Free Hunted by Jaycee Clark

they’d remained silent. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    For a moment, he gave in to her, then said, “You might not want to speak of it, but everything you could tell us might help another girl.”
    She just looked at him, the way the dash lights gave a soft glow to his harsh features, the bladed nose and hard jaw as unmoving as his eyes. Cars met them, the lights slashing across his face, a flip of a switch. Light and dark, savior and mercenary.
    The man was one big contrast. He’d been fine in the run-down flat, but he’d had the limo and now they were driving the Saab. He looked like the type that would have a Porsche stashed away somewhere. Mysterious came to mind. He could blend into any surrounding. He fit the image of the diamond dealer, the hip wealthy renter of the flat, the concerned and worried husband . . .
    Nothing with him added up.
    He wanted to help another girl? Why not help them all. If Interpol was helping, why didn’t someone do something?
    “Why can’t you just close them down?” she asked him, wondering again how places, how whorehouses could still exist. Not the kind where women wanted to work, but the kind where they were forced. Imprisoned. But sex had sold since the dawn of time.
    Both brows winged up. Those arched brows and his features made her think of some vampire. Not that he was pale or had fangs. It was the deep widow’s peak, the arched brows, the aristocrat.
    He looked at her again and she thought him a man of the shadows. “Close them down? Bloody close them down?” His words were quiet, considering. “Gor. Do you have any idea what you were even into?”
    She crossed her arms. She was the one forced to do the johns however they wanted several times a day. “Prostitution.”
    “And do you know who runs prostitution rings?”
    She stopped, having never asked herself that question. She’d always seen Mikhail as the bad guy. Her anger and hatred had gone no further than him, focused solely on the one evil face she knew. Unless she counted Simon, or herself. But Mikhail was the one all her emotions had been centered on. There had been nothing beyond him.
    He glanced at her again and said, as if reading her mind, “Jezek is only a midlevel boss. He answers to someone.”
    She sat there, looking at him. “Mafia?”
    “Organized crime. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Eastern European states have become a hotspot for drug trafficking, prostitution, slave trade, skin trade, guns, black markets, whatever term or bloody vice you’d like to use.” He slowed behind traffic, then speeded up when the truck in front of them exited. “You don’t just close them down. It’s a global web. Asia, Europe, the U.S.”
    “Everywhere?” she asked, sitting back in the seat, chills racing through her. She’d never get away. They’d never let her leave. Never let her escape.
    Something in her voice must have alerted him. He looked at her and said, his voice as precise and clipped as she’d heard it, “They won’t get you. You’ll have to lay low, follow advice and instructions. We’ve been doing this for a while. Several countries have anti-skin-trafficking groups. We’ve saved several girls.”
    She watched as his fingers curled around the stick shift. “Granted, not as many as we’d like, but one is better than none.”
    There was something in his words, something she caught. Anger? Resentment? Something. She was too tired to dwell on it. Sitting back, she looked at the blacktop in front of them, the sleek taillights of some sports car glinting red in the night.
    “I just wish it would all go away. I’d wake up tomorrow at home and it would all have been a dream.”
    His deep in-drawn breath made her wonder if he was getting frustrated with her, if he was getting angry. She didn’t know this man, had only seen what he was capable of. An apology sat on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t utter it.
    “It won’t go away. I’m sorry. It does help to talk of