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his hair and picks his head up, only to slam it back down into the table. “That’s not very polite,” he growls. “I have another idea. How about you keep quiet for a moment and we tell you why we’re here. After that, you can tell us what we want to know and we’ll leave. And you can go back to tugging on your pathetic excuse for a dick and forget we were even here. What do you think?”
    “My dick…isn’t…”
    Cade picks his head up and smashes it down again. “ What. Do. You. Think ?”
    Eli’s hands scramble at the desk, disrupting more dog-eared papers and paper cups, spilling the dregs of long forgotten coffee everywhere and sending a cloud of mold spores billowing into the air. “All right. All right. Jesus Christ!”
    “Good. Now. Look at this woman,” Jamie says, producing a photograph from his pocket. “This woman was kidnapped three weeks ago. We’ve searched high and low for her and found nothing. You’re going to tell us who runs the biggest human trafficking rings in the States. You’re going to give us names and locations, and you’re going to do it quickly before my friend here loses all patience whatsoever and decides to put you down.”
    Jamie says this coolly, calmly, in a flat, monotone voice that doesn’t sound like his own. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him act like this, never heard him speak like this. No matter what kind of shit his father put him through, he always managed to maintain an air of light-heartedness to him, but now that seems to be long gone. In its place is a cold, icy demeanor that doesn’t leave any room for second-guessing. He will follow through on his words if Eli doesn’t comply. He or Cade will kill the man, and I can tell that neither one of them will lose sleep over it.  
    I’ve tried to hide this side of myself from my family. From him, specifically. He’s always seemed so innately good, yet right now he’s anything but. Jamie’s been capable of this, being reckless and cold, the whole time I’ve been out taking care of problems for people like Charlie Holsan, and now here he is, threatening to kill someone right in front of me and he’s not even batting an eyelash.  
    Good for him.  
    Bad for me, since he nearly fucked things up for me with Sara, and god knows what Charlie’s moronic henchmen saw when we were idling outside his place, but hey. Good for him.
    “I don’t…I don’t fucking recognize her, okay?” Eli screeches. “Only big time guys I know running women in the states are Julio Perez and some guys out Chicago way.”
    “We already visited the guys in Chicago,” Cade snarls. “Their head guy lost three fingers before he caved and showed us through his books. She wasn’t there. We told Perez we wanted to buy a girl so he let us look through his stables, and she wasn’t there, either. You’d better come up with some new names, fucker, otherwise I’m gonna go find my cigar cutters.”  
    “I can give you as many names as…as you like,” Eli grinds out. “That doesn’t mean any of them will have this girl of yours. If she’s been gone for three weeks, she’s in…the fucking wind. No one will be able to find her now.”
    This is obviously the very last thing Cade wants to hear. Even when we were younger, Cade was broad and strong. Now he’s built like a fucking Sherman tank. I wince as he punches Eli in the ribs, hard enough that the overweight guy pinned to the table wheezes out the contents of his lungs, turning redder and redder.  
    “Fuck!”
    “Do I need to tell you again?”
    “No, no, no. Shit . If you want skin traders, there’s Mendez’s group in Phoenix. There’s Proctor and his boys over in Texas. And…and…you could always try Richter in Oregon. He’s normally drugs and guns, but his outfit’s been expanding recently. Seems…seems that there’s more money flowing in for them. Could be that they’re dipping their toes, too.”
    Cade and Jamie exchange glances. Neither