SEIZED Part 1: New Adult Romantic Suspense (Seize Me Romance Fiction Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

the sex trade. They’re lucky because they lived even if they were forced into sex thirty or forty times each day.
    Instead of the recovery of their uptown counterparts, most young victims of kidnapping are dumped back in the foster system, sent to group homes, or with their troubled pasts, they end up in juvie. There’s no therapy or time to heal, and they’re stuck there. The choice is either to run away again or wait out the time until they turn eighteen, and can finally try to make sense of the world on their own.
    It pisses me off that as many as one in three girls on the street will become a prostitute within twenty-four hours of leaving home. Pimps know where to find the girls, too, tracking them down in the all-night diners where they sit on one coffee for hours and try to make a plan, knapsack tucked between their feet. They usually have cheap make-up smeared from crying, but whatever they’ve been running away from will be nothing compared to where they end up.
    I wonder if it’s lack of instinct or plain old desperation that causes so many young women to fall into this shit. Despite years of ‘stranger danger’ training and kidnap movies, thousands are still snagged and taken away. Sometimes it’s by force, and sometimes they willingly follow whatever bait is being offered.
    It’s like a pimp fishing contest. The carrot on the end of the stick could be a hunky young guy who promises to look out for them, or the compassionate ear of another young girl who offers them a room of her own in a supposedly ‘cool warehouse apartment’.
    Of course, whatever their new and exciting option is, it comes for astoundingly cheap, and ‘little miss lost and alone’ perks up immediately without even thinking to get more details. I guess in those moments the runaway’s logic is drowned by relief. Believing she’s been lucky enough to fall on her feet, she’ll hop along nicely, but have no idea the nightmare is just beginning.
    Once they’ve got the girls, pimps are experts at turning them. Breaking in a new girl takes deceit, manipulation, and sometimes straight-up violence. He’ll give her drugs and romance her. He’ll play on her insecurities, treat her like she’s special, and then the work will begin. He’ll make sex work seem glamorous. She’ll be given new clothes and sexy shoes. If she’s lucky, she’ll have a moment where she thinks, ‘this isn’t so bad,’ before the first nasty John beats her. If she’s unlucky, the beating and gang rapes will begin on day one.
    That’s why it’s hard for me to have compassion for rich girls who are taken from Park Avenue. That’s why I get frustrated with demanding daddies and dramatic ransom videos. There are hundreds of women in America who’ll never get a ransom video, a book deal, or a chance to run sobbing into the arms of their family. I’m not even counting the foreign nationals who come in by boat or border each year. There are whole truckloads of human cargo heading to lives most people can’t imagine, as Manhattan girls like the one waiting upstairs indulge in dramatics.
    I guess that’s the job, though. Through the wall of the shower cubicle, I can hear that the men’s changing rooms are starting to fill up now. I need to get a move on. The faster I get this girl’s parents in here, and tell them what to do, the quicker I’ll be home again to get some shut-eye.
    The station is just starting to pump as I hit the top floor. There’ll be a changeover briefing starting soon, and officers are milling around in the halls waiting. Nobody wants to be late for morning briefing, and the pack of blue uniforms is swelling rapidly. So many cops in one place. This is the main reason I work nights. There may be more thugs out in the hallways wreaking havoc, but at night, for the most part, the Detective’s cage is empty and I can keep to myself. It’s not just the focus I like, though. I guess I’m not really much of a team player. Everything’s so