HARDCORE: Storm MC(29)
He took a minute. “He has my baby girl. Fielding has my Zoe, Dom. I gotta find her, and I gotta get her back, and then I gotta kill that motherfucking son of a bitch. But I can’t die first, and I can’t let anything else matter more. That is what the fuck is goin’ on.”
Holy. Fucking. Hell. The clusterfuck just went apeshit out of control.
Okay, this was way worse than anything I had imagined. And it completely made sense why our Pres was keeping us tied to Hardcore. Shit.
Zoe had always been a little on the wild side, getting herself into drugs and shit. Jesus, she and Tania had a lot in common, from the sounds of it. But if what the Pres was saying was true, and Zoe somehow got taken up by Fielding, like a sex slave, and Fielding was also talking about the same shit with intentions toward Sienna, then the Pres was not talking out his ass. He was being dead honest. And fuck, his heart must be breaking every minute to think of his little girl in that situation. I’d be fucking lost and furious, too.
“Pres, you gotta know. I got your back on this, however I can help. Whatever I can do. What do you know? Do you have a plan?”
“That’s what I’m workin’ on. Zoe’s been gone a long time already, over six months. I don’t even know if Fielding still has her, or if… No. I’m not going there.
“What I do know, from what I’ve overheard and from some bugs I managed to place in Ronn’s office, is that Ronn knows that Fielding trades in sex slaves, human trafficking. They don’t talk about it openly, though, so it’s not something I can pin down. But there are references.
“I gotta find out where she is. I gotta get her back. I gotta believe she’s still…” He couldn’t finish the thought. I didn’t need him to.
“We’re gonna find her, Clav. We will.” I looked at him fiercely, and I could feel my jaw clenching. This game with Fielding was off-the-charts dark.
“But what I was meaning to get clear to you, is that Ronn’s got this on me. He knows that I’m under his thumb as long as he’s got intel on my girl, and he’s holding it over my head. That’s why I couldn’t shoot him at that scene with Manny and the girl. The fucker made me dig a fucking grave that day, for the two of ’em. So now I’m implicated, too, in that sick fucking scene. I’m fucked. But I still gotta get my girl back. And that can be my only priority. You got me? You understand now?”
“Yeah, man, I got you. Loud and clear. And I’m with you on that. Completely.” I raised my arm to him, and we clasped hands, full eye contact. It was a grave trust, and one I would never back down on.
“How are you sure, first off, that Fielding has her, Pres?”
“I got word back then, sent to me from her phone, a text from Ronn that said she’d been taken. Resulting from her ʽdrug debt’ to him, as he put it. And that he’d sold her off to a special business partner to make good on it. I pieced together from a lot of shit since then, that that guy is Fielding. No question.
“I’m pretty sure that Fielding doesn’t know who I am, though. She only had me in there as ʽDad.’ And the text was from Ronn, not Fielding.”
“Okay. Why haven’t you shared this with the rest of Storm, though? Why keep us in the dark? Seems like the more ears you got, the sooner this can all go down, we get her back, and take Fielding and Ronn down?”
“The knives, Dom. As soon as I learned of Fielding’s sick thing for knives, I knew I couldn’t risk my baby girl like that. The more people who know, the more chance of something slipping. I need this to go one way, and one way only. I can’t think…” And he shook his head.
I could see that. I had to give him that. I’d be lost and confused with gargantuan worry, too.
“Dom, here’s the only way I can figure it: I need us to appear to be under Ronn’s thumb. All of us. Like you thought—hell, like everybody thinks—that we’re all just security for the ass king of porn. I trust all our brothers in Storm, Dom, but there ain’t no way that all of us can act. So as real as I could keep it was the way it had to be. That’s why I couldn’t talk about it. If they don’t know they’re pulling the wool, then they can’t misstep and blow the cover, right? It’s the only way to play it, for now.”
“Yeah, I get that. You’re right about that.” I took a moment. “Thinking this through, though, Ronn knows you’re Zoe’s dad, now, right? That’s what he’s got on you.”
“Yeah. He does. He put two and two together when he saw that the phone number is the same. So he’s holding that knowledge over me, but I’m pretty sure Fielding doesn’t know, ’cause he don’t look at me differently, with any special knowledge or anything. So Ronn’s got me on two counts: Zoe, and now Manny and the girl.”