Nenia Campbell's Blog - Posts Tagged "cease-and-desist"
FIRST CHAPTER OF CEASE AND DESIST SNEAK-PEEK!!!!!
So I said that when CLOAK AND DAGGER broke 1,000 ratings, I'd post a sneak-peek of the first chapter of CEASE AND DESIST. I didn't forget! I've just been really busy with work and haven't had a chance to get on my computer.
Here is the first chapter. It's still rough and will probably change a bit in the final draft, but here you go!
SOMETHING TO PROVE THAT I AM DEFINITELY WORKING ON THE SEQUEL.
Also, don't read this if you haven't read books 1-3 because spoilers.
Chapter One
Michael
Most animals are put down once they get a taste for human flesh — and why not? It makes no sense to keep around a dog that's quicker to bite than to heel. The moment a tool becomes a health risk, it ceases being useful and instead becomes a liability. Would you use a gun that had a fifty-fifty chance of blowing up in your face? I wouldn't.
Someone should have neutralized Adrian Callaghan years ago, as soon as he began to show signs of that same propensity. But human beings, it seems, are the exceptions to that rule; we make blood lust, especially the cannibalistic form of it, lucrative. And true to form, instead of putting Callaghan down, the fools put him into power.
Nothing had been the same since.
He had taken over the IMA through a series of carefully executed coups, a group of highly trained mercenaries of which I was once a part, and turned it into a feudal mob. Powerful men bowing to him, with their tails tucked between their legs. Too afraid to say boo, even when they should have. Especially when they should have. Now his organization had fragmented and grown corrupt; Callaghan thought little of loyalty, except when it could be used as a weakness.
When he had grown bored with his playground, he branched out into the media. There was less blood to be had in this sector, but controlling the news fed into his ego. When he attempted to make his conquest live six months ago, I had cut transmission, branding him a failure. Now, it seemed he had turned his attention elsewhere once more.
“Here is the dossier you asked for.” Angelica handed me a thick folder.
“This is practically a fucking book.”
“It is,” she said. “It's a biography.”
I flipped through the thick stack of papers. “You put this together quickly.”
That earned me a very white smile. “A magician never reveals her secrets.”
Once, a man named Kent would have done this. But he had been killed in an explosion rigged up by Callaghan. Kent had survived the rigors of being a field agent at MI6, and the thought of him dying because of a stupid fucking mistake filled me with anger.
Anger, and a deep, yawning regret that I felt like a bullet wound.
Angelica was the next best thing. She had been his protegee, and sometimes I could see faint shadows of his personality in her. Odd, since they were nothing alike. He had been a chip off the British upper-crust, florid complexion, watery eyes; he was the type of man who looked most at home in tweed. She was young, attractive, dark-skinned. Her accent was constantly morphing: one minute, she sounded French, the next, Nigerian.
Today, she sounded Azerbaijani. It was impressive.
I stopped toying with the folder and began to read. It was a bit redundant. I didn't need to read the files it contained to know the man they were describing.
Once, Adrian had been a lowly agent, who paid his bills in human lives. The IMA stood for Integrated Military Affairs, and while it still existed, it was no longer recognizable as the privately contracted group of mercenaries that it had once been.
Richardson, with his paranoia and weakness for women, had been a shit boss, but until he had branded me as a traitor, I had never had cause to complain. Most of the men and women I killed probably deserved it. Those that hadn't, well — their deaths hadn't bothered me enough to prevent me from sleeping at night. People died every day. I liked to think I just hastened the process. It wasn't as if I'd been born innocent.
No, Richardson's scouts had pulled me out of the Louisiana slums and given me the education I never had cause to believe I'd ever need, let alone possess. If they hadn't, I'd probably still be in a gang, selling drugs, fighting in the streets, and stealing from the prone and naive. A conscience was a luxury I couldn't afford. Growing up, there was only one golden rule, and it wasn't the one they tacked up in school rooms.
Them, or me.
Unfortunately for him, Richardson had hired on Adrian Callaghan as well. Callaghan's history was a little more convoluted, and since he was a liar, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. I had heard many things about him. He almost certainly had roots in the IRA, that much I believed. He was a little young to be in the thick of it, but I wouldn't put a grassroots revival behind the shit-fuck; he loved to stir the pot.
I would not have been surprised to learn that he had killed his parents. I'd seen him torture people with little recourse. He loved causing pain. Death was only a means to an end; if there was a way for him to maim without killing, then he would do that.
Callaghan had come close to killing me once, when he had been my trainer. I'd been young, in my late teens, and Richardson had paired the two of us together for reasons that still escape me. One day, instead of beginning the lesson, he simply told me to run. And when he caught me, he slashed through my gut and walked away leaving me to crawl to our on-site hospital, clutching my innards like a penitent seeking absolution.
Given his colorful history, I couldn't believe Richardson didn't see his death coming. He sat across from it most days, listening to its Irish brogue, looking it dead in the face.
All of this was in the folder, and more. I flipped through it, keeping my face composed as the accompanying memories surfaced in my head with vivid clarity. Christina's chart was in here, from when Callaghan had beaten her so badly that the IMA had been forced to treat her to keep her from dying until they were ready for him to finish her off.
And he'd come close to doing just that.
Too close. My hands tightened around the folder, leaving divots into the cream colored surface. Too fucking close. I started to close the folder, when a highlighted chunk of text towards the end caught my eye. Prostitution leaped out at me, as did human trafficking.
This is new, I thought. And then, fuck. I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until I caught Angelica looking at me questioningly. “I wasn't expecting this,” I said.
Angelica arched her pretty brows. “Does it surprise you?” she wanted to know.
“That he got in on the skin trade like so many other corrupt businessmen? No, that doesn't surprise me.” What surprised me was his choice of venue. He was a fastidious prick who generally washed his hands of sex. I knew he'd raped people before, but rape wasn't about sex; it was about power, and causing pain.
Actually…this made a lot of sense now.
I skimmed this new printout but this was a tale even older than the tale as old as time. Bringing in young girls from the Balkans and Mainland Southeast Asia to a land where they couldn't speak the language on the pretense of job opportunities. These women came to the U.S. thinking that they would be employed as a maid or a cook, an honest living, with an honest wage they could send back to their families. Instead, they were subjected to abuse that bordered on torture, and promised more if they didn't behave. The traffickers employed the use of the middleman to keep the money out of the hands of the girls, although they did encourage girls to send for their sisters and their mothers and their friends. More girls meant more bodies, and more leeway to keep them in line.
I'd been contracted by men in the human trafficking industry before, and I'd been contracted to kill men of that same industry. As long as I got paid, I never asked where the money came from. It was a brutal trade, but no more than mine had been at the time, and since there was a ready market for sex, as well as death, the enterprise persisted.
But dealing in it firsthand? I wondered if even I would have stooped so low. There had been a time I was capable of anything — killing small children, rape, maybe even this.
I rattled the folder, shaking myself as I did. Dwelling in the past offered no solutions for the present and this was not a productive line of thought. It was time to focus on the problem at hand. Clearing my throat, I said, “How did you discover this?”
“Read — ”
Angelica slid her hand under mine and yanked out one of the pages, flipping it over so that it covered the manila envelope, and almost gave me a fucking paper cut in the process. I was irritated by her cute behavior — until I began to read.
“Maudit,” I breathed. One of the 'shipments' had been intercepted by the local authorities. The man who'd been charged with the crime was a patsy if I'd ever seen one. Overweight. Sweating. Well into his fifties. Just the kind of pervert society liked to condemn. There was no way he'd done it. “Who's this clown?”
“He was a member of the IMA.”
I noted the past tense. “Was? Is he dead?”
“No,” she said, “although they don't care much for rapists and sex traffickers very much in prison, so he might as well be, yes?”
Yes. And incarcerated in a prison where he might well be killed before the year was through, this Kevin McCarthy would be as effectively silenced as if Callaghan had placed the gun to this man's head and pulled the trigger himself.
“He was an older member,” Angelica said, reciting the facts from memory, “with seniority over you. He was recently stationed in Scotland — ” my mouth thinned at this. In the same “reeducation facility” as me? I wondered — “it seems he had not kept his displeasure with the recent changes in management quiet.”
Callaghan knew that I would see right through this smokescreen. This was his way of flipping me the bird. I didn't like that. Not one fucking bit.
Christina wouldn't, either. She popped into my head, unbidden, as she did so often these days. I could visualize her reaction as easily as if she were standing in front of me.
Schooling my expression, I asked in a bland voice, “Does anyone else in AMI know?”
Did you tell Christina?
When she smiled, it revealed small white teeth. “I left that distinct pleasure to you, of course.”
Of course.
Fils de putain.
I wasn't looking forward to this.
Christina
Three months. They could slip by in a breath. They could span an entire lifetime. Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last.
Six months had passed since my mother's death.
No, that wasn't quite right — my mother's murder. Death was a passive, natural thing; my mother had been forcibly removed from this world by a cold-blooded killer.
I was hacking into the computer of a member of the IMA. I'd forgotten his name, It wasn't important. He was low-ranked, and not particularly careful, but still, information can be waiting where you least expect it.
I stared at the scrolling cryptograms — he was that careful, at least — unseeingly. Numbers, letters, special characters: they blurred together in wavering lines, forming a road map of exhaustion. I hadn't slept in days. The coffee that sat beside me on the desk was ice cold. I had knocked it over several times, the dark spills spattering the carpet were testament to my clumsiness. They looked like dried blood. I would know.
Murder.
I closed my eyes. The inside of my eyelids rasped against my dry corneas like sand.
Mamá and I had never been close. In life, she had caused me untold pain. She was constantly criticizing my weight (I was too fat), and my interests (baseball and computers were indicative of hidden lesbian proclivities); when my father had landed on the IMA's radar screen she had thrown me to the wolves so they could escape, and when I had been threatened, she took a gamble no mother should ever make; she assumed that my captor would not have the stomach, or the motivation, to hurt me.
On that, as with so much else in life, she was mistaken.
My father told me that she was a very troubled woman, haunted by her own demons, and while this did not make her past actions any easier to accept, it did make them easier to understand. Even before the incident that changed my life, all of our lives, she had been as removed as a statue, never showing affection or offering words of praise. Other mothers hugged and coddled their daughters, sewed prom dresses, and had mother-daughter spa days. Mine could only offer criticism and condemnation.
This wellspring of grief that had spurted up in the wake of her passing was unexpected; I had never anticipated that her loss would hurt so much, but it did. I felt it every day, like a thorn in my heart, and I was starting to wonder if it would ever go away.
Along with that hurt was hate — a hate so caustic, it could sear on contact. I hadn't known I had the capacity for so much hate.
I hated the man who had my mother killed. His name was Adrian Callaghan, and he had done it to get back at me for putting a bullet in him. He was also the man who had tried to buy me like a slave; the man who had once beaten me so badly that I had nearly died from the ensuing wounds; the man who had made damn sure that Michael and I could never go on living for as long as he was still alive.
Oh, I hated him so much, I vibrated with it. When I closed my eyes, I could see his mocking smile. He was in my nightmares, and I often awoke from my dreams with his laughter ringing in my ears like a death knell.
The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.
Until I met him, I hadn't truly believed that people could be evil. I had believed that everyone had a little of both in their hearts, and that it was up to God to measure the scales. I had been mistaken: Adrian Callaghan was evil in every sense of the word.
Keys clacked. Cliff was studying the screen of the computer as it spewed out printouts of the code I had managed to crack. His eyes were as red-rimmed as mine felt, his face a mask of concentration.
Cliff had once worked for Adrian alongside a man called the Sniper. The two of them had captured me when Michael and I had tried, ineffectively, to lie low after our escape from Target Island. He was a big man, with a bronze complexion and dark hair. I knew next to nothing about him, except that the changes Adrian was imposing under his new regime frightened him enough that he had looked elsewhere for employment.
It said something that Adrian could bring even this great monolith of a man to fear.
He was aware of being watched. When his eyes started to slide towards mine, I looked away. It still felt strange being on the same side as the man who had hauled me in to Adrian. I wasn't sure I could trust him, although it looked like I might have to.
Suraya was in the other room with her young sister, Jatinder. I could hear the two of them talking softly in Hindi. They had been conversing for the last hour. I hadn't been trying to eavesdrop but in the silence that stretched, I couldn't help it.
“Dhana rahe,” she said, “Dhyana rakhana.”
I heard Jatinder say something in response.*double-check translation
I frowned. I wasn't sure I could trust Suraya, either, although Michael seemed to think she was trustworthy. Yes, she had driven the getaway car that helped us escape from Adrian's soiree, and, by proxy, helped save Michael from death, but she didn't do much for AMI now—at least, not that I could see. Mostly, she spent her time standing around and looking sullen or sequestered away with her sister. It made me think she was a spy.
What she had done for Michael couldn't carry her forever and I would have liked to see more concentrated effort on her part. Loyalty was all we had, and if we couldn't count on that, we had nothing, nothing at all.
“This coming from you?” Michael said, when I went to him with my suspicions, “if you recall, in the beginning you thwarted me each and every time I tried to save your ass.”
Anger flooded me in a hot rush. “Because you kidnapped me. You held me hostage.” He had done terrible things to me in the name of money. To me. To my family. His indifference had encased him in a shroud of ice; sometimes I still had nightmares of what he had been.
Of what he still might be.
“You're not the only one bad things happen to,” he said. “But c'est la vie. Life goes on.”
Life goes on? “Is that really what you believe? I didn't realize you were so…zen.”
Michael gave a Gallic shrug, and went back to whatever it was that he'd been doing before I came along, leaving me fuming in the process. Since she saved his life I'm sure he felt indebted to her. That gave me a strange feeling I didn't like. When you owed someone a favor, it was like they owned a part of you — forever.
The door opened. As if my thoughts had summoned him here, Michael stood in the doorway, casting a shadow that reached the monitor of the computer I was working on. I wondered if that was symbolic, then scoffed at my fancifulness. This wasn't some silly story; this was life, and life was never as simple or dramatic as fiction. Life was a study in contrasts, and a constant source of misery. What good parts there were happened so quickly that you could miss them if you blinked. I hadn't had any good parts in a while.
Michael's face was drawn. That was never a good sign. He rarely smiled, rarely showed any kind of expression at all. When he did, that almost always meant trouble.
I watched him carefully but his expression revealed nothing about his inner state, apart from the fact that he wasn't pleased. Wasn't he in a meeting with Angelica? Why had it ended early? Had they fought? Or did they discover…something?
Cliff noticed me tense and his hands stilled on the keyboard as he glanced over his shoulder. I saw his shoulders relax slightly, but not a whole lot. It seemed I wasn't the only one who was put on guard by the abrupt change in sides.
Michael's eyes flicked to Cliff and me. He arched an eyebrow. In the other room, the faint strains of Hindi had stopped. The door opened and Suraya came out, arms folded over her chest. Michael cleared his throat, shifting something under his arm. A file folder.
Uh oh.
“We have a problem,” he said, and he handed the envelope to me.
Big uh oh.
When Michael said there was a problem, that usually meant someone was trying to kill us. I stared at that manila envelope, running my trembling fingers along the stiff edges. I knew that I wasn't going to like whatever was inside.
My eyes were burning. Sweat had dripped down my forehead and gotten into my eyes. It had gotten suffocation hot under the flickering fluorescent lights. Why had he given the folder to me in front of everyone? Couldn't we discuss it in private?
Maybe it's because he trusts you.
I sneaked a look at him. Was that what it was, trust? Or was this a test?
I flipped through the folder that Michael had given me, trying to get a grasp of what I was dealing with before I was forced to acknowledge it publicly. My first thought was that it would involve blood, blood and death. I was half-right. There was plenty of blood.
It took me a moment to process the images I was looking at. I had never seen anything like them outside of movies, and that had been toned down for a viewing audience. This was uncensored reality, in all its gritty, gory glory. I swallowed wetly and shook my head, feeling ill. Those poor girls. Because they were, without a doubt, girls, and not women.
Adrian had told me in our last meeting that he had trouble getting women to come home with him. I'm afraid I've developed somewhat of a reputation, he'd said, slyly, as if he were joking about the weather, or sports.
For what? I'd asked him. Sending girls home in boxes? I hadn't been joking, but I hadn't expected that I'd be so close to the truth, either. The spaces to which these women had been confined were coffin-small. There was no room to move, to even breathe; they must have been entrenched in their own waste. My skin crawled at the thought.
I knew what that was like. Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
I studied the faces that were so painfully, heartbreakingly young beneath their murky veneer of blood and grime and sweat. Some of them wore scraps of soiled clothing. Many were naked. On many I could not tell where the dirt ended and the bruises began.
My stomach cramped in unease. I passed the folder on. I couldn't stand to look at their eyes anymore. They were the eyes of people who have glimpsed a world without hope, and I was all too familiar with that feeling. There had been a point, not long ago, where I had been forced to come to terms with what I wholly believed was my impending death. I could be killed before the week was out, even now. Many powerful men out there wanted me dead, and this world was ruled by powerful men who were all too used to getting their way. I closed my eyes briefly. Adrian had taught me that lesson all too well.
Oh, but hell, like many things, exists on earth. It's only a matter of finding the right path to get there, and believe me, Christina, I know the way. I can take you there.
He was Satan with a human face, and I wanted to put him back where he belonged.
In hell.
Michael's eyes met mine for a moment. He had incredible eyes—cat-like one moment, and then forest green the next. The color was dependent on luminescence and shadow, affected by something as small as the tilt of his head. Up close, in the light, they were even more stunning, with yellow flecks caught in the iris like beads of honey.
They were dark now, foreboding, and even though I knew that had everything to do with his facing away from the light source and nothing to do with his state of mind, he still cut an imposing figure. His jaw was tense, and I had the expression that he wanted to speak, to me, in private. But of course, he wouldn't. Not here. Not now.
What have you gotten us into this time?
My own face, never stoic no matter how hard I tried, must have revealed my despair. I saw his mouth relax slightly, the lip soften as he unclenched his teeth. I knew from experience that he was attempting to look reassuring, and instead of consoling me it had the opposite effect because if he felt he had to protect me, we really were screwed.
Suraya cursed aloud, shattering my train of thought. I twisted around to look at her along with everyone else. The folder had reached her. One of the papers had fluttered to the ground, but she didn't seem to notice. Her face was flushed, and there was a spark of animation in her eyes that I'd never seen so vividly.
“Something you'd like to share with the rest of the class?” Michael drawled.
“This man is a demon.” She smacked the folder violently with a cracking sound that made me flinch. Michael noticed that, too. I saw his eyes flick towards me again before returning to Suraya. Spittle flew from her lips as she added, “He is a scourge upon humanity. This is the fate he promised my sister if I did not cooperate with his plans.”
Me too.
I bit my lip, hard. That could have been why Michael had looked at me in that odd way, with the slight softening that wasn't quite pity. He knew what Adrian had suggested to me because I'd told him, and once his rage had dissipated he had told me that that would never happen, not as long as either of us breathed. I remember wishing that he hadn't used those exact words, as it seemed like tempting fate.
An odd thought occurred to me: was this why he'd given me the folder to open? Had he been curious about my reaction? Why?
Maybe it is a test. To see if you're strong enough.
“He has been very quiet of late.” That was Angelica. She was standing in the doorway Michael had only recently vacated. I hadn't even heard her come in. “Now we know why.”
Adrian Callaghan isn't quiet, I wanted to say. He bides his time.
When he wasn't speaking, that's when you needed to watch out, because it meant he'd decided to hurt you, hurt you badly, and was best planning on how to go about it as ruthlessly and as painfully as possible.
Michael gave her a slow, measuring look, but there was no surprise in it. They must have discussed it earlier. I wondered why I hadn't been included.
“Well?” Suraya's voice smacked of impatience. “What are you going to do about it?”
Fear uncoiled deep down in my gut. Taking the initiative meant facing him again, and I didn't want to do that because I knew that the next time I did, I might not walk away. What can we do? I wondered. We're already living on borrowed time, all of us.
I wanted somebody else to take my hand, and make the bad man go away.
I was pathetic.
And then, as Suraya's words circled through my head, mocking my lack of drive, I couldn't help but notice the structure of her words, her odd choice of pronoun. Not 'what are we going to do about it?' but, 'what are you going to do about it?'
“It will cost too much time and resources to pinpoint each shipment.” Angelica dehumanized the women, turning them into objects, like something that could be sent through FedEx. I had never borne any ill will against her, but in that moment I hated her a little for being so cool. One look at Suraya told me she felt the same exact way.
As she glanced our way, discreet diamond studs in her ears caught the light and winked. “If we do succeed in cutting them off,” she continued, purposefully, “another operation will simply sprout up elsewhere — and the girls will be killed.”
I thought of the pictures, of those frightened human faces, and wondered if I was going to be sick. I steeled myself against the nausea and tried to think of it in the abstract. This wasn't real. I was reading a novel — a badly written novel by some hack novelist who was trying to titillate her audience through the degradation of human beings.
If this was a story, I asked, how would I resolve the conflict?
“All you're succeeding in doing is going around in circles.” Suraya's face hardened. “I ask you again—what are you going to do about it?”
Still no we, I noticed. But I had an answer. My ridiculous thought experiment worked.
“Infiltration,” I said, and the moment I spoke, I saw Michael's head whip towards me. I faltered briefly. “Maybe — maybe we can't do anything about it from the outside, but if one of us could figure out a way in, we could find out more details — the hows and whys and wheres — and maybe do more than shut down a single, tiny branch.”
Michael nodded, so imperceptibly that I'm not sure anyone else noticed. I did, and my heart fluttered a little under the sheer weight of his attention. “How?” he asked.
The way he looked at me, it was as if we were the only two people in the room. He is testing me. There was only one possible solution, though. I wet my lips. “Go undercover.”
The slight hitch in my voice made Suraya narrow her eyes. “You mean…prostitution?”
“Not exactly.” Michael leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. “If we were going to do this, it would have to look authentic. One of us would have to sell another.” His eyes fell into shadow. “One of us would have to be trafficked to Adrian Callaghan's men.”
Here is the first chapter. It's still rough and will probably change a bit in the final draft, but here you go!
SOMETHING TO PROVE THAT I AM DEFINITELY WORKING ON THE SEQUEL.
Also, don't read this if you haven't read books 1-3 because spoilers.
Chapter One
Michael
Most animals are put down once they get a taste for human flesh — and why not? It makes no sense to keep around a dog that's quicker to bite than to heel. The moment a tool becomes a health risk, it ceases being useful and instead becomes a liability. Would you use a gun that had a fifty-fifty chance of blowing up in your face? I wouldn't.
Someone should have neutralized Adrian Callaghan years ago, as soon as he began to show signs of that same propensity. But human beings, it seems, are the exceptions to that rule; we make blood lust, especially the cannibalistic form of it, lucrative. And true to form, instead of putting Callaghan down, the fools put him into power.
Nothing had been the same since.
He had taken over the IMA through a series of carefully executed coups, a group of highly trained mercenaries of which I was once a part, and turned it into a feudal mob. Powerful men bowing to him, with their tails tucked between their legs. Too afraid to say boo, even when they should have. Especially when they should have. Now his organization had fragmented and grown corrupt; Callaghan thought little of loyalty, except when it could be used as a weakness.
When he had grown bored with his playground, he branched out into the media. There was less blood to be had in this sector, but controlling the news fed into his ego. When he attempted to make his conquest live six months ago, I had cut transmission, branding him a failure. Now, it seemed he had turned his attention elsewhere once more.
“Here is the dossier you asked for.” Angelica handed me a thick folder.
“This is practically a fucking book.”
“It is,” she said. “It's a biography.”
I flipped through the thick stack of papers. “You put this together quickly.”
That earned me a very white smile. “A magician never reveals her secrets.”
Once, a man named Kent would have done this. But he had been killed in an explosion rigged up by Callaghan. Kent had survived the rigors of being a field agent at MI6, and the thought of him dying because of a stupid fucking mistake filled me with anger.
Anger, and a deep, yawning regret that I felt like a bullet wound.
Angelica was the next best thing. She had been his protegee, and sometimes I could see faint shadows of his personality in her. Odd, since they were nothing alike. He had been a chip off the British upper-crust, florid complexion, watery eyes; he was the type of man who looked most at home in tweed. She was young, attractive, dark-skinned. Her accent was constantly morphing: one minute, she sounded French, the next, Nigerian.
Today, she sounded Azerbaijani. It was impressive.
I stopped toying with the folder and began to read. It was a bit redundant. I didn't need to read the files it contained to know the man they were describing.
Once, Adrian had been a lowly agent, who paid his bills in human lives. The IMA stood for Integrated Military Affairs, and while it still existed, it was no longer recognizable as the privately contracted group of mercenaries that it had once been.
Richardson, with his paranoia and weakness for women, had been a shit boss, but until he had branded me as a traitor, I had never had cause to complain. Most of the men and women I killed probably deserved it. Those that hadn't, well — their deaths hadn't bothered me enough to prevent me from sleeping at night. People died every day. I liked to think I just hastened the process. It wasn't as if I'd been born innocent.
No, Richardson's scouts had pulled me out of the Louisiana slums and given me the education I never had cause to believe I'd ever need, let alone possess. If they hadn't, I'd probably still be in a gang, selling drugs, fighting in the streets, and stealing from the prone and naive. A conscience was a luxury I couldn't afford. Growing up, there was only one golden rule, and it wasn't the one they tacked up in school rooms.
Them, or me.
Unfortunately for him, Richardson had hired on Adrian Callaghan as well. Callaghan's history was a little more convoluted, and since he was a liar, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. I had heard many things about him. He almost certainly had roots in the IRA, that much I believed. He was a little young to be in the thick of it, but I wouldn't put a grassroots revival behind the shit-fuck; he loved to stir the pot.
I would not have been surprised to learn that he had killed his parents. I'd seen him torture people with little recourse. He loved causing pain. Death was only a means to an end; if there was a way for him to maim without killing, then he would do that.
Callaghan had come close to killing me once, when he had been my trainer. I'd been young, in my late teens, and Richardson had paired the two of us together for reasons that still escape me. One day, instead of beginning the lesson, he simply told me to run. And when he caught me, he slashed through my gut and walked away leaving me to crawl to our on-site hospital, clutching my innards like a penitent seeking absolution.
Given his colorful history, I couldn't believe Richardson didn't see his death coming. He sat across from it most days, listening to its Irish brogue, looking it dead in the face.
All of this was in the folder, and more. I flipped through it, keeping my face composed as the accompanying memories surfaced in my head with vivid clarity. Christina's chart was in here, from when Callaghan had beaten her so badly that the IMA had been forced to treat her to keep her from dying until they were ready for him to finish her off.
And he'd come close to doing just that.
Too close. My hands tightened around the folder, leaving divots into the cream colored surface. Too fucking close. I started to close the folder, when a highlighted chunk of text towards the end caught my eye. Prostitution leaped out at me, as did human trafficking.
This is new, I thought. And then, fuck. I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until I caught Angelica looking at me questioningly. “I wasn't expecting this,” I said.
Angelica arched her pretty brows. “Does it surprise you?” she wanted to know.
“That he got in on the skin trade like so many other corrupt businessmen? No, that doesn't surprise me.” What surprised me was his choice of venue. He was a fastidious prick who generally washed his hands of sex. I knew he'd raped people before, but rape wasn't about sex; it was about power, and causing pain.
Actually…this made a lot of sense now.
I skimmed this new printout but this was a tale even older than the tale as old as time. Bringing in young girls from the Balkans and Mainland Southeast Asia to a land where they couldn't speak the language on the pretense of job opportunities. These women came to the U.S. thinking that they would be employed as a maid or a cook, an honest living, with an honest wage they could send back to their families. Instead, they were subjected to abuse that bordered on torture, and promised more if they didn't behave. The traffickers employed the use of the middleman to keep the money out of the hands of the girls, although they did encourage girls to send for their sisters and their mothers and their friends. More girls meant more bodies, and more leeway to keep them in line.
I'd been contracted by men in the human trafficking industry before, and I'd been contracted to kill men of that same industry. As long as I got paid, I never asked where the money came from. It was a brutal trade, but no more than mine had been at the time, and since there was a ready market for sex, as well as death, the enterprise persisted.
But dealing in it firsthand? I wondered if even I would have stooped so low. There had been a time I was capable of anything — killing small children, rape, maybe even this.
I rattled the folder, shaking myself as I did. Dwelling in the past offered no solutions for the present and this was not a productive line of thought. It was time to focus on the problem at hand. Clearing my throat, I said, “How did you discover this?”
“Read — ”
Angelica slid her hand under mine and yanked out one of the pages, flipping it over so that it covered the manila envelope, and almost gave me a fucking paper cut in the process. I was irritated by her cute behavior — until I began to read.
“Maudit,” I breathed. One of the 'shipments' had been intercepted by the local authorities. The man who'd been charged with the crime was a patsy if I'd ever seen one. Overweight. Sweating. Well into his fifties. Just the kind of pervert society liked to condemn. There was no way he'd done it. “Who's this clown?”
“He was a member of the IMA.”
I noted the past tense. “Was? Is he dead?”
“No,” she said, “although they don't care much for rapists and sex traffickers very much in prison, so he might as well be, yes?”
Yes. And incarcerated in a prison where he might well be killed before the year was through, this Kevin McCarthy would be as effectively silenced as if Callaghan had placed the gun to this man's head and pulled the trigger himself.
“He was an older member,” Angelica said, reciting the facts from memory, “with seniority over you. He was recently stationed in Scotland — ” my mouth thinned at this. In the same “reeducation facility” as me? I wondered — “it seems he had not kept his displeasure with the recent changes in management quiet.”
Callaghan knew that I would see right through this smokescreen. This was his way of flipping me the bird. I didn't like that. Not one fucking bit.
Christina wouldn't, either. She popped into my head, unbidden, as she did so often these days. I could visualize her reaction as easily as if she were standing in front of me.
Schooling my expression, I asked in a bland voice, “Does anyone else in AMI know?”
Did you tell Christina?
When she smiled, it revealed small white teeth. “I left that distinct pleasure to you, of course.”
Of course.
Fils de putain.
I wasn't looking forward to this.
Christina
Three months. They could slip by in a breath. They could span an entire lifetime. Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last.
Six months had passed since my mother's death.
No, that wasn't quite right — my mother's murder. Death was a passive, natural thing; my mother had been forcibly removed from this world by a cold-blooded killer.
I was hacking into the computer of a member of the IMA. I'd forgotten his name, It wasn't important. He was low-ranked, and not particularly careful, but still, information can be waiting where you least expect it.
I stared at the scrolling cryptograms — he was that careful, at least — unseeingly. Numbers, letters, special characters: they blurred together in wavering lines, forming a road map of exhaustion. I hadn't slept in days. The coffee that sat beside me on the desk was ice cold. I had knocked it over several times, the dark spills spattering the carpet were testament to my clumsiness. They looked like dried blood. I would know.
Murder.
I closed my eyes. The inside of my eyelids rasped against my dry corneas like sand.
Mamá and I had never been close. In life, she had caused me untold pain. She was constantly criticizing my weight (I was too fat), and my interests (baseball and computers were indicative of hidden lesbian proclivities); when my father had landed on the IMA's radar screen she had thrown me to the wolves so they could escape, and when I had been threatened, she took a gamble no mother should ever make; she assumed that my captor would not have the stomach, or the motivation, to hurt me.
On that, as with so much else in life, she was mistaken.
My father told me that she was a very troubled woman, haunted by her own demons, and while this did not make her past actions any easier to accept, it did make them easier to understand. Even before the incident that changed my life, all of our lives, she had been as removed as a statue, never showing affection or offering words of praise. Other mothers hugged and coddled their daughters, sewed prom dresses, and had mother-daughter spa days. Mine could only offer criticism and condemnation.
This wellspring of grief that had spurted up in the wake of her passing was unexpected; I had never anticipated that her loss would hurt so much, but it did. I felt it every day, like a thorn in my heart, and I was starting to wonder if it would ever go away.
Along with that hurt was hate — a hate so caustic, it could sear on contact. I hadn't known I had the capacity for so much hate.
I hated the man who had my mother killed. His name was Adrian Callaghan, and he had done it to get back at me for putting a bullet in him. He was also the man who had tried to buy me like a slave; the man who had once beaten me so badly that I had nearly died from the ensuing wounds; the man who had made damn sure that Michael and I could never go on living for as long as he was still alive.
Oh, I hated him so much, I vibrated with it. When I closed my eyes, I could see his mocking smile. He was in my nightmares, and I often awoke from my dreams with his laughter ringing in my ears like a death knell.
The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.
Until I met him, I hadn't truly believed that people could be evil. I had believed that everyone had a little of both in their hearts, and that it was up to God to measure the scales. I had been mistaken: Adrian Callaghan was evil in every sense of the word.
Keys clacked. Cliff was studying the screen of the computer as it spewed out printouts of the code I had managed to crack. His eyes were as red-rimmed as mine felt, his face a mask of concentration.
Cliff had once worked for Adrian alongside a man called the Sniper. The two of them had captured me when Michael and I had tried, ineffectively, to lie low after our escape from Target Island. He was a big man, with a bronze complexion and dark hair. I knew next to nothing about him, except that the changes Adrian was imposing under his new regime frightened him enough that he had looked elsewhere for employment.
It said something that Adrian could bring even this great monolith of a man to fear.
He was aware of being watched. When his eyes started to slide towards mine, I looked away. It still felt strange being on the same side as the man who had hauled me in to Adrian. I wasn't sure I could trust him, although it looked like I might have to.
Suraya was in the other room with her young sister, Jatinder. I could hear the two of them talking softly in Hindi. They had been conversing for the last hour. I hadn't been trying to eavesdrop but in the silence that stretched, I couldn't help it.
“Dhana rahe,” she said, “Dhyana rakhana.”
I heard Jatinder say something in response.*double-check translation
I frowned. I wasn't sure I could trust Suraya, either, although Michael seemed to think she was trustworthy. Yes, she had driven the getaway car that helped us escape from Adrian's soiree, and, by proxy, helped save Michael from death, but she didn't do much for AMI now—at least, not that I could see. Mostly, she spent her time standing around and looking sullen or sequestered away with her sister. It made me think she was a spy.
What she had done for Michael couldn't carry her forever and I would have liked to see more concentrated effort on her part. Loyalty was all we had, and if we couldn't count on that, we had nothing, nothing at all.
“This coming from you?” Michael said, when I went to him with my suspicions, “if you recall, in the beginning you thwarted me each and every time I tried to save your ass.”
Anger flooded me in a hot rush. “Because you kidnapped me. You held me hostage.” He had done terrible things to me in the name of money. To me. To my family. His indifference had encased him in a shroud of ice; sometimes I still had nightmares of what he had been.
Of what he still might be.
“You're not the only one bad things happen to,” he said. “But c'est la vie. Life goes on.”
Life goes on? “Is that really what you believe? I didn't realize you were so…zen.”
Michael gave a Gallic shrug, and went back to whatever it was that he'd been doing before I came along, leaving me fuming in the process. Since she saved his life I'm sure he felt indebted to her. That gave me a strange feeling I didn't like. When you owed someone a favor, it was like they owned a part of you — forever.
The door opened. As if my thoughts had summoned him here, Michael stood in the doorway, casting a shadow that reached the monitor of the computer I was working on. I wondered if that was symbolic, then scoffed at my fancifulness. This wasn't some silly story; this was life, and life was never as simple or dramatic as fiction. Life was a study in contrasts, and a constant source of misery. What good parts there were happened so quickly that you could miss them if you blinked. I hadn't had any good parts in a while.
Michael's face was drawn. That was never a good sign. He rarely smiled, rarely showed any kind of expression at all. When he did, that almost always meant trouble.
I watched him carefully but his expression revealed nothing about his inner state, apart from the fact that he wasn't pleased. Wasn't he in a meeting with Angelica? Why had it ended early? Had they fought? Or did they discover…something?
Cliff noticed me tense and his hands stilled on the keyboard as he glanced over his shoulder. I saw his shoulders relax slightly, but not a whole lot. It seemed I wasn't the only one who was put on guard by the abrupt change in sides.
Michael's eyes flicked to Cliff and me. He arched an eyebrow. In the other room, the faint strains of Hindi had stopped. The door opened and Suraya came out, arms folded over her chest. Michael cleared his throat, shifting something under his arm. A file folder.
Uh oh.
“We have a problem,” he said, and he handed the envelope to me.
Big uh oh.
When Michael said there was a problem, that usually meant someone was trying to kill us. I stared at that manila envelope, running my trembling fingers along the stiff edges. I knew that I wasn't going to like whatever was inside.
My eyes were burning. Sweat had dripped down my forehead and gotten into my eyes. It had gotten suffocation hot under the flickering fluorescent lights. Why had he given the folder to me in front of everyone? Couldn't we discuss it in private?
Maybe it's because he trusts you.
I sneaked a look at him. Was that what it was, trust? Or was this a test?
I flipped through the folder that Michael had given me, trying to get a grasp of what I was dealing with before I was forced to acknowledge it publicly. My first thought was that it would involve blood, blood and death. I was half-right. There was plenty of blood.
It took me a moment to process the images I was looking at. I had never seen anything like them outside of movies, and that had been toned down for a viewing audience. This was uncensored reality, in all its gritty, gory glory. I swallowed wetly and shook my head, feeling ill. Those poor girls. Because they were, without a doubt, girls, and not women.
Adrian had told me in our last meeting that he had trouble getting women to come home with him. I'm afraid I've developed somewhat of a reputation, he'd said, slyly, as if he were joking about the weather, or sports.
For what? I'd asked him. Sending girls home in boxes? I hadn't been joking, but I hadn't expected that I'd be so close to the truth, either. The spaces to which these women had been confined were coffin-small. There was no room to move, to even breathe; they must have been entrenched in their own waste. My skin crawled at the thought.
I knew what that was like. Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
I studied the faces that were so painfully, heartbreakingly young beneath their murky veneer of blood and grime and sweat. Some of them wore scraps of soiled clothing. Many were naked. On many I could not tell where the dirt ended and the bruises began.
My stomach cramped in unease. I passed the folder on. I couldn't stand to look at their eyes anymore. They were the eyes of people who have glimpsed a world without hope, and I was all too familiar with that feeling. There had been a point, not long ago, where I had been forced to come to terms with what I wholly believed was my impending death. I could be killed before the week was out, even now. Many powerful men out there wanted me dead, and this world was ruled by powerful men who were all too used to getting their way. I closed my eyes briefly. Adrian had taught me that lesson all too well.
Oh, but hell, like many things, exists on earth. It's only a matter of finding the right path to get there, and believe me, Christina, I know the way. I can take you there.
He was Satan with a human face, and I wanted to put him back where he belonged.
In hell.
Michael's eyes met mine for a moment. He had incredible eyes—cat-like one moment, and then forest green the next. The color was dependent on luminescence and shadow, affected by something as small as the tilt of his head. Up close, in the light, they were even more stunning, with yellow flecks caught in the iris like beads of honey.
They were dark now, foreboding, and even though I knew that had everything to do with his facing away from the light source and nothing to do with his state of mind, he still cut an imposing figure. His jaw was tense, and I had the expression that he wanted to speak, to me, in private. But of course, he wouldn't. Not here. Not now.
What have you gotten us into this time?
My own face, never stoic no matter how hard I tried, must have revealed my despair. I saw his mouth relax slightly, the lip soften as he unclenched his teeth. I knew from experience that he was attempting to look reassuring, and instead of consoling me it had the opposite effect because if he felt he had to protect me, we really were screwed.
Suraya cursed aloud, shattering my train of thought. I twisted around to look at her along with everyone else. The folder had reached her. One of the papers had fluttered to the ground, but she didn't seem to notice. Her face was flushed, and there was a spark of animation in her eyes that I'd never seen so vividly.
“Something you'd like to share with the rest of the class?” Michael drawled.
“This man is a demon.” She smacked the folder violently with a cracking sound that made me flinch. Michael noticed that, too. I saw his eyes flick towards me again before returning to Suraya. Spittle flew from her lips as she added, “He is a scourge upon humanity. This is the fate he promised my sister if I did not cooperate with his plans.”
Me too.
I bit my lip, hard. That could have been why Michael had looked at me in that odd way, with the slight softening that wasn't quite pity. He knew what Adrian had suggested to me because I'd told him, and once his rage had dissipated he had told me that that would never happen, not as long as either of us breathed. I remember wishing that he hadn't used those exact words, as it seemed like tempting fate.
An odd thought occurred to me: was this why he'd given me the folder to open? Had he been curious about my reaction? Why?
Maybe it is a test. To see if you're strong enough.
“He has been very quiet of late.” That was Angelica. She was standing in the doorway Michael had only recently vacated. I hadn't even heard her come in. “Now we know why.”
Adrian Callaghan isn't quiet, I wanted to say. He bides his time.
When he wasn't speaking, that's when you needed to watch out, because it meant he'd decided to hurt you, hurt you badly, and was best planning on how to go about it as ruthlessly and as painfully as possible.
Michael gave her a slow, measuring look, but there was no surprise in it. They must have discussed it earlier. I wondered why I hadn't been included.
“Well?” Suraya's voice smacked of impatience. “What are you going to do about it?”
Fear uncoiled deep down in my gut. Taking the initiative meant facing him again, and I didn't want to do that because I knew that the next time I did, I might not walk away. What can we do? I wondered. We're already living on borrowed time, all of us.
I wanted somebody else to take my hand, and make the bad man go away.
I was pathetic.
And then, as Suraya's words circled through my head, mocking my lack of drive, I couldn't help but notice the structure of her words, her odd choice of pronoun. Not 'what are we going to do about it?' but, 'what are you going to do about it?'
“It will cost too much time and resources to pinpoint each shipment.” Angelica dehumanized the women, turning them into objects, like something that could be sent through FedEx. I had never borne any ill will against her, but in that moment I hated her a little for being so cool. One look at Suraya told me she felt the same exact way.
As she glanced our way, discreet diamond studs in her ears caught the light and winked. “If we do succeed in cutting them off,” she continued, purposefully, “another operation will simply sprout up elsewhere — and the girls will be killed.”
I thought of the pictures, of those frightened human faces, and wondered if I was going to be sick. I steeled myself against the nausea and tried to think of it in the abstract. This wasn't real. I was reading a novel — a badly written novel by some hack novelist who was trying to titillate her audience through the degradation of human beings.
If this was a story, I asked, how would I resolve the conflict?
“All you're succeeding in doing is going around in circles.” Suraya's face hardened. “I ask you again—what are you going to do about it?”
Still no we, I noticed. But I had an answer. My ridiculous thought experiment worked.
“Infiltration,” I said, and the moment I spoke, I saw Michael's head whip towards me. I faltered briefly. “Maybe — maybe we can't do anything about it from the outside, but if one of us could figure out a way in, we could find out more details — the hows and whys and wheres — and maybe do more than shut down a single, tiny branch.”
Michael nodded, so imperceptibly that I'm not sure anyone else noticed. I did, and my heart fluttered a little under the sheer weight of his attention. “How?” he asked.
The way he looked at me, it was as if we were the only two people in the room. He is testing me. There was only one possible solution, though. I wet my lips. “Go undercover.”
The slight hitch in my voice made Suraya narrow her eyes. “You mean…prostitution?”
“Not exactly.” Michael leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. “If we were going to do this, it would have to look authentic. One of us would have to sell another.” His eyes fell into shadow. “One of us would have to be trafficked to Adrian Callaghan's men.”
Cloak and Dagger Broke 1,100 Ratings
I'm a huge dork for keeping track. I know. But it's just so wonderful and exciting. I CAN'T HELP IT.
You guys are wonderful, and please don't stop.
P.S. CEASE AND DESIST is in its final stages of revisions. I have the BEST betas ever. They complement each other's critiquing style perfectly, and OH MY GOD, I'm actually really excited. :D
You guys are wonderful, and please don't stop.
P.S. CEASE AND DESIST is in its final stages of revisions. I have the BEST betas ever. They complement each other's critiquing style perfectly, and OH MY GOD, I'm actually really excited. :D
CEASE AND DESIST Is Published!!!
At last!
You can currently get it from Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Cease-Desist-IM...
If you have a moment, I'd appreciate it if you could write a short little something on Facebook or Twitter letting others know as well.
Thank you so much for all of your love, support, and encouragement. This book was probably the most difficult I've written to date, and I had SO MANY PEOPLE in my corner, cheering me on, and that has made all the difference.
You guys rock. ♥
You can currently get it from Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Cease-Desist-IM...
If you have a moment, I'd appreciate it if you could write a short little something on Facebook or Twitter letting others know as well.
Thank you so much for all of your love, support, and encouragement. This book was probably the most difficult I've written to date, and I had SO MANY PEOPLE in my corner, cheering me on, and that has made all the difference.
You guys rock. ♥
The IMA Series Is Complete--New Books, Freebies, & Promotions!!!
Yesterday I published the last book in my IMA series, which makes it my second completed series to date.
This is a huge milestone for me, and I couldn't have reached it without the help of others.
That's why I've decided to do an exciting promotion to celebrate reaching this goal!
On November 2, 2015, Cloak and Dagger will be free for download (normal price is $.99).
On November 3, 2015, Armed and Dangerous will be $1.99 for download (normal price is $2.99).
Also on November 3, 2015, Locked and Loaded will be $1.99 (normal price is $3.99).
Both these price-cut promotions will begin at 8 AM PST, and last for 24 hours.
Please spread the word if you can. I'm not very good at self-promotion and would love any help I can get!
And thank you for getting me this far. It's been a long, hard ride, and even though there have been low moments, I've appreciated every moment of it.
You guys...are amazing.
Love,
Nenia M. Campbell
This is a huge milestone for me, and I couldn't have reached it without the help of others.
That's why I've decided to do an exciting promotion to celebrate reaching this goal!
On November 2, 2015, Cloak and Dagger will be free for download (normal price is $.99).
On November 3, 2015, Armed and Dangerous will be $1.99 for download (normal price is $2.99).
Also on November 3, 2015, Locked and Loaded will be $1.99 (normal price is $3.99).
Both these price-cut promotions will begin at 8 AM PST, and last for 24 hours.
Please spread the word if you can. I'm not very good at self-promotion and would love any help I can get!
And thank you for getting me this far. It's been a long, hard ride, and even though there have been low moments, I've appreciated every moment of it.
You guys...are amazing.
Love,
Nenia M. Campbell
Vote for Cease and Desist in the Goodreads Choice Awards
If you really enjoyed my IMA series, please consider voting for Cease and Desist in the Goodreads Choice Awards under Romance.
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceaward...
I don't expect to win, or even reach the finals. There are many other nominees whose books are much more qualified than mine. But it would mean the world to me if you could vote for my book--and mean it. In fact, that sounds like a win to me right there. :)
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceaward...
I don't expect to win, or even reach the finals. There are many other nominees whose books are much more qualified than mine. But it would mean the world to me if you could vote for my book--and mean it. In fact, that sounds like a win to me right there. :)
Michael's Letter
Some of my readers expressed a desire for some sort of epilogue in Cease and Desist. I did actually write one, but I removed it because I wasn't sure it fit. So here, for my loyal readers, is the portion that I excised, for your reading enjoyment.
Warning: contains spoilers for books 1-3
DON'T READ IF YOU LIKED THE ORIGINAL ENDING.
https://www.facebook.com/aficionenias...
Warning: contains spoilers for books 1-3
DON'T READ IF YOU LIKED THE ORIGINAL ENDING.
https://www.facebook.com/aficionenias...
