Out of Plans (The Mercenaries #2) (27 page)

“You're alright,” she whispered, her eyes wandering over the little boys who still stood in front of her. “No matter what, you're alright now. We'll help you.”

She let him cry for a minute or two, then gently pulled the little boy away. She smiled into his face and wiped away his tears. When he seemed calm enough, she stood up and gently moved him back to stand with his friends.

There were papers scattered across the island in the room and they rifled through them. There were addresses and dates, but none of it meant anything to them. There were names, but when Kingsley asked the kids about them, they said they didn't know anything. They'd been taken from their homes, from parents who couldn't pay debts, or simply snatched off of streets, and brought a long distance to a strange place. A cold place. Somewhere with lots of other kids, like them. They'd only been brought to the city recently.

There was a file cabinet in the corner across from the open doorway, and while the men went through the papers on the island, Lily started tearing through the files. The top drawer was filled with information that to her looked like code for diamond heists. Maybe that was the real reason why Stankovski wanted a spot in the diamond district; not just a place to peddle his dirty goods, but a home base for a theft ring.

She found the pictures in the third drawer. There were folders full of papers, a lot of addresses and a lot of dates. More of the same. She figured it was useless, and was about to close the drawer when a file in the very back fell open. She pulled it out and opened it.

Oh. My. God.

She had seen a lot of sick shit over the past five years. Hell, she'd blown a guy's head off with a sawed off shotgun, at point blank rage. That hadn't been pretty. Then she'd cut open Ivanov's stomach, with a blade that had been sticking out of her arm. Pretty nasty. But nothing compared to what she saw in those pictures in Stankovski's filing cabinet.

“He's selling them,” she whispered.

“What?” Marc grunted, not looking up from the piece of paper he was reading.

“They're for sale,” she cleared her throat before she spoke. It caught their attention, and both men looked at her.

“He's selling children?” Kingsley asked, but she kept staring at Marc.

“He's selling them. Like he bought my sister, he bought these kids, and he's
selling them
. Did you know?” she demanded.

“Huh!?” his gaze bounced between her and Kingsley. She stepped closer to him.

“He's fucking selling children to pedophiles!” she shouted. “Did you know about this!? When you went to work for this asshole, did you goddamn know he sold little boys to rapists!?
Did you fucking know!?
”

She was shrieking by the end, and all she could think about was what Marc had once said to her, “
...I'm not of those 'no women, no kids' mercenaries …
”, long ago. Over the months, Lily had often wondered if she'd somehow fallen in love with Marc during their short time together. She accepted him for what he was, a ruthless killer and a cunning conman.

But if he had knowingly helped Stankovski buy and sell children for sex, so help her, she really would shoot him in the head.

“How could you ask me that!?” Marc shouted back. She threw the folder at him and the photos went flying around the room.

“You'd do anything for the right price, right!? How could you fucking work for him!?
They're children!
At least my sister had a fighting chance! At least they took her against her will! They're kids, De Sant!
They're just kids!
” she screamed at him.

He moved fast, and before she could even put up a fight, his arms were around her. She held onto him and cried into his shoulder.

“I didn't know, sweetheart. You know I wouldn't do that. I'm an awful goddamn person, but I would never do something like that,” Marc told her.

“Jesus, these are sick,” Kingsley groaned from behind them.

“How could one person be so evil? Why isn't anything enough for him?” Lily whispered, struggling to catch her breath.

“I don't know. But we're going to find him, and we're going to make him pay. Pull yourself together and let's go get this asshole.”

Lily nodded and pushed away from him. She wiped at her eyes and glanced at the island top. So many pictures, of so many little boys, all in various poses. Some clothed. Some not clothed. Some alone. Most not alone. And in more than a few of them, in all her bleached blonde glory, was the Russian bombshell herself. Laughing into the camera, a child's face pinched in her hand. In one, she was forcing a kid to bend over. Another one featured her whip.

Lily was in the bedroom before she even realized she was moving. Roksana was where they'd left her, tied up in her chair. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but her face from the nostrils down was still coated in blood. She smirked, her eyes full of condemnation.

“What's wrong with you?” Lily asked, standing a few feet back. Roksana lifted one shoulder in a shrug, as if she were bored.

“I could ask you the same question,” she replied. Lily felt like she couldn't catch her breath.

“They're children. The diamonds, the women, the drugs, I get all that, I really do. But …
children,
” Lily stressed. Roksana finally looked her in the eye, and she smiled broadly.

“
You
see children.
I
see dollar signs. Did you like the pictures? My own personal collection is in a scrapbook I keep in my safe. Better than anything you saw in there, I assure you.”

Lily's Glock held fifteen bullets in its clip.

She emptied fourteen of them into Roksana Stankovski.

“One left,” Lily whispered, looking down at her gun. The gun that's bullets had never hit anything, until that night.

“Sweetheart,” Marc sighed, walking up next to her. She just kept staring down at her gun, till she felt his hand come to rest against her back. Then she jerked her head up and slid the gun into its holster.

“One bullet left. Let's get the fuck out of here.”

They left the kids on the street, with Kingsley giving them strict instructions on what to tell the police. Shockingly, not much time had elapsed since they'd entered the building, but they could hear sirens in the distance. Marc and Kingsley said goodbye to the kids, laughing and joking with them, but Lily kept her distance. Too much rage was still flowing through her veins. She'd finally become the person she'd never wanted to be; the kind of person who definitely shouldn't be around children.

She took off before the men, and by the time they caught up to her, she was in the Escalade, turning the ignition. Kingsley climbed into the backseat, with Marc automatically taking the shotgun position.

“Lily, maybe we should -”

She burned rubber while peeling out of the parking spot.

Traffic at six in the morning in New York wasn't exactly smooth, but Lily broke more than a few laws while driving back to South Bronx.

“Darling, I appreciate that you're a little upset, but maybe you should take it easy?” Kingsley suggested from behind her. She glared and pressed down harder on the gas pedal.

“Slow the fuck down!” Marc demanded, bracing his hands against the dashboard as she took a corner too fast.

“I don't have time to slow down! That asshole was there! How the fuck did he get out!? He knew we would find out his little side business – we have to get to him,” Lily growled, taking another corner.

“Lily, he's probably already on a plane. He probably had a secret staircase built in a wall, or an escape route through the sewer. He ditched out after the first gun shot. He's on a plane to Moscow right now,” Marc told her. Lily shook her head, yanking the wheel. They drifted through a stop light and she hit the gas. The tires squealed, urging the car towards the house they'd left behind only an hour before.

Has it really been an hour? How many days have I have been doing this? Days of sand, and jungle, and roads, and fighting, and killing. So much.

She didn't bother parking in the driveway; they jumped the curb and skidded on the grass, coming to a stop just before the edge of the porch. Both Kingsley and Marc were shouting at her, but she ignored them and leapt out of the car, sprinting for the door.

Kingsley had a put a padlock on it, but a couple well placed kicks and one violent thrust with her shoulder, and she was in the building. She took the stairs two at a time, ignoring Marc as he yelled and followed behind her.

She immediately grabbed the blanket off their make shift bed and she carried it into the front bedroom, tossing it onto the floor. Then she began dropping guns into the center of it, fully intending to carry their entire arsenal to Stankovski.

“Take a fucking breath!” Marc snapped as he grabbed her shoulders and whirled her around. She shoved at his chest.

“I don't have time! If you don't want to help, fine, but then stay the fuck out of my way!”

“He's gone, Lily! He's
gone!
”

Marc was shouting in her face, and his hands were gripping her arms so tight, they hurt. Still, she continued to struggle against his hold, even as he pulled her closer.

“He's not. There's still time. There's still time, De Sant. He's not gone, and we're the only ones that can stop him,” she panted against his shoulder.

“My name is Marc,” he whispered in her ear. She chuckled and finally stopped moving. She curled her fingers around the sides of his vest, squeezing so tight her nails bent backwards.

“How could we not know?” she whispered back, staring at the wall across from them. “How … after all this time? I thought I knew everything about him. For fuck's sake, I know when his baptism was! I knew his home address in Moscow, I knew about his diamond smuggling, I know where he went to school, how he met Roksana. How could I have not found this?”

“He's good at hiding things, sweetheart. Better than we thought.”

“He doesn't hide any of his other dirty deeds.”

“This one was dirtier than most.”

“I know we're bad people,” she started. Marc began to argue, but she pulled away from him and shook her head. “
We are
. Maybe that doesn't give me the right to judge. But there's thing I won't do, things I won't be a part of. I like getting paid as much as the next guy, but I would never steal another human being and sell them. I would
never
sell a child.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. She could hear the floorboards creak as Kingsley paced in the hall, but she kept her eyes on Marc.

“Neither would I,” he finally agreed. “My morals are definitely looser than yours, but I'd rather just kill someone than sell them into a life of torture.”

“Good. Then we can keep moving,” she said, and turned back to her pile of guns. She heard Kingsley finally enter the room.

“And where exactly do you propose we move to?” he asked, moving to stand next to her.

“Ithaca,” she replied.

“I'm sorry, did you say Ithaca? As in upstate New York?”

“Yes.”

“As in four hours away, if we're lucky with the traffic?”

“Yes.”

“As in we're going to drive -”

“
Kingsley.
”

“I'm sorry, but what the fuck is going on? Why are you so sure Stankovski hasn't left? And why the fuck are we going to Ithaca, New York?” he demanded, taking a rifle out of her hands.

“Those kids weren't living there, did you see that room? And that one kid said that they had been moved, that they had been kept somewhere cold, somewhere with lots of other kids. Stankovski was in the process of moving them; holding them there till they could be taken to their buyers. The rest of the kids are somewhere else. Where do you hide a couple dozen children?” Lily asked, squatting down and grabbing a corner of the blanket.

“A farm in the middle of nowhere would be pretty fucking perfect,” Marc mumbled from behind her. She nodded and folded the blanket all around the guns.

“Yeah, that's what I thought. He knows we're onto him, and he probably wants to flee the country, but he has to clean his tracks a little. INTERPOL has their suspicions about him, but no concrete evidence, nothing legally attained that they can make stick. He works very hard to keep it that way. So I would bet my life that right now, he's racing to that farm,” Lily explained.

“To clean house,” Kingsley's voice was soft.

“Yes. Now you see why I'm in such a fucking hurry,” she growled.

She finished rolling the blanket around the guns and went to pick up the mass, but Marc gently shoved her aside and picked it up himself. While he adjusted the load in his arms, she set about reloading her Glock.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Kingsley snapped, holding up his hands. “Let me see if I've got this straight – we're going to some farm in the middle of nowhere New York, allegedly near Ithaca, that may or may not be a station for transporting children into the sex slave trade industry.”

“
Yes,
” Marc and Lily answered in unison.

“And let me guess, you know nothing about this farm?” he checked. Lily shrugged and glanced at Marc.

“I know there's a barn, and a main house, and that it's five miles from any of its nearest neighbors,” he offered.

“No floor plans? Blueprints? Anything?”

“Nothing.”

“And what do you propose we do when we get there?”

Everyone was silent. Kingsley's eyes bounced between Lily and Marc. She stared at him for a second, but she couldn't stand it. She slammed her magazine back into the Glock and locked it into place before racking the slide.

“We kill this motherfucker,” she finally replied, her teeth clenched together. Kingsley grabbed her arm and stopped her movements.

“Yes, but
what's your plan?
” he insisted. She laughed, and the sound was loud in the quiet house, startling everyone.

“
Darling,
” she mocked his voice as she wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. “Haven't you figured it out yet?
I'm all out of plans.
”