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  PROLOGUE

  Eighteen Years Ago

  Bella Caruso stared at her reflection in the cracked mirror, doubting for a moment that she was actually here. Was this what an out-of-body experience felt like? She knew, intellectually, that she was standing in the cramped bathroom. But she felt nothing. Not the cold, broken tile on her bare feet. Not the pain in her throat. Not the familiar soreness between her legs. Not the warm blood dripping from the knife in her hands.

  Then numbness took over and Bella froze, unable to think. Her mind was somewhere else. The only way she had survived the last year

  thirteen months, one week, three days

  was by shutting everything out. Blocking the pain, the humiliation, the anger. Forgetting her past, living each day beginning-to-end, burying the hope that she might be able to escape.

  Until tonight.

  The john would have killed her.

  She had no choice.

  it was him or you, him or you, him or you

  Her bruised neck would prove her story. That he had tried to strangle her while he had sex with her. Sergio would have to believe her.

  Tommy set you up. He hates you and wanted you to suffer.

  Slowly, the reality of her fate broke through the numbness. She would be dead by dawn if Sergio found out she had killed the john, no matter what he had done to her. Whores were a dime a dozen. She was just one whore in the stable, and if one whore could kill a john, the others might get ideas.

  you’re not a whore, you had no choice

  Run away. The idea that there might be help somewhere had long ago been beaten out of her. Run away and disappear. She’d been stealing a little bit here and there, keeping the bills rolled tight in a loose panel of the house she lived in. Lived in? She didn’t live in the house. She was kept prisoner there between the parties. Parties? That’s what Sergio called them. “Get ready for a party, baby.” Forced prostitution. The drinking. The drugs. It was the life.

  Bella hated the drugs. She’d gotten really good at faking a high, really good at faking everything in her life, waiting for her opportunity … They thought they’d broken her because she’d humiliated herself, done things she’d never thought she would do, but she kept a tiny ember burning inside, waiting for the moment when she could run. Run fast and keep running.

  But hope had been extinguished. Died with that john she knew only by the name Clark.

  She had to run, even though Sergio would hunt her down like an animal. He would find her. He’d moved her and the others from city to city to keep them on edge, to prevent them from learning the area, the people, making friends. Pick up a few new girls, sell a few others, and move on. Los Angeles first, then Las Vegas, then Reno, now San Francisco.

  Did he know when he moved her to San Francisco that they were now less than two hours from where she’d grown up? She didn’t know what she would find in Sacramento, but she was closer to regaining the hope she’d lost, as she thought about her grandmother. She could walk there. How long would it take her? It was a hundred miles. She could walk ten miles a day, maybe more. If she had food and water, she could walk more. She knew people in Sacramento, people who would help her.

  Or a phone. Find a phone and call her brother’s best friend. Her brother didn’t even know what had happened to her. He was probably on a ship somewhere protecting the country from foreign enemies. He was a hero. He saved people.

  Not you.

  He didn’t know. He couldn’t know that their father had given her away.

  Bella washed her hands in water that smelled foul. She jumped at a sudden pounding on the bedroom door.

  “Wrap up the party, we leave in fifteen.”

  She had to fake it. Fake that everything was okay. Get to the house, grab her stash, and sneak out through the second story window just before dawn, when everyone slept soundest.

  She washed off the blood and slid into the short dress she’d been forced to wear. She looked at the dead man’s watch. Almost four in the morning. She considered running now, but she looked like what she was: a hooker. They were in a small beach house on the north end of the city. She could swim, but it was February and the icy water might kill her before she could reach shore.

  No matter what had happened to her since her father sold her into slavery, she had never wanted to kill herself. Other girls had. Other girls had succeeded. But Bella would not give into the pain. She would never break. Never.

  So the Bay was out. She could run through the streets, the alleys, hide in the shadows of night. It might work. The police were out of the question. She didn’t trust the police. How many had she been forced to screw? Too many. That also meant no hospitals. They would call the police. A fire department, maybe. But would they listen to her? Believe her? Would they call the police or her mother? The second time she’d escaped and called her mom from a stolen cell phone, her mother had betrayed her. Sergio had tracked her down and beaten her.

  Bella didn’t trust anyone.

  The only person she trusted was her brother, but he was thousands of miles away, and she had no idea how to reach him.

  She knew how to live on her own, on the streets, take care of herself.

  Sergio’s men might shoot her in the back. If she didn’t die from a bullet, they’d take her to be tortured by that bastard.

  Or, worse, hand her over to Tommy. Sergio ran a business. Bella could sometimes reason with him. Manipulate him—if she was very careful. But Tommy was vicious. He enjoyed causing pain. Especially to her. He had almost broken her for good. She let him believe that he had.

  She didn’t want to die, but right now running was her only chance of survival, slim though it was.

  She still had the knife.

  Gunfire erupted downstairs. The screams of girls cut through the bullets.

  Bella had been in the middle of a gun battle once before, when Sergio’s operation had been attacked by a rival organization in Las Vegas. Three of her friends—if that’s what she could call the girls who hooked with her—had been killed. Bella had been one of the lucky ones.

  Or unlucky, depending on how she looked at it.

  There was no place to hide. Even the bathroom had no door. The bed was a mattress on the floor. Clark’s blood had seeped into the stained bedding.

  There was a door leading to the hall. Bella clutched the knife to her chest. It had been Clark’s knife—a pocket-knife with a four-inch blade. She just wanted to make him stop. Not fucking her—that was her job, that’s what she had to do to survive—but hurting her. She hadn’t wanted to die.

  She stood to the side of the door, right next to the hinges. She could only see shadows and darkness. Maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t see her when they opened the door. Maybe she could escape.

  A gun went off right outside of her hiding place and a body collapsed with a grunt. The door opened.

  She held her breath, her right hand tight around the knife handle.r />
  you’re going to die tonight

  No, not tonight. She would kill again if she had to, but this was her best chance of escape. To finally be free.

  She saw a hand with a gun before she saw the man.

  She brought the knife up. If she died, he would die. Small victory, but it would be something.

  The man stepped through the door and turned to her. He wore all black, head to toe, and she could only see his eyes.

  His eyes changed focus. Just a small change, but she froze. She couldn’t move. His eyes were green. Dark emerald green. Like hers.

  “Bella.”

  He spoke in a whisper. But she knew.

  “JT?” Her voice was raw; she didn’t know if he’d heard her.

  “I have her,” he said. She looked around and didn’t know who he was talking to. Then she saw an earpiece and cord going down behind his ear and under his shirt. “I’m coming out. Cover us.”

  He took the knife from her hand. Instead of dropping it, he pocketed it. “You’re safe, Bella.”

  “Sergio—he’ll hunt you down. He’ll kill you. He never gives up.”

  “Sergio is dead,” JT said. “He’ll never hurt you again. But we have to go before the police get here.”

  She followed her brother. She was free.

  She would never be a prisoner again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Present Day-Monday

  Bella Caruso had often found herself in prickly and dangerous situations where she faced impossible choices. Every time, she handled the situation to the best of her ability. Sometimes her skill and training had saved her, and sometimes luck kicked in. Usually a combination of both.

  It appeared that her luck had run out, and the thousands of hours of training would do her no good. In the end, she was going to have to rely solely on her instincts.

  Even then, she might end up dead.

  She’d been roused from sleep—such as it was—by a pounding on her motel room door.

  “Doc, get up, we have a situation.”

  It was Damien, Hirsch’s enforcer.

  She slid jeans over the boxer shorts she slept in and opened the door. It was barely dawn. Even though they were in Arizona, the early spring morning brought chills to her skin.

  Damien slipped inside, shut the door. “We’re pulling up stakes. The 10th Street house was compromised last night.”

  “What happened?”

  She knew what had happened because she’d set the plan in motion, but she had to protect her cover. That was always the hardest part of this job. Not only did she stay far away from the house, but she had a solid alibi if Hirsch looked. She’d been playing poker in an illegal gambling hall downtown. Her gambling “problem” was one of the two reasons Hirsch knew she wasn’t a cop. Illegal gambling was also the best way for her to keep in contact with her partner.

  “Just get your black bag, you’re going to need it.”

  Her heart raced. Declan had confirmed that he’d taken the two girls to the hospital, and that he’d gotten word to Laura. The hospital was the safest place for them until they could be put into protective custody. But it worried her that Roger hadn’t made contact—with either her or Declan. Especially since he was supposed to extract three girls.

  “I need to pack. It’ll only take two minutes.”

  “We’ll get what you need when we settle. Now, Doc.”

  She picked up the medical bag that had become her tether. “I need my shoes and jacket at least,” she said.

  He nodded. “Thirty seconds. The boss ain’t happy.”

  Bella had worked months to gain the trust of these people. She’d saved some of their miserable lives, earned their respect—at least as much respect as any of them could give a woman. But she had no doubt that if they knew why she was here, they would kill her.

  Bella put the bag on her bed, quickly slipped on her tennis shoes, and stuffed a page torn from a Bible under the filthy mattress. She didn’t have time to write a note, but Declan would know what the verses meant.

  Trouble.

  She pulled a sweatshirt over her head, slipped a switchblade into the front pocket of her jeans, grabbed her last two water bottles and put them in her medical bag along with a clean shirt, and followed Damien out to his car.

  She wasn’t part of the inner circle and she never would be. That was okay—her cover was solid, but there were some things she couldn’t do, and she didn’t want to go too far. She’d crossed the line, but not too far over—nothing that she couldn’t justify to save the life of an innocent. But sometimes it depended how the op ended, and right now she was worried everything had gone south.

  She’d figured out Martin Hirsch pretty quickly—he hated women. Many of the men who worked for Hirsch were abusers, rapists, and had no respect for females, but they came at their jobs as a way to exercise their he-man dominance. They didn’t hate women, they simply used them because they didn’t respect or like anyone. Whores were a business, and they were just doing a job.

  It had taken Bella months before she got her foot in the door. It had gotten to the point where Hirsch needed her—and relied on her—and he hated that. If he could find someone—preferably a man—to replace her he would, but he was a businessman first. She kept his girls healthy and working. She extracted bullets from his men when they crossed the wrong people, and she’d once saved Damien’s life. That had been one of the hardest things she’d done. Not only because she wasn’t a real doctor, but because Damien was a killer.

  Damien glanced at his watch as he drove fast—but not too fast—through the shithole Bella had called home for the last four weeks. He went the long way to the freeway—the only reason was to avoid driving by the 10th Street house where nine girls had been living. There were three houses in Phoenix, all on Hirsch’s circuit, but 10th Street was the newest. The girls in all three houses were prostitutes. Some came into the business because they felt they had no other options, some were forced into the business by boyfriends or family. And some were bought and sold like property, taken far from anyplace they might have known.

  Bella knew exactly how they suffered.

  In Phoenix, two of the houses were well established and Bella didn’t trust any of those girls not to betray her, so she hadn’t even attempted to extract them. It saddened her, because some were underage, but at sixteen and seventeen, they’d been seasoned and put out by Hirsch and men like him for years. They were broken and put back together the wrong way. They’d turn on Bella for a new dress or bubble bath or just another fix.

  Bella wanted to kill Hirsch so badly she could taste it, the thirst for vengeance oozing from her pores. But she was patient and she wouldn’t make a move before she found Hope. She wouldn’t kill him unless she had to. She wasn’t an assassin and she wasn’t a vigilante.

  But deep inside, in a dark spot where she didn’t like to look too carefully, she wished that Hirsch would make the wrong move so Bella could justify putting a bullet in his head.

  Or in his gut so she could watch him bleed out. A small suffering for how he tortured the girls and women he turned out.

  Hirsch was a supplier. He ran a human pipeline and procured and moved “merchandise”—in this case women, girls, and sometimes boys—for the purposes of the multibillion-dollar sex trade. He’d been buying up small, independent trucking companies throughout the southwest to the Louisiana border to make it easier to move his products and launder his money. Bella had been collecting evidence on his operation for the last year, and she suspected if she turned everything over to the FBI they might be able to make a solid case against him.

  Might was the operative word. But even if they could shut down Hirsch, Bella knew there was someone bigger and badder than him—which was saying something. And she had no idea who he was, where he was located, or exactly what his role was.

  Besides, calling in the feds too early wouldn’t help her find Hope. The people Hirsch supplied would go to ground, disappear, and likely kill anyone connected
to the man, should he end up in prison.

  Hope first—then Bella would share her intel. Maybe by then she’d know who was holding Hirsch’s leash.

  The 10th Street house was newly established, run as a temporary way station. The girls had been brought from Los Angeles, though they had originally come from all over the country. These girls Bella had the best chance of saving. They hadn’t chosen this life, some new and some clearly underage. Girls who wanted to walk away but deep fear rooted them in the life. Fear of being caught, fear of hunger, fear of being alone, fear of going back home. Hirsch and his people played on that fear to keep them in line, and it worked.

  It worked very, very well, as Bella had learned firsthand many years ago.

  As soon as Damien turned onto the freeway heading east, he tossed her a black cotton hood. “You know the drill, Doc.”

  “I thought we were beyond this shit.”

  “Boss’s orders. We lost two girls last night, no taking chances.” Even Damien wouldn’t have put a bag over her head, except on orders. “Climb in the back, put on the hood, and just veg, Doc. Everything is fucked and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  It almost sounded like he cared. Damien didn’t care about anyone—but he didn’t hate anyone, either. He just did what he was told.

  Bella climbed in the back of the SUV and put the bag over her head. She had a suspicion that she knew where they were going, but she couldn’t let on that she had figured out how Hirsch transported his girls across state lines. She was alive because she kept her mouth shut.

  She went along with it because she really had no choice. Damien would put a bullet in her rather than let her walk away. She hoped that she’d gained his trust enough that he would hesitate if ordered to kill her, and his hesitation would be enough time for her to get the upper hand, but she couldn’t be certain. She still had a job to do.

  If she died today, at least she’d saved two girls from a horrific fate. Two girls who now had a real future ahead of them. But she needed to find Hope.