Nickie had learned in the past, people with illegal income streams tend to spend cash at restaurants and for entertainment, and to use their laundered, taxable funds to pay things like mortgage, car payment, and electric bill. Neither girl had any traceable expenses at a coffee shop or restaurant, but there was a Starbucks literally right outside the math building, and Sandy had an hour between classes after a two-hour period in the math building.

The library was next door, too, though. Would she go to Starbucks or the library? Was she a werewolf or a human? If Sandy was a werewolf then she might walk to an actual restaurant. Once Nickie knew his secret, Bud had let her see how much he actually needs to eat in a day.

Sandy didn’t post much on her Instagram account, and Nickie wondered if that meant anything. Bud had told her the MC rules say none of the brothers can be on social media, and they have to coach their family and significant others not to mention them too much. It’s okay to talk about them generically, but never to say where they were at a specific time, or where they’ll be in the future. No locations, because why make things easy on their enemies.

Did the MC have similar rules for their employees? Did their human employees have the same rules as their shapeshifter employees?

When Tyler arrived, she showed him what she had. “I want to find a way to talk to her. Get a feel for who she is.”

“She isn’t going to talk to a stranger about being a working girl, and if you approach her at school and know what she is… I don’t see how you’ll make it work.”

“I’ll find something. I always do. Just need to dig into her life more so I can find a connection and she’ll feel comfortable talking to me.” Nickie looked up as an idea slammed into her. “Bud finally told me he’s in his late fifties, and explained werewolves don’t age the same. What if she’s a werewolf and is studying biomedical engineering because she wants to use what she knows about shapeshifters to figure out how to keep humans from aging as fast?”

“I’m not a wolf, but I’ve learned that since wolves heal back to their perfect DNA blueprint every time they change, the aging process is drastically slowed. I know the strongest wolves age slower than the weaker ones, which is why Bud looks even younger than other wolves his age. Human’s don’t change form, so I’m not sure how she could make it work.”

Another idea occurred to her, and she compared full moon days with absences from class. Since Sandy would have a choice of three days each month, only three out of every seven months forced her to choose a weekday. Still, looking through her college records, none of her missed classes corresponded with any of those days. It didn’t prove anything one way or another, but leaned towards her being human.

When she told Tyler, he carefully said, “Wolves are the only shapeshifters governed by the moon.”

“Oh, so she could be a lion, or something else.”

He shrugged, and she told him she’d dig some more before taking action. When he was gone, she called another hacker and placed an order for him to track Sandy’s phone. When Nickie figured out how to approach her, she’d need to know the best spot to run into her.

* * *

Bud didn’t believe in holding a lot of meetings. The club had Church on a schedule, and he met with his top people every other Thursday morning — the managers of the restaurant, bike shop, B&B, and laundromat. Shadow was in charge of their control room, so he attended as well. Occasionally, some of the shift managers were asked to attend, but this had been a bare bones meeting and went fast.

Shadow stuck around after everyone left, and Bud waited to see what he needed.

“An unknown vehicle drove through the B&B parking lot last night. The driver wore a cap and glasses so we couldn’t make him out. Someone in the back seat was moving around, but the tinted windows kept us from getting a decent look on video. Tags are registered to a business in Fayetteville on an empty lot. Made me think of something Aaron Drake would do, to hide any vehicles he didn’t want tracked back to him.”

Bud’s heart felt like a heavy knot in his chest, but he tilted his head to tell Shadow to go on — and he put a lock on his emotions.

“When I set up Nicole’s proxy, I routed things through a server I can control, but we don’t own. All her traffic is recorded there, though I didn’t intend to look at it unless she gave us a reason to.” He shrugged. “I also made a back door into her laptop, in case I needed back in. It seemed this warranted a peek, so I checked out her web traffic, which led me to looking through her laptop’s hard drive to find out more.”

“Aaron would be pissed if he knew. He paid you to route her traffic as his employee.”

Shadow shrugged. “You come before Aaron. No question. If we can finesse this so he doesn’t know what I did, great. If not, so be it. I won’t lie to him, but what he can’t figure out on his own, I’m not going to explain.” He chuckled. “Besides, Brain wrote our encryption app after Aaron spied on Brain when he used the Drake app. It isn’t like Aaron wouldn’t do the same thing to get information.”

Bud had made the right decision, bringing this kid in. Nickie might’ve just turned on him, but Shadow never would. “Tell me what you know.”

Shadow told him of the video Nicole had taken of the parking lot, and her searches of Sandy through financial, medical, school, and criminal records as if Nicole were a private investigator. He told him of her hiring someone to look up tag numbers, and the fact she’d paid someone to track Sandy’s movements via her cellphone.

“How did she find out about the B&B in the first place?”

“Her forensic accountant dug through our records and followed the corporate paperwork trail.”

“Can you get me everything on a thumb drive?”

Shadow stood, pulled a thumb drive from his pocket, set it on the table, and walked out.

Bud figured he had three options — talk to Nickie and help her understand they were providing a service to these girls and not exploiting them, threaten to post all her pen names publicly if she told a soul what she’d learned, or bring Gavin in to mind control her away from their business ventures. Gavin would be expensive, but he might provide the easiest, least dramatic solution.

Bud considered calling Ranger or Mac for intel, then thought about calling Aaron, but instinctively knew they’d have to be loyal to Nicole. He trusted them to have his back if she got too far out of line, but so far she was just researching, and they’d need her to trust them to keep her safe. And Bud wanted her to be safe, he just needed to pull her head out of her ass so he could explain reality to her.

Okay — how to handle this without giving Shadow away? Bud heard Angelica’s voice in his head, warning him to be upfront about their working-girls from the get-go. Damn, how had she gotten so smart?

Nickie had texted earlier to tell Bud she was busy and needed time to get caught up, but he wasn’t on board with staying away. She still owed him two days of twenty-four/seven, but calling that in right now would be bad form. Fuck, but relationships were a pain-in-the-ass.

As soon as the thought went through his head, he quashed it. Nickie was worth it. She was looking at from the perspective of someone who’d researched human traffickers. He just needed to show her he wasn’t like them.

Bud called one of the club’s sweetbutts who made products with essential oils designed for supernaturals and their partners — super subtle to those with sensitive noses and still pleasing to humans. He told her he wanted to buy a massage oil for relaxation and a lotion to increase productivity or maybe focus, and she said she’d be at his place in ten minutes with both.

When she arrived, she offered a blow job and then her ass, but he turned both down. Nickie hadn’t asked for exclusivity, but neither Bud nor the wolf was interested in anyone else.

A quick trip to The Varsity for burgers, fries, and shakes, and then Bud was at Nickie’s door. It opened before he had a chance to knock, and Patrick stepped out — the new Alpha of the Pack in Ringgold, Georgia.

“She isn’t accepting visitors.”

“I thought Aaron was keeping you closer to home, with your new responsibilities?” Patrick had taken over a Pack in trouble, and it was likely still a full-time job to keep everyone sorted so he could turn it into a healthy Pack.

“This isn’t too far from home, and Nathan brought me in since I’ve worked with Nickie before. She isn’t accepting visitors.”

“Tell her I brought burgers, fries, and shakes from The Varsity, and massage oil — her choice of relaxing or something designed to increase productivity.”

Patrick stepped back inside and closed the door without saying anything. Several long minutes later, he opened the door and motioned Bud in.

“I need some space,” Nickie told him, standing in her kitchen. “I need you to give me a week.”

“We need to talk,” Bud told her as he set the bags on her island. “Give me thirty minutes while we eat, and if you still need the week, I’ll give it to you.”

She sighed. “Pushy.”

“Damned straight.”

“Okay, but only because it’s easier than trying to deal with you all week.”

When the food was distributed and they were eating and not talking, Bud used his phone to show Nickie a picture of the first girl the club had sponsored. “This picture’s from the sixties. Her name is Janet, and she told her pimp she was tired and needed to go home after fucking eight men in one night, so he beat her the hell up because he had someone else willing to pay for her and she told him she wasn’t up to it.”

The picture showed both eyes nearly swollen shut and her face badly bruised. Nothing broken, because a whore with a broken jaw can’t work.

“I wasn’t in the club at the time, but I’ve heard the story. She lived next door to a club member who saw her, and when she refused to tell him what happened, he started asking questions around town. He found her pimp, made him look worse than this, found out Janet had enough regular customers to stay in business without help, and told her he’d keep her safe from that point forward. She offered him half her income, but he told her since she’d be finding her own johns, the most he could take would be ten percent. He put the word out she was to be respected, and anyone who roughed her up would answer to him. By the end of the week a dozen more women had come to him to ask for the same deal. He talked to the club’s president, percentages were negotiated, and the club suddenly had a stable of working girls they protected. The girls were given necklaces with the RTMC logo, and no john got rough with a girl wearing that necklace or he ended up hurt a whole lot more than the girl.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“My daughter said if I wasn’t up front with you about it, I’d regret it. She’s rarely wrong about this kind of thing.”

“You’re a pimp?”

“You want plausible deniability? I’ve told you history, with the statute of limitations long past. I tell you more and you may have to lie if a cop asks you questions.”

Nickie looked at her hands a good five seconds before meeting his gaze. “I need to know, and I’m going to need to talk to the girls. I won’t lie to the police for you, but I’ll refuse to answer any questions.”

“Even if they send you to jail for refusing?”

“Yeah. If you’ve researched me at all, you’ll find out I once spent three days in a jail in Arkansas for not giving up the name of an informant.”

True enough. “If you want, I’ll walk you into the lobby and let you pick a girl. I’ll pay for an hour of her time, and I’ll tell her to answer your questions honestly. The two of you can go in a room or into the office, and whatever happens past that is up to you as long as you don’t hurt her physically or emotionally. It’s my job to protect them, so if you’re going to demean her for her choice of job — no deal.”

“How is what you do different than the sex traffickers I’ve been chasing?”

“They kidnap people and sell them. We protect women who want to provide sexual services under controlled conditions — we give them a safe working environment and treat them as employees and not property. If they’re scheduled to work from eight until two and tell us they’re done at midnight, we might ask if they want blowjob duty the rest of the night instead, but we won’t beat the hell out of them for needing to leave early. Johns are required to wear a condom and they never consider balking because doing so will bring a big scary biker to hurt them. If they want to get rough we have girls who’ll happily do that for more money, but if they get rough without arranging it first then we get rough with them.”

She didn’t respond and seemed to want more, so Bud added, “Girls who come to us with their own clientele have options as to whether to pay us ten percent of their earnings plus a modest per-night room rental, or whether to let us handle their scheduling and give us thirty-five percent with no room rental. Girls who come without a clientele don’t get that good of a deal, but if they’ve built up a decent list of clients who only want to see them after six months, we renegotiate the percentage.”

“How do you recruit?”

“We don’t. Ever. Women come to us and ask for a job, and we turn away more than we hire. I wish we could take on more, but getting too big brings its own set of problems.” He shook his head. “Girls have to be clean — no drugs. We can smell it on them, and if a girl shows up for work high, in most cases she’s escorted off the property and told not to return. If it’s someone who’s shown loyalty to us in the past, we’ll find out the problem and help with rehab, but they won’t work again until we’re sure they’ve sorted through the issue.”

“How do you get away with it? How do they? Prostitution is illegal in Georgia.”

“The cops know what goes on, but we’ve learned how to keep from incriminating ourselves over the years, so charges never stick. It’s a constant dance, though.”

“You make it sound as if you’re a hero for protecting these girls, instead of a lowlife pimp making money off them.”

“We provide a service, Nickie. A girl opening her legs for hire? She’s putting herself at all kinds of risk, and we keep her safe. Some of our girls work three nights a week and bring home well over a hundred grand a year — a few make double that, but they offer special services. Others only work one night a week to help pay expenses while they further a career. We have a budding artist who doesn’t want to be a starving artist. She’s in art galleries in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York now, but still works for us one night a week because she says her muse gets freaked out and shuts down at the idea of being totally responsible for all income. Plus, she likes sex and enjoys making men feel good. She says it feeds her muse, too.”