Breaking Hammer

  There was no hope anymore, only darkness.

  Benicio leaned forward, his elbows on the large mahogany desk, his hands under his chin. It was early in the morning, yet he was dressed in a suit, impeccably tailored to his frame, the same way he was the few times I'd seen him before. Two imposing men, clad in similarly tailored suits, stood behind him against the far wall, in front of the bookcases that ran the length of the office and rose from the floor to the ceiling. Their hands were at their sides, and they waited, unmoving, like London Palace guards or something. Looking forward, expressionless.

  The ludicrous thought popped into my head that he must keep a tailor on retainer to outfit his staff.

  Benicio said nothing for a while, even after Blaze had finished speaking. "I assume you've done some digging of your own on Aston, yes?"

  I held up the binder containing everything I had on the man. "I narrowed down the possibilities for where they might be located. I don't know for certain, but out of the several locations, I'd be inclined to say they're at his location in Bangkok. Meia talked about the place where she was held - she called it a finishing school. Aston was younger then, and it's where he first...met...Meia and her sister." I stumbled over the word "met," and I forced the image out of my head of what he'd done to Meia back then.

  And what he might be doing to her and her son now.

  The thought made my stomach turn. But, more than that, it made me enraged. I wanted to kill him before; I wanted to destroy him now.

  Benicio had said little during any of this, and I held my breath, waiting for his verdict. The club's Panamanian employer had an extensive network of resources, broader than I could begin to even guess at. If anyone was going to give us a contact for weapons in Thailand, it would be Benicio.

  "I'm familiar with Aston," he said. "He's been running a trafficking operation out of Vegas for years now. With the implicit permission of some influential political leaders, of course. There are rumors about his parties, and the people who attend."

  "Parties," I echoed stupidly. Meia had said she was forced to do whatever Aston wanted. I felt my fists clench at my side.

  "Invitation only, given by Aston or one of the key members. These are people who are extremely powerful, very well-connected, and wealthy. The rumor is that Aston provides whatever you need to satisfy a craving- no matter the type of craving- and no matter how young your preferred partner."

  A chill ran up the length of my spine. "Meia and her son," I said. "There won't be a lot of time before they disappear."

  Benicio shook his head. "No, I imagine not. There is some urgency here."

  "We need a contact for weapons in Bangkok..."

  Benicio raised his hand, silencing Blaze. "Weapons, transportation, manpower," he said. He gestured, and one of the men at the wall walked to his desk, leaned down while Benicio spoke in his ear, then nodded and left. "This will be done."

  "This is a personal issue," I said. "With all due respect, I didn't expect -"

  Benicio cut me off. "What is happening with your woman is tragic, yes," he said. "I am not a humanitarian. I may not like this trafficking of persons, but I am not a charity. But Aston and I have had dealings before. He does not only smuggle people. And I am, shall we say...intrigued by the possibility of expanding into an Asian market. I am always looking for opportunities for growth. Elimination of a rival is an opportunity for growth."

  "I don't know for certain that they are in Thailand," I said.

  "Details," Benicio said. "To be ironed out in the next several hours. I don't doubt your intelligence gathering skills, but I have my own resources who may be more useful. Are you sending anyone else from the club?"

  "Squid," Blaze said. "And Axe is going to make the trip too."

  Benicio nodded. "Axe," he said. "He will be very useful. So will my men." He paused. "You will, of course, preferably return Aston here. Alive."

  "I would like the opportunity to end him myself," I said. The remaining associate standing behind Benicio glanced in my direction, his face unreadable, but his eyes spoke of an understanding of what would happen. After what he'd done to Meia and her son, I had my own end in mind for Aston.

  "Yes, well," Benicio said. "There are particular questions I would like to ask him. Business questions about which I am curious. I have someone who is exceptionally skilled at extracting information. After that, he is yours."

  If Meia doesn't try to kill him first, I thought. It would be a suicide mission.

  The bolt in the door turned, and I sat up on the bed, my heart racing, my body immediately tensed in preparation for another assault. Aston didn't often hit me like that, square in the face, preferring to "preserve my beauty," and I feared what else that meant he had in store for me.

  What he had in store for me was nothing compared to what he had threatened to do to my son.

  I would kill him first, before I let that happen. Even if it meant I would die in the process. I didn't care what it took, what it might do to me.

  The girl stepped inside, and the heavy wooden door shut behind her with a thud. She walked toward the bed, a tray in her hands, eyes cast downward to the floor. She appeared Cambodian, a young girl, maybe ten, and walked with the defeated gait I recognized from my own childhood. She set the tray on the table beside the bed without looking at me, and I reached for her hand.

  "What is your name?" I asked.

  She withdrew her hand like she'd been scalded, and glanced up at me with sad eyes, a dog who'd been beaten. She shook her head.

  "How long have you been here?" I asked.

  She turned to leave, looking at me before she left. "Eat," she said.

  She'd been gone only a few seconds, before I reached for the water on the tray, gulping it down, feeling it fill my empty stomach. My stomach churned again as the water sloshed inside, and I took a few deep breaths, willing myself not to vomit. Being weak and dehydrated was the last thing I needed.

  When I took the cover off the food, and smelled the curry, I could not stave off the memories of being here before. They washed over me like a tsunami, overwhelming and nauseating. I laid down on the bed, calming myself by slowing my breath, and it wasn't long before my eyelids began to feel heavy. I looked at the water glass on the bedside table. My brain felt foggy, and I wondered stupidly if I'd been drugged.

  Being drugged is better than being here, I thought, as I drifted into oblivion.

  When I blinked open my eyes, my first thought was that I was dead. It was illogical, I knew, but the hangover from whatever I'd been drugged with was making it hard to think. The room was pitch black, and when I tried to move, I felt my arms stretched out to the sides, attached to something.

  I fought the acid taste of bile in my throat as I realized that my feet were restrained as well. Calm, I thought. Calm down.

  The air in the room was cool, and I shivered, but I wasn't sure if it was the chill from the air or from the realization that I was naked, standing, my wrist and ankles chained to something.

  Think of Ben, I told myself. Think good thoughts. Think of Hammer.

  Hammer. I'd taken a huge risk, dropping the locket in the bathroom in the hotel. I held out hope that he'd find it, understand that I had not left voluntarily.

  And what then? I asked myself. Do you really think Hammer is going to figure out where you are? Do you think he's going to come charging in, take down Aston, and carry you and Ben off into the sunset?

  I was a wonderful fantasy. But that's all it was - a fantasy. Hammer was not coming to save me. No one was coming for me. No one was coming for Ben. What happened to me would happen to my son, and there was nothing I could do about it. Aston would sell me - no, I wouldn't get that treatment, after I'd betrayed him - no, he would whore me out to the worst of them, to the men who wanted to use me in horrific ways, torture me. And when the worst of those men were finished with me, he would sell me to the ones who liked to kill. Someone would plan a gruesome death for me and carry it out.

  I knew
what the rest of my short life had in store for me. I had no fight left in me. In a way, it was a blessing, what was happening now, being chained up like an animal.

  Waiting to die.

  At least it would end my life's misery. There had been only two times in my life when I'd felt happiness. The first was the period of time after Ben's birth, when the old man had banished us from the house and we were left alone. Just me and my son.

  The second was with Hammer.

  Everyone I loved was taken away. No, I hadn’t known him long enough for love. I was swept up in some lust-at-first-sight kind of thing. I was mistaking lust for something more, and that’s all it was. It was stupid and foolish of me to think it might be anything else. It was naive, this fantasy that he would swoop in and rescue me.

  A fantasy, that’s all it was. And, of all people, I was not naive. I knew that there was no fairy tale for me, no knight in shining armor, no one who would take me away.

  What I’d had with Hammer, it was temporary, a momentary shelter from the storm that raged around me. If I closed my eyes, I could feel him still, his touch still on my skin, his lips pressed gently against mine, the way he moved inside me.

  At least I could hang on to that memory during whatever was to come. Aston could have my body, but he could never possess my mind.

  In the darkness, I felt a hand on my shoulder, then on my arm.

  “Who is it?” I asked. “Who’s there?”

  Had he been here the whole time? I felt like I was slipping in and out of awareness, like my sense of time had somehow become distorted.

  He didn’t answer. As his hand began to move over the expanse of my body, I closed my eyes. I thought about Hammer's touch on my skin. I would endure.

  "Thanks for coming, man." Axe had gotten the first flight he could out of Colorado after I'd called him, and he'd just gotten to the clubhouse, where Blaze and I had set up a staging area in the back room. I clapped my arm around Axe's shoulder. "How's June doing?"

  "Pregnant," Axe said. "But she's got some help running the bed and breakfast, so she'll be okay." Axe was the old Sergeant-at Arms for the Los Angeles chapter of the Inferno MC. It was Axe who'd taken April and MacKenzie and I back to his hometown in Colorado, hidden us when the club was going to shit out here. It was Axe's house where April had been murdered.

  I hadn't seen Axe since then. I hadn't talked to him since then either. I knew he'd gone back to Colorado, was out of the club, running a bed and breakfast and some kind of bike shop in his hometown. He'd married June, his childhood sweetheart, and was doing the whole dad thing.

  He didn't look like the Axe I knew back in the MC. Yeah, he was still tatted up and shit, but the old Axe was mostly shithoused and crazy and out of control. The old Axe was haggard, rough-looking. He'd cleaned up his act when he met June, and whatever he was doing now, it was working. He looked like a new man.

  "You look happy," I said.

  "Shit," Axe said. "I'm good. It's not exciting, but it's good. Calm, you know?"

  I nodded, but I didn't know. Calm was something I hadn't experienced in a long time. Calm was something I didn't know if I'd ever have again. The closest I'd come to that was the short time I was with Meia, and fuck, could I really say that was anything? Stolen moments in hotel rooms with someone who was a prisoner in her own life? I was about to risk everything to fly to another country for some girl I'd just met.

  "This girl," Axe said. "She worth it?"

  "Yeah, man." I said it, with no hesitation. "She is." The thing was, I knew it in my gut. I didn't even need to think about it. She was worth it. A hundred percent.

  "All right, then," Axe said, grinning. "Let's go fuck some assholes up. Oh- and the other thing you asked about, the horse? Consider it done- I'll bring her out to Vegas myself. Happy to do it for MacKenzie."

  One of Benicio's men, Eddie, unrolled a printout of blueprints out on a table in Benicio's private plane.

  "Are these actual blueprints to the finishing school?" I asked. "How the hell did you get these? I couldn't get ahold of this, and I dug through everything online."

  One of the other men, Diego, gave me a sharp look. "It's a rendering based on our intel. Benicio has his ways."

  Benicio has his ways. This guy was the most well-fucking-connected guy ever. I knew his North and South American connections were extensive, but I didn't know he had ways of getting information in Asia. I guessed that was what happened when you had decades of military connections.

  "You have a hook-up for weapons when we arrive?" Axe asked.

  Eddie nodded, "Benicio says you were a sniper. Any good?"

  "Fifty-six confirmed," Axe said.

  Eddie nodded his head in understanding. Fifty-six confirmed dead. I didn't know Axe was that fucking good.

  "Good," Eddie said. "We won't have much time to sight in weapons according to your specs, but I'm sure he'll find a rifle suitable to your liking."

  Squid spoke up. "I know we sent him a laundry list of items, but silencers can be tricky to get a hold of, and even trickier to verify if they're effective."

  "Gentlemen," Eddie said. "Rest assured. There's a Royal Thai Admiral in Sattihip who's a close personal friend of the Jefe -" Eddie looked at me. "Benicio, I mean. He'll make sure this guy's got what we need. Right now, while we have the time we need to discuss timeline and logistics."

  "Do we know how many victims he's got there?" I asked. "How many kids and shit?"

  "Thirty, forty girls maybe," Diego said. "The school is small, buyers are international. These girls are being sold as brides, so there's more financial investment in them. Higher prices, lower inventory, slower turnover."

  "What's going to happen to them?" I asked, a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought of how many kids this man had sold into a life like Meia's.

  Diego shrugged. "We're only there to extract your woman and her kid, bring Aston back to the Jefe."

  I shook my head. "No fucking way," I said. After Meia had talked to me about this trafficking shit, I started doing my own research. There was no way short of hell freezing over that I was about to just blow through there and leave all those kids there. "What happens to those kids? You're going to, what, open the doors and turn them out on the streets?"

  "We're not fucking social workers, Hammer," Squid said. "You want us to, what, turn these assholes in to the police? You want to wind up having to explain a bunch of dead bodies to the Thai police, the same ones who are taking bribes and looking the other way for Aston? This isn't the only place Aston's running. Takedowns like that take years of coordinated effort, time we don't have if you want to get your woman back."

  "I get that," I said. "And I'm appreciative of everything Benicio's doing here. But for these kids, we can't just turn them out onto the streets."

  "What are you suggesting, Crunch?" Axe asked, aware of the fact that I was just getting pissed off. He had always been good at diffusing tension when his head was screwed on straight.

  "There are trafficking organizations in Bangkok, people who provide emergency assistance for women and kids in these situations," I said. "We get the kids turned over to them. They're not going to ask questions about dead traffickers."

  Eddie looked at one of the other men, then back at me. He nodded. "It’s doable.”

  One of the other guys spoke. "We're at almost forty-eight hours since your woman was taken. She might be gone by now."

  "Fuck, we're aware of that," Blaze said, his voice sharp.

  "I know," I said, the words coming out in this disembodied voice, like I was detached from myself. Did they think I was that fucking naive? "She could be moved somewhere else, sold already - lost somewhere in the underground - or dead. But I don’t think so. Aston's obsessed with her though, has been since she was a kid. He's not going to dump her yet."

  I needed to believe that.

  I could save her. I had to save her.

  I had been absent when my wife was murdered. I couldn't save April. I would sa
ve Meia.

  The drip, drip, drip of the water in the room - the cell, or whatever the hell this was- was relentless. I wondered if people could go crazy after a while, just listening to these unrelenting