HUNTER

Later that night, I received a message from George.

RUSKIE5: Celia found video feed from dorm. She is not happy. Maybe you should come by. Talk to her.

Damn.

I knew she'd be mad if she discovered I'd had her dorm bugged and a hidden camera installed, but I also knew she'd never believe me when I told her it was for her own safety.

I should have gone right over and confronted her, explained things, but I decided to let it ride. She'd get over it.

Or she wouldn't. I was going to avoid the safe house as much as possible, visiting only when Celia was away. Until she came to me and asked me to fuck her, she could spend her time alone if that was what she wanted.

I was through with trying to seduce her and fed up with her resistance. I thought she wanted me. I thought, by the way her body responded to me when we had sex, that she enjoyed being with me. She orgasmed. Easily.

I’d figured I was giving her an excuse to do what she really wanted anyway, but I was wrong.

She didn't really want it. Not really.

So, that was it for me. I didn't have to coax women to fuck me. They did so because they wanted it.

That was my bottom line.

I figured if I left her alone for a while, she'd come to her senses and just fuck me the way I thought she really wanted. Instead, I felt a sense of gloom, because I'd grown used to being able to drop in and see her whenever I wanted. I enjoyed fucking her just a little too much for my own good.

I wanted her to want me back just as much.

As to the debt? Fuck it. I did it out of loyalty to Graham, despite how badly he'd betrayed me. I didn't want anything to happen to him despite what he did to me.

Finally, I did it because I could.

I arrived at the safe house a few days later to talk to George before I went out of town.

"How does she seem?" I asked, keeping my voice as neutral as possible, despite the fact I felt less and less certain about my decision to force the issue between us.

"She is fine," George said, misinterpreting my intent, of course. I didn’t want her to be fine. I wanted her to feel lonely and upset and missing out on my company.

"What does she do all day when she's not at class?"

"She is very studious," George replied, nodding to himself. "Reads books and papers all the time. Writes on computer. No need to worry. She is not lonely. Too busy."

"Huh," I replied, trying hard not to show my frustration.

Of course, I could have found release in the company of one of the club regulars. Lila was always willing and able, but I couldn't take her vapid conversation and her focus on the way things looked. How rich I was, how much respect the thugs from the Romanov family showed me...

The truth was that I wanted Celia.

Later that day, I met my handler down by the docks south of the city, behind an old warehouse that had seen better days. I parked the SUV and turned off the engine, sitting with my cell, checking my texts to see if he was still on his way.

About five minutes later, Millar arrived, pulling up beside me, his window beside mine. I rolled down my window and he nodded, his dark glasses hiding his eyes from view.

I didn’t like that. I wanted to look in someone's eyes when I spoke to them to see if I could detect falsehood.

"You shouldn't have roughed up Stepan," Millar said. "His family's lawyer is pushing for an arrest. Can you believe it? The nerve of these thugs."

I shook my head. "That's the biggest joke of all."

"Well, it puts us in a very tough position. Since you've been named and we have video that puts you there, if we don't arrest you then too much focus could come down on us. You should have kept your nose clean."

"Look," I said, my fists clenched. "You gave me wide open rules of engagement. If I did nothing, none of them would respect me. If you really want me to get next to Sergei Romanov, I have to fit in. They have to believe I'm in this for real, and not a plant."

"This is my operation," Millar said, his voice firm. "I'm the one who developed the plan. I'm the one who changes it. Got that?"

"Hey," I said, holding up my hands in submission. "I'm doing my job. You want me to get close to Sergei. I can't do that unless he thinks I'm legit. A real wiseguy would have beaten up Stepan. That's the way they work."

"The way the cops work is when they have a suspect, they make an arrest."

I exhaled. Of course, it would look suspicious if they had direct evidence of me beating Stepan to a pulp and didn't even bring me in.

"What do you want to do?"

"We need to arrest you." Millar said. "We can pick you up or you could turn yourself in. We’ll put you in lockup for a few days, in a segregated unit, then you make bail, and when the case comes to trial, you can conveniently get off due to some technicality."

I gave him a dark look. "It's that easy, is it?"

"We have ways." Millar shrugged. "Sometimes, we have to cooperate with the bad guys to get the biggest bad guy there is."

"There's a slippery slope," I said ruefully. "Careful we aren't standing too close to the edge."

"I'm fine with my own morals," Millar said and glanced away. "I can live with myself and what our unit is doing. Can you?" He turned back to look at me pointedly.

"I sleep very well, thanks," I replied.

"What about Spencer Grant's stepdaughter? You fucking her or something?"

I glanced away, not happy that they were monitoring my every move. "We have a history."

"Are you using her to get revenge against Grant? You have to tell me these things."

"Grant is a sonofabitch who’s had it in for me and my family for decades."

"Yeah, I know. He was all butthurt because your uncle got off years ago when he was Assistant DA. He's still gunning for you."

"Some people can't let the past go."

"So, are you using the stepdaughter to get back at Grant? Throw her in his face or something?"

"No," I said. "It's not like that. We go a long way back." Then, I tried to change the subject from Celia. "So did you find that information I asked you about?"

He sucked his teeth thoughtfully for a moment. "As a matter of fact, I heard that the Bureau's looking at Spencer Grant as part of an investigation into a sex ring operating in the DC area. Seems he developed a preference for young things when he first worked as Commonwealth's Attorney in Alexandria. There were rumors, but nothing stuck. A task force has a few leads and they're moving forward with the case."

"What?" I said and turned to him, a surge of adrenaline going through me. "He's a pedophile?"

"Apparently, he likes them pubescent and just illegal. There's some modelling agency that provides vulnerable young things from Eastern Europe, the old Soviet Union, who don't know what to expect when they get to the US. These creeps lavish these girls with booze and money and have their way with them. Get them gigs with the big agencies."

I frowned and wondered if he'd ever done anything to Celia. Then I shook my head mentally. Celia had been a virgin. He'd made her sign a chastity contract.

Maybe that was to protect him more than her…

"That fucking bastard," I said, anger coiling inside me. "He's been involved with trafficking young Russian girls?"

"Yeah," he replied. "He's just slimy enough to have slipped out of reach."

"What a fucking hypocrite. He's condemned my family all this time because of our ties to the Russian mob, and he's using them for his own perversions? He's all kinds of evil," I said, remembering how he'd hurt Celia and Graham when they were kids. "I'd like to take him down, too. Believe me. Seeing him in prison would be the cherry on top of the Sergei Romanov ice cream sundae."

"One mission at a time," Millar said. "We need you on the Romanovs. That's your world."

"Grant's stepdaughter is an old friend. He was a bastard to those two kids, beating them both. What a psychopath."

"He's a real case, if what the task force thinks happened is true. Like I say, they're building a case against him."

I nodded. "What do you want from me?"

"I want you to lie low for a week or so until the stuff with Stepan settles down. Can you take a vacation or something? When you get back, we could make a show of picking you up, bring you down to the station, then have you released on bail."

"I could go to Quantico for a week, but it's really inconvenient." Then I thought I could kill two birds with one stone—get out of town and investigate what I could about Spencer and his time in Alexandria chasing after pretty little Eastern European girls who thought they were coming to the USA to become rich and famous…

"We either pick you up now or later, but it would be best to let things die down a bit before we take you in, get everything in place. It would be good to have you stay in lockup for a while. Make your bones with the Russians, so to speak."

"I'd rather not, but I survived Hell Week, so I think I can survive a week in lockup."

"I'll see what I can arrange."

Then, we parted, Millar driving off in one direction and me in the other.

As Millar suggested, I left Boston for a week, spending time in Alexandria. If I had to lay low, I wanted to achieve something during my off time, and that something was to track down intel on Spencer Grant and the possibility he was a fucking pedophile pervert who trafficked in Russian immigrant girls. The thought he might have harmed Celia in some way made my blood boil and I could think of nothing else.

While in Alexandria, I called on contacts I had in Virginia, tracing Spencer's past before he’d met Celia's mother and moved in with them. I tapped a private eye friend, asking him to do some snooping into Spencer's background for me. Bill O'Donnell had worked for DC police in their cyber-crimes unit and was now retired, but had a PI business on the side. An aging man with a big potbelly and a shaved head, he had an easy smile and laugh.

I liked him the first time I met him years earlier.

"What can you tell me about these kinds of scum?" I asked when we met at a bar in Alexandria.

"What can I tell you? Too much, most of it will make you puke your guts out. Often, pedophiles belong to ultra-secret networks that operate on the dark web. They're difficult to infiltrate, but this modelling gig is almost too easy. It makes everything above board, look legit. They appear to be just a group of men helping to fund a modelling agency looking for new talent. If you want to dig up dirt on a suspect, I'll have to have more to go on than just a name."

"The current DA in Boston," I said and nodded when I saw his expression of surprise.

"Seriously?"

"Yep. There's an ongoing FBI case, but it's stalled. He has a lot of power, as you can imagine."

"No shit," he replied and stared off in the distance.

"Dig up as much dirt as you can on Spencer Grant as fast as you can. I can pay you handsomely."

"That's always an incentive."

Twenty-four hours later, as I sat at a hotel in Alexandria, doing my own research on Spencer's past, Bill called me with some usable intel.

"I got some stuff for you," he said. "We should meet somewhere private."

I agreed and we met later that evening at an Irish pub in DC.

"So, what have you got for me?" I asked, impatient to get to the good stuff. I took a long pull on my glass of Guinness and waited while Bill did the same.

"Spencer was quite the big religious leader in Alexandria when he was living there, and was known as a pious man among his colleagues," Bill said, licking the foam off his lip. "It took some digging, but there was an incident in his past that I found alarming. He'd gone through a messy divorce and his ex made an allegation that he was abusing their daughter, but then, when the court date was scheduled, she withdrew the charge and nothing more was said. Typical of these kinds of cases."

"Let me guess: the allegation was true but he threatened to ruin her if she went through with it."

"Something like that," Bill replied, raising his eyebrows.

Bill finished filling me in on his findings, taking out a reporter's notepad and flipping through pages.

"Grant still owns a few properties in Virginia, including a cabin near Chesapeake Beach. The address was linked to some chat logs of staff at the modelling agency."

"That sounds very suspicious. You got an address?" I asked. Bill nodded and wrote it down on a sheet of paper, ripping it out and handing it to me.

"You shouldn't go there alone," Bill said. "No vigilante stuff, Hunter."

"Don't worry about me."

We finished our beers and I drove back to my hotel room, deciding to take a drive out there the next day, check it out. I wasn't above a little breaking and entering to see what I might dig up that could incriminate Spencer.

The Virginia coast in October was wet and cold. I knew my way around the locale and felt comfortable driving the streets. I retraced a few of my old visits to the area, even went to stand and stare at one of the battleships in the harbor.

My life had been good before Sean's death, before I took over the business, and I wished now that I could go back to it, back to the days when I was in the Marines, getting ready to teach the incoming officer selection course. But I couldn't.

This was my life now, for better or worse. I had to make the most of it.

I pulled into a narrow back road that ran beside Spencer's property, trying to remain invisible to anyone who might be in the cabin. I didn't think Spencer would be there. It was off-season so the cabin should have been empty. From where I parked, I could just see the house and the circular driveway in front. It resembled a log cabin, with rustic cedar and a stone fireplace. Totally innocuous, in other words.

I wondered, as I sat in the rental car and debated whether to break in, if Celia and I would have become a couple had Greg not come along.

While I mused on Celia and her possible likes and dislikes in men, I was surprised to see a car drive up the lane. I was glad I'd had the forethought to park on a different street out of sight but with the cabin in my line of vision. One of the cabin doors opened and a tall, gangly young girl left and walked to the waiting car, whose engine was still running.

Who was she?

Then I saw her face straight on before she got in the back seat, and I got a sick feeling in my gut.

Her long fair hair was a mess, her makeup was a smeared, there was lipstick on her cheek, black streaks under her eyes.

She was no more than twelve or thirteen by her height and physical development, but the makeup was sickeningly adult. The car drove off and I was just about to follow it when a man appeared at the cabin door, wrapping a scarf around his neck before striking off on foot. He must have parked somewhere else and walked to the cabin.

I got out of my car, pulled up my own collar against the wind, and followed him.

The man entered a narrow walkway that skirted the coast a few hundred feet ahead of me. I sped up and bumped into him, knocking him in an attempt to intimidate him, put him off balance.

"How do you live with yourself?" I said in a hushed voice, my disgust with him and his type making me feel that violence was the only solution.

He stopped and turned to face me, his response showing he was alert, but not expecting to be followed.

"Who the fuck are you?"

I grabbed his arm when he tried to run. "Who do you think I am?"

He shook his head, his eyes wide. "I don’t know." He looked me up and down, sizing me up. "Are you one of Franklin's men? I paid up."

"No," I said, making a mental note to check all Spencer's contacts for a Franklin.

"Then who are you?"

I reached into his pocket and grabbed his keys, his wallet, and his cell. He tried to wrestle with me, but I was a few inches taller and a few dozen pounds heavier.

"Go," I said and shoved him.

"Give those back," he replied, reaching for the wallet and cell, trying to take them from me.

I withdrew my sidearm and pointed it at him. "Leave before I shoot your sorry ass," I said and backed away. "Be prepared."

He frowned. "For what?"

But by the paleness to his face, I could tell he knew what I meant. He'd better prepare himself for being arrested when I turned the bastard in.

"Go, now," I said waving my gun at him. "Or I may lose my temper and shoot you, you perverted fuck."

He turned and hustled down the walkway, disappearing into the trees where the walkway met the forest. I watched for a moment and then turned back, running along the pathway back to the cabin. I tucked the phone and wallet into my jacket pocket and did a recon of the cabin, looking for a point of entry.

Before I did anything, I slipped on a pair of latex gloves. No need to leave my fingerprints all over everywhere. Then, I used the handy little device George had given me that jammed the radio frequency used in any alarm system, enabling me to open a window and slip inside undetected. Your average neighborhood thug didn't have access to sweet tech like I had.

The living room looked completely normal, except for a dozen empty bottles of beer, and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts. A distinct scent of weed hung over the room.

I took my time, examining everything. Then, I opened the door to the basement and walked down the stairs, my heart in my throat as I went. I knew that if there was anything incriminating, it would be located down here, where the air was cool and damp.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I felt sick to my stomach.

Video cameras set up on tripods.

They were making child porn. Inside a dark room was a bed against one wall and video equipment, a camera on a tripod, an assortment of other cameras on a table against another wall. Restraints of many kinds—leather straps and chains, belts and whips—were laid out on a table. Whoever owned this cabin was not only into abusing children sexually, he was a sadist who enjoyed their pain and fear.

I felt the blood freeze in my veins as I examined the sadistic pedophile's paraphernalia, my anger making my muscles tense. This stuff between consenting adults I had no problems with, but against children?

Had the worm been this bad, this developed in his sick perversion, when he’d lived with Celia? He'd hit her, he'd hit Graham, but had he spared Celia this hell?

I could only hope so.

I couldn't imagine Celia as a little eleven- or twelve-year-old girl, tied up and abused.

It was impossible.

I checked around, looking for a stash of pornography, magazines, photographs, or films in the room that Spencer and his pedophile associates used as a trophy room, but there was nothing.

Then I found it.

Inside the closet, at the back, behind a box of clothes, was a locked cupboard. That was surely where the goods were kept. I easily broke the lock and checked inside, where I found row upon row of cassettes, old reel-to-reel tapes, and newer CDs. Boxes filled with Polaroids of young girls just pubescent, their eyes blank, their faces pale, some with makeup on, red smears on their lips, bodies in obscene poses that made sense only when assumed by adult women.

I felt my guts roil, my gorge rise, as I sorted through them, looking for Celia among the faces—for the black hair and chocolate-brown eyes. Spencer and his group of perverts were meticulous, documenting each child, the name, age and a little comment on each. One depicted a little girl doing something little girls shouldn't even know about, let alone perform on an adult. The label read, "Penny. 8."

There was nothing in the box showing Celia—thank God. Perhaps these predated Spencer's time with her. They were older, taken in the 80s, the color fading.

I started sorting through the cassettes, reading dates and labels. I sat on the edge of the bed and held the tapes in my hand, considering whether to watch then or not. If I did, I'd be witness to horror I knew I could probably not forget, but I wanted to see him and know he deserved to die. I'd know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that killing him was completely just. I knew that already, but I needed to see what the worm did so I could look him in the eye and exact a confession, forcing Spencer to admit to his crimes.

When I killed Spencer, and I would kill him, I'd make him say the words.

I slipped a tape into the VCR and watched it. On it, the most devastating scenes I could imagine for a little girl—any little girl. As I watched, I thought about Celia and about our encounters when she was a teen. Was Spencer doing this kind of thing to her back then?

It made me ill to even consider it.

I'd seen and done shit that would make most people's skin crawl. I'd been in firefights where I'd blown off the heads of enemy fighters; I'd been in the aftermath of car bombings, seeing body parts strewn around the road, bodies burnt beyond recognition.

I'd never seen anything like this.

The men I killed were all enemies—soldiers or insurgents. They were terrorists. They were adults, they were hardened, they knew what was going to happen, they had been prepared for it.

When I made them bleed, the blood was justified. When I made them cry out in pain, inflicting the pain was legitimate.

The only response to witnessing a video like this was to kill the man. Death was the only justice possible. All that kept me from losing complete control were thoughts of killing him in as slow and deliberate and painful a way as possible.

Witnessing the anonymous child's abuse made me feel a need to purge myself through violence. I could kill the man today, when I returned to Boston. That would give me immediate satisfaction.

However, I wanted to do it right. I wanted to do it legally. On top of that, I wanted to make sure all his perverted associates went down with him.

In public.

I put the tapes back into the cupboard and then left the basement, left the cabin through the window, and went to my car.

Before I reached it, I stopped and bent over, emptying the contents of my stomach on the leaf-strewn forest floor.

I stopped on a side street in downtown Alexandria and called Millar on my burner, using a secure line he'd given me for when I needed to contact him.

"I'm coming back early," I said, a feeling of exhaustion hitting me now that the adrenaline had burned off.

"What's up?"

"I've been snooping around Alexandria, and found something. I think your boys need to check out Grant's old property in Chesapeake Beach. He or his fellow perverts are using it as a fun house. There's material there that could put him and his associates away."

"You broke into his property?"

"I saw a young girl leave and then an older man. I stopped him and got his name and cell. You better have someone go there quick before he alerts Grant and they go and clean the place out."

"What's the address?"

I gave him the address and I heard him flip through a file.

"We haven't got a warrant to do a search."

"You better get one, and quick. I'm ready to go kill the bastard myself," I said, remembering the images I'd seen.

"Don't do that," Millar said, his voice firm. "It won't do anyone any good to have you in jail for murder for real."

"Don't worry," I said. "I got control of myself. I'll leave the rest up to you, but I'm warning you. If nothing happens because of this, I can't promise anything."

"I'll call my contacts in Alexandria and get to the cabin as soon as we can. As for you, lie low until I have things in place. Then we'll take you in."

"I'm coming back to Boston," I said, impatient to return and see things through.

"I can't talk you into staying there for another few days? Things aren’t in place yet to bring you in."

"I'll stay quiet. I don’t like being away when things are going to go down."

"Okay, but lay low."

I ended the call. What I really wanted to do was go and find Spencer and choke the man to death, but I'd leave justice to the justice system. Only if it failed would I take matters into my own hands.

I returned to Boston and went right to the warehouse. I slumped in a chair beside George, who sat in front of a computer, reading the newspaper.

He put down his paper and turned to me, his reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. "How are you? Back so soon? I thought you were staying for a week."

I rubbed my eyes, not able to put how I was feeling in words.

"It was bad?" George asked, frowning at me.

"Yeah, it was bad," I said finally, leaning my head back, closing my eyes. "Worse than I expected. But thanks for this nifty little piece of technology."

I handed him back the radio jammer and he slipped it into a drawer in his desk.

"Glad it was of use. Tell me what happened."

"Celia's stepfather," I said and shook my head. "I found evidence at his old cabin. He's going down."

"Is good, no?"

"Yeah, but I don’t know what, if anything, he did to her."

"Talk to her. See what she says."

"This isn’t something you just ask a person," I said and rubbed my forehead. "‘Hey, did your stepfather sexually abuse you when you were eleven?’"

George nodded. "Is delicate personal matter. You have thought through this whole business with her being your little bit of pussy? "

"I've thought a lot about it," I said. "Now, given what I've seen, I'm rethinking it. If there is any possibility that she was abused…"

George shrugged. "Is your decision."

"You think I should let her go?"

"I think nothing. You are good man, Hunter. You do wrong things for right reasons."

I gripped the armrests of my chair and exhaled. "I should have let her be. Paid the debt and let her alone. Now, I've got her in trouble. She's in Victor's sights."

"You have to protect her if nothing else."

"I will," I said, resting a hand on George's shoulder. "The Pottery Barn rule applies here. Graham got her in trouble. I got her in even more by becoming personally involved with her. I have to look after her.”

"You will," George said, nodding.

I would. Even if she didn't want anything to do with me, I would protect her.