Finished (Auctioned)

“Oh, wow. He must’ve started talking right away.” Or maybe Niko was just that good.

“Yeah, the little shit felt betrayed by AJ and sang like a canary. I put way too much effort into Alfred.” Reese folded his arms over his chest and eyed the men in the room. “I figured, since Riv was interrogating him when everyone dropped, I could pick up where they left off.”

Made sense.

Gray joined him in front of the window and glanced at Alfred and AJ. They hadn’t moved closer to each other, nor were they talking right now. They were just glaring.

“How many do you think heard me with Alicia?” Gray asked quietly.

“Probably just me,” Reese said. “The downside of always having the mic on, you get tired of hearing everything on the same line. Niko took his out earlier, and Dante switched to a new line once Willow got back.”

That was a relief. Not that Gray had said anything to Alicia that he wanted to keep secret, necessarily; it’d just been a moment when he hadn’t filtered himself.

Reese nodded at the window. “AJ got upset right after the gunshot. He demanded to know if Ally had been hurt.”

He and Alicia definitely seemed to have the strongest connection in the criminal bunch. “How loyal do you think they are to each other?”

“From what little I’ve gathered, I think they’re partners—maybe romantically too.” Reese weighed his next response. “I don’t have any two cents on their level of loyalty, but Ally hasn’t been completely honest.” He gestured at Alfred. “He said it suddenly made sense why AJ was so willing to take the money from tonight’s auction back to his place for safekeeping.” Reese tilted his head at Gray and cocked a brow. “That’s weird if you ask me, because Alicia has known for a while that Darius and Ryan’s cousins were breaking in to AJ’s house right around now. And if Alicia and AJ’s plan had been to escape with that money, it’d be stupid to store the cash in a place where she knows it could disappear in a planned robbery.”

That was weird. It was also a minor detail that Gray didn’t care about. He’d stopped giving a shit about why criminals acted the way they did. They were inexplicable degrees of selfish and cruel, and these motherfuckers weren’t gonna breathe for much longer. The crimes they’d committed were so heinous that theft and deceit were just things to shrug at.

Everything boiled down to human trafficking. No crime was worse.

It reminded him of something… He had to know. “Reese, do you know how many survivors we’re looking for? Be honest with me.”

Reese side-eyed him and contemplated for a moment, then nodded once. “Casey and Boone found over sixty photos of victims the first time they searched AJ’s estate.”

Over sixty.

Gray averted his gaze and felt a chunk of lead drop into his stomach. Hatred simmered below the surface, as did grief. Sixty innocent lives—and there were more out there. Most of them weren’t as fortunate as Gray. Many wouldn’t make it at all, and everyone would carry an extra weight on their shoulders for as long as they lived.

“What was Darius’s reason for not telling me?” Gray asked quietly.

Reese blew out a breath. “I reckon he didn’t wanna lie outright, so he just omitted the information. He thought if you saw the pictures, it would be too much. You wouldn’t be able to keep your head in the game.”

Yeah, that sounded like something Darius would say. Or how he would justify that he always intended to put himself between Gray and danger.

It didn’t matter anymore. Gray glanced back at AJ and Alfred and found at least a sliver of pleasure in knowing that those two sons of bitches wouldn’t wreck another innocent person’s life.

“Your mother was right about you, AJ,” they heard Alfred mutter. Gray cocked his head. “We were too kind.”

AJ chuckled darkly. “You’re so detached from reality that I can’t take a word you say seriously. You refused to let me in—because of pride. You didn’t want to admit that I was right. The organization’s been a sinking ship for years. I could’ve revolutionized—”

“Lies!” Alfred thundered with murder in his eyes. “You’re a spoiled boy. If you’d spent half as much time shadowing me as you did following that little whore around, you could’ve been something.”

AJ snapped his mouth shut and shook his head.

Oh, screw this. What was the point? Gray was getting bored. He was ready to kill them both. He’d do it too, as soon as they heard from Niko and Dante.

“You don’t even care that your mother’s dead,” Alfred spat out.

“Why the fuck does it matter?” AJ laughed. “You think we’re walking out of here?”

At that, Alfred smiled a little. “Unlike you, I have something to bargain with.”

Gray and Reese exchanged a quick look.