Page 52 of Hidden

It’s forty-three seconds long. There’s a dark room, it’s poor quality, and the way this group works, they’ve done it deliberately so no one can see where they are.

My fingers are moving fast over the keys, wanting it to break down the video second by second, and clean up the audio so I can hear something, fucking anything.

My fingers freeze mid-air, and a girl appears in the center.

She’s young, has dark hair. The image is too degraded to confirm who she is, but I have a feeling it’s one of the girls in my files.

I watch it twice, then a third time with the sound pulled up, stripped back, and cleared as much as the software will allow.

There’s a voice with an Eastern European accent giving a number, it’s not a phone number, it could be a map location. I quickly write them down and make a note to try and work it out what they are.

Then there’s another voice, American this time, slightly higher.

Then the first voice again.

I sit back in my chair, replaying the video over and over again, until I can make out the words better. I clean the audio as much as I can, but it’s still not clean enough to hear it. Then one word hits me.

Sold.

The girls aren’t missing; they’re being fucking sold.

I grab my phone and type my message to Cain.

Miles.

I need to show you something.

I’m on the way.

I look at the secondary monitor where Sadie's feed still runs, she’s quiet and still, her breathing the only movement in the frame. Turning my computers to sleep mode, I grab my laptop where I’ve sent the video, and leave.

Yes, it’s late, but Cain needs to see this.

***

I get to the club, send Cain a message telling him I’m here and to let me up. Cain opens the door before I knock.

He closes the door behind me and moves to the table and sits down. “And this couldn’t wait until the morning?” he asks as he watches me set up my laptop.

“No.” The video loads.

Cain brings the laptop closer to him and watches it. His face does nothing. That's normal though, Cain's face rarely does anything.

He watches it twice, then looks up.

"Where did you find this?"

"Embedded in a dark web forum thread. Encrypted, three layers, the outer two were standard but the third was custom-built." I pull up the metadata window. "Timestamp puts it fourteen months ago. Two weeks after Amber Reyes disappeared from Phoenix."

"You confirmed the identity?" Cain asks, watching the video again.

"Not yet. The image quality is degraded, but the build, the approximate age, the timeline…" I pause. "It fits."

"The bidding?" he asks.

"Two voices minimum on the audio. Possibly three. The primary voice is accented, Eastern European, I've narrowed it to Romanian or Bulgarian, but I need a cleaner sample to confirm. The secondary is American. Midwest, probably, based on the vowels."

"How many bids?" Cain asks.