Chapter 9

“Hey, Ash, we got a problem. We found somebody here and it doesn’t look good,” a member of her unit who had raced upstairs with her reported.

Ashley was still in the hallway but two doors down and didn’t need a mic to tell her what her crew had discovered. The girl’s strident screams and cries were loud enough to wake the dead and could now be heard all over the second floor. She was tempted to rush to the source of the commotion but hesitated and stared at the closed door she was facing. It was the second last one on the second floor. The only other one was facing her and its door was open so she could see it was vacant. Convinced Adam was cornered in the room, she gently tried to turn the knob and give it a push but it refused to move.

“Locked, well he ain’t going anywhere so we’ll leave him be for a moment,” she muttered. She stepped back from the door and motioned for somebody to stand guard before turning her attention back to the commotion in the other room. Not knowing what to expect she marched back down the hallway and looked questioningly at the man standing in a doorway.

“Young girls and it’s sickening,” he muttered. “There’s two of them, naked and chained to a bed and showing all kinds of physical abuse. And they won’t stop screaming, even when Marshal and Toni gave them jackets to cover them up.”

Ashley nodded and even though she thought she had prepared herself for the worst, she was shocked and numbed at the sight of the two girls. They lay huddled in the bed wrapped in jackets but still sobbing. She looked at Toni, a tall brunette who had joined Galaxy Security a few months earlier and saw she was trying to free the girls from the handcuffs.

“You got them off yet?” Ashley asked.

Toni shook her head in frustration. “I couldn’t find a key so I’m trying to pick the locks with a pin. It was something I used to have quite a knack for but it’s been awhile.”

Ashley turned to the girls who were whimpering and staring at her through big, wide eyes filled with fear. She tried to calm them down.

“Hey don’t worry, don’t be scared. We’re not here to hurt you, we’ve come to rescue you so just be patient until we can get those cuffs off, okay?”

The blond nodded and stopped sobbing long enough to point to what was left of the battered doorway.

“I think there’s a key up there on the wall, to the right of the door. I saw Abe hang it up there whenever he left us cuffed to the bed. He always said it’s in case somebody else wanted to use us.”

“Found it,” Marshall said.

He plucked the key chain off the wall and waved it in triumphant at Ashley and the girls before presenting it to Toni. She had the cuffs opened in seconds and then helped usher the teenagers out of the room.

“Let’s find them some decent clothes and call the medics so we can see what else we can do for them,” Ashley ordered.

As they vacated the room, she glanced down the hallway and caught the eye of the person she had left guarding the door. The guy shook his head meaning no sounds, nothing emanating from the room. It made her doubt, but only for a moment, her belief that Adam Bondar was cowering behind the door. Why else would it be locked?

At the sight of the poor girls, who were still sobbing, as they hobbled down the hallway between Toni and Marshal, she was struck by the horror of what had been happening in the mansion. It made her want to immediately kick that door open and drag whatever son of a bitch who was hiding behind it out the room by his balls, but Max’s voice interrupted her. As usual, he had been watching the attack on the estate and witnessing the discovery of the girls but had remained silent up until now.