Capítulo 20: An Obedient Child

"I like the sound of it." She beamed up at him. Her tear stained face had managed to catch on dust from when she was hiding. It was stuck to her cheeks which were tinted pink due to the crying. Her runny nose looked like a red blob resting on her face, more specifically, it was tinged with a shade of pink much deeper than her cheeks.

"Sure, kiddo. You are Lillian, starting from now." Blake gave her a smile in return, showing off his perfectly aligned teeth.

"You aren't much older than me. You don't look like it." She complained.

"I am twenty one years old, so I am definitely much older than you." He shrugged his shoulders in a not so caring manner. He couldn't think of any other appropriate endearment for someone of her age.

Calling her Lillian right away wasn't something he was comfortable with. Not after he was the one who chose the name itself, and there was no way he was going to use a shorter version of her name.

"I am sixteen." She said, emphasizing on the last word. "That makes you like what? Five years older than me." She stared back at him. The fear which was running through her veins earlier, was long gone now. She was rather annoyed by the way he had addressed her. She wasn't a kid.

"Five years is no small gap." Blake muttered. "There are some things which I need to talk to you about, but this is no place to do it. We should go back upstairs." He suggested only to get a nod from her.

The two of them had only gotten up from the floor when the door of the room was busted open from the outside, making Lillian jump in her spot. It didn't take her long to take a couple of steps back before she stepped behind Blake's towering figure. As soon as her eyes landed on the figures which rushed inside the room with their hands supporting guns, her eyes reached up to hold on to Blake's shirt, tugging at it.

Meanwhile, Blake just stared at his men. His eyes were glaring daggers in their direction. If looks could kill, they would have been dead the moment they stepped inside the room.

"Are you alright, Boss?" The man who was in the front spoke up. His eyes shifted to the not so small figure which was trying to hide behind Blake for a fleeting second before they jumped back to the man who was staring back at him with a blank face.

Jeffery had asked the man to look into the CCTV footage of the last half an hour of all the floors when he wasn't able to find her. The problem was that the top floor which had Blake's office and room, had no CCTVs installed as requested, more specifically ordered, by him. He even had the old ones removed from that floor which were only a few.

It took them a while to figure out where the girl was as they had to go through the recordings of each floor one by one. What they didn't expect was to see Blake with her as they didn't bother going through it completely once they were able to spot her getting out of the trolley.

"Put your guns away." He said, clenching his jaw. He was more than angry at them. It took him so long to make the girl feel better, and here his men were, ruining all of his hard work. He could feel her hands which were clutching on to his shirt, tremble.

"Right now!" He yelled. His words forced them to pull their hand guns back. Some of the men tucked their guns in the waistbands of their jeans while the rest only pulled theirs back, holding them behind their backs. But, one thing was the same for everyone. All of them had their heads hanging low with their eyes cast down.

It only took them a second to realize that they had messed up big time and not only were they regretting it, they could foresee what was about to come their way. The way Blake was breathing fire, it was too obvious that they would be punished severely for scaring off the girl.

"Leave." Blake ordered them. He couldn't bother himself and waste anymore of his words on them. Deciding that it would be better to give them a piece of his mind later on, he thought of dismissing them.

Within a couple of seconds, the whole room was cleared off, and the twenty or so men who had busted in were no longer with the girl's sight. It was as if they never came. The room was forced to embrace the deadly silence once again, leaving the two souls on their own. Only the sound of their breaths was what kept the place alive.

"Are you okay?" Blake took a step forward and turned around.

Lillian had her head bowed down, too afraid to look up in case the men would come again. She still nodded her head in a yes, making Blake exhale a sigh of relief.

"They won't be coming back." He added after seeing how much she was hesitating when it came to looking straight ahead. It only worked as fuel for the fire which was burning inside him.

"Thank you." Lillian muttered as she looked up at him, raising her head finally.

Blake felt a sudden rush of relief washing over him, turning down the intensity of the burning rage within him when he saw that she hadn't jumped back to her crying self. The girl was his responsibility until he could figure out how she ended up with those traffickers and who she was.

"You don't have to thank me for anything at all, kiddo." He shook his head. "Let's go upstairs for now. You need to change and freshen up, and so do I before we can have our dinner." He added.

The girl trailed her eyes down to look at her clothes and nodded her head. The black shirt and trouser which she was wearing, looked rather gray due to all the dust stuck to the fabric.

Just like that, the two figures left the room with Blake leading the way and the girl following him like an obedient child.