but was passed off as younger by the handlers. Then there was Jani, the Russian girl who was the oldest at this facility at twenty-seven. All was quiet in Susan’s room, a young woman still shrouded in mystery and whom they had yet to identify. Then it was back to Cat, just seventeen. Listening in on her once more, he realized she was changing her sheets getting ready for the next client to come up the stairs. Yes, the job was making him lose his faith; his feeling that he was doing something important was beginning to fade
.

His fist hit the wall beside his computer screen. He just didn’t know how much more of this he could take and be able to live with himself. It was just too damn much.

Tex woke up from his nightmare sweating profusely. His heart and mind were racing. It took a moment for him to get his bearings and realize where he was. Melody was beside him, beginning to sit up. He hadn’t dreamt about that in a long time. A very long time though the guilt crept in every now and then, like whenever he’d see a young girl with dark hair. Like when he’d first seen Akilah, his now adopted daughter. He felt Melody’s soft hand stroke his chest affectionately. Turning onto his side, he pulled her into his arms regretting that he woke her up.

“You were dreaming about her?” It was more of a statement than a question, but he answered her anyway.

“Yes. Her. All of them.” He’d told her everything over lunch. Well, the gist of it. She hadn’t needed to hear all the gory details, the things he’d heard while doing his surveillance. It was enough for her to surmise what happened in those kinds of places. He’d hated telling her about that part of his life. But like he’d known, she’d completely understood.

“I guess seeing her again brought it all back. The fear. The worry. The guilt.” He sighed as her arm tightened around his chest.

Melody hated that his guilt still ate at him. “Love, you were doing what you were told. And from what I’ve seen, you helped a lot of girls since then. And even though you feel guilty, can you imagine how many other victims there might have been had you not gotten the ring leaders?”

Tex kissed the top of her head. Her disheveled blond locks looked well-loved and he sank his hand into her thick mass of hair, just loving its feel and texture. He loved her hair. And he knew her words were true. His work with the FBI had prevented countless others from becoming victims by capturing the leaders, the rounders and kidnappers in Europe, the Iraqi and Greek organizers, the men who bought and sold the girls on the black market and those who arranged for their illegal transportation and helped to smuggle them into the United States with fake identification. It had been a huge coup for them all. A grand success for their service records. But he still questioned if it was worth it. The over forty victims he eavesdropped on in the middle of the night had to suffer long months before the rest of the investigation had fallen into place. And that had been something he hadn’t been able to deal with. It was why after the trial, and with just a year under his belt with the FBI he’d asked to be allowed to sign up with the SEALs. He needed the immediacy of rescue to heal his wounded soul. He needed a job with a purpose in which the result could be more immediately satisfying if all went according to plan.

Luckily, his superiors had understood, and they had known his technical skills learned in college and with them would be put to good use with the government anyhow. It would just be in another capacity. Two weeks following the grand jury trial, he was in California training with a newly created elite team. And those men became his brothers. He fought with them, beside them, and although he’d come home missing a leg after his second tour, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Those years repaired his soul, and made him almost whole again. It was Melody who repaired the rest.
His gift.

“I know. My mind tells me that, darlin’, but my heart just doesn’t want to buy it.”

Melody listened to his heart as she lay across him her legs entwined around his leg. She felt his fingers in her hair trying to sort her unruly curls. But the beat of his heart still gave away his unease. “Why? I mean, now it should be easier. You’ve seen her. She seemed happy up there on that balcony. She didn’t look like she was there against her will.”

He sighed. Her words were true.
But how could he be sure? How could he know his waiting hadn’t harmed her more?
“I know. And you are probably right,” he admitted. “But it’s all the years in between, Mel.” He sighed in frustration. “I don’t know. I guess it was her eyes. When we rescued her. They were void. You know like. . .dead eyes. The other girls cried, laughed, thanked us profusely, but not her. I was there when her hostel was taken, and I helped lead her to the waiting vans. Her eyes haunted me for so long and there was nothing in them.”

Melody looked up at Tex who was staring up at the ceiling of their hotel room. “Honey, you can’t live with that kind of guilt. She looks fine now. She healed. She is pregnant. That’s got to mean something. Up there on that balcony with that man, she looked like she was where she wanted to be.”

Tex didn’t answer right away. He couldn’t find the words to express what he was thinking in that moment. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I guess so,” he answered lamely. “I just wish I could be sure. Know that somehow her life turned out okay.”

His words built in their confidence but didn’t belie the tone or conviction in them, and Melody didn’t like that. But it did give Melody an idea. Her man was rational, and all about proof, facts, and evidence. If that is what it would take to help ease his mind then she would figure out a way to lighten that load.

She didn’t know if her idea was a good one or not. But she was going to suggest it anyway. She didn’t like seeing her man like this. Torturing himself over the past. He had been through so much, sacrificed so much. Even his leg had been lost for his convictions, and love for his country. She knew that if there was something to be done to save that woman without jeopardizing the mission, he would have done so. “Honey, why don’t you search her out,” Melody suggested. “Find out what happened to her. Maybe it will put these grim thoughts at bay, give you a little closure, so this guilt doesn’t eat at you anymore.”

Tex smiled down at his wife. She was always trying to fix things for him. He’d been planning on doing that anyhow, but loved her for suggesting it first. “I guess I could do that. But. . .when we get home, I’ll see what I can find out.” This time was about her. He could wait to get the answers he sought. He suddenly had enough small talk and flipped Melody onto her back positioning her underneath him and separating her already naked thighs.

Melody knew her husband needed to be in control once more, and gave herself over to his needs. Now it was about this. Raising herself up to meet her husband’s cock already nudging her entrance, she met his desire with her own. She was more than ready to accommodate him. But just before she gave herself over to the pleasure that awaited her, Melody decided that as soon as she had an opportunity she would do a little digging of her own. Her husband wasn’t the only one who was good with a computer. And to hell if she was letting him live with this guilt one day longer than he had to. Her woman’s intuition told her, this Cat, was right where she belonged, and probably gloriously happy like her. And like her, she owed a great deal of that to John “Tex” Keegan.