"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.