Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 141255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 706(@200wpm)___ 565(@250wpm)___ 471(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 141255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 706(@200wpm)___ 565(@250wpm)___ 471(@300wpm)
Business was winding down in a number of areas. I’d sold all the local debts to a factoring company who paid a decent rate to buy the debts, since we’d done them all with contracts under our financial services wing, and those who’d been in debt with us now got to deal with a collection agency instead of bloodthirsty thugs like Tino and his crew if they were late for a payment.
We were in talks to sell a few of the retail and hospitality businesses. Businesses we were part owners in were being sold to the existing partners.
We were keeping the chain of coffee shops, but would be hands-off by hiring a few extra people to run the day-to-day and all the locations would be franchises, so it’d just be royalties coming our way. We were talking about gifting Venetia, our Italian restaurant that was run by Eddy, to Luc and Ed.
We’d backed off some of the other shady stuff, too. Not all of it. But it was work-in-progress. There were still people in our pockets but that’d all get slowly phased out as the companies under Ferrano Enterprises were all sold. The construction arm and the nightclubs we owned would take more clean-up before being sold and other than a few associations that all had or would have time limits on the relationships, that’d be the last bit of it.
I was trying to take care of our guys, too. Some of our key guys had been offered first refusal on some of the businesses or given our blessing to go onto other ventures. It was all working out. All working out fairly smoothly with just a few kinks now and then until now, when all the Thailand shit had been dumped in my lap.
Stan had gone ahead already with some directions from me on how to handle some of the other business ventures he’d told me about and he would be picking me up at the airport. From there he was dropping me at another location where I’d be picked up by a guy named Gan Chen, general manager and one of the founding partners of Kruna, the name of the resort. He’d said Kruna meant please in Thai, and had dual royalty meanings in Croatian. The place was designed to please, to make visitors feel like they’d been crowned royals.
Kruna was on a gated waterfront property outside Bangkok, classified to the public as a private time-share community. Most of what they did involved entertaining on-site with slaves. Stan said it was only very occasionally that they parted with them and that the slave sold to become mine was considered an exceptional asset.
I didn’t know how Tommy and I would exit this partnership yet, but for the moment I needed to get in, assess the place and the management, pick her up, get home, and then figure out what to do next. All without arousing any suspicion. This would be natural for me. I often dealt in shady businesses with dangerous people. I could handle myself. But I’d never dealt with human trafficking at this level and I’d certainly never handled a transaction that was so personal – a female being prepped to be handed off to become my wife and personal sex slave. I had a plan, not a very in-depth one, but I had a plan and that entailed getting in, making them think I was a friend, and getting her back home.
From there, I’d tell the girl she was out of the sex trade and I’d help her get on with her life. Before I left, I briefed Zack Jacobs, our PI. I’d get him some details and then he’d assess and get us some information to help us determine an exit strategy.
I’d do all this as fast as possible so that I could finish my task of selling off the rest of Ferrano Enterprise’s assets. Who knew how cracked this sex slave would be and whether or not she’d be another risk to us. But, I’d see how things went and decide from there. Hopefully she wasn’t going to be a problem we’d have to dispose of. Hopefully we were at a point in our lives where we could be past all that.
2
When Cleo, my handler, told me a little under two months ago that I’d been sold I was a numb, walking zombie for hours after the fact. Maybe even days.
I wasn’t sure, at first, if she was playing a game with me. She’d snarled it in my ear and stormed away, furious. A few hours after she imparted this info, she took me from where I’d been left sitting in the slave courtyard over to Rafe’s office. He confirmed it.
Rafe was Kruna’s warden, in essence, and he was not my favorite person, but I was one of his favorites, which worked in my favor. When I was brought to his office where he sat with his boss, Mr. Chen, I was tweaking, not sure if Cleo was playing a game designed to put me off my game, getting me in trouble, or what.