Chapter Text
“That will be all, thank you Lexa”. Her employer said and stashed the brown, paper envelope Lexa gave him in his desk drawer. Then he sat back comfortably in his chair with a smug look on his face.
Lexa nodded and waited for her payment, giving her employer a hard glare when he made no move to get her the money she was promised to.
Lexa woods did not fuck around. She didn’t make any friends and she most certainly did not do any favors. She was asked to complete a task and she did, now all she wanted was her money and to get out of that fucking posh place. But this guy was really getting into her nerves. “This son of a bitch how dare he fuck with me” Lexa thought as she continued her death glare at this guy.
“Ah, that’s right!” Her employer chuckled.
He stood up from his fancy desk chair and removed a white envelope out of the inside pocket of his expensive suit. “Almost forgot” he grinned and handed her the envelope.
He knew if he kept pushing Lexa’s buttons the consequences would not be ideal mostly for him.
Lexa immediately counted the paper bills inside. Once she made sure everything was ok, she proceeded to gather her leather jacket and helmet from the nearby chair across her employer’s desk.
“Lexa hold on!” He said just as she was about to open the glass door of the office.
“Why don’t you stay and let us have a talk about giving you a permanent place here?” He said.
“I’m sure a girl as… resourceful as you, could benefit the company.” He sat again in his chair, fingers interlinked in front of him on the desk, patiently waiting for the tattooed girl’s answer. He wasn’t stupid, he knew of Lexa’s reputation in the streets and how a person like her could be an asset to have. Sharp, intuitive, computer genius and overall lethal. Lexa Woods could handle any weapon she could get her hands on just as good as she could work a computer.
Lexa gave him no response.
“I’ll pay you double,” he said. “I will personally assign you to jobs and pay for any equipment you’ll need.” He finished trying to convince the younger woman. “Think about it for a sec” he smiled at her with certainty. “you’d have to be stupid not to accept such proposal Woods” he thought. “come on Lexa just fucking answer me!” he though.
Lexa was getting angry by now. His persistence was really starting to get on her nerves. She had made herself very clear about the fact that she worked independently. She chose her own jobs, the people she worked with and how much money she would get. but this guy was not getting it.
“No” She said firmly and left the office without a second glance, leaving her former now employer baffled.
“Fucking rich pig,” she thought as she was walking towards the elevator, passing through the large corridor where all the other offices were. She could feel the stares of the employees at the back of her head, maybe because they suspected of their boss, it wasn’t the first time lexa was hired but a rich man to do their dirty work or maybe because her attitude and attire did not match that of an office’s employee. Black leather jacket, black band t-shirt, black ripped jeans, biker boots, piercings all over her face, tattoos, partly shaved head and white bleached eyebrows hardly made proper appearance for a white-collar worker. But lexa Woods did not care, she never gave a shit about other people’s opinions nor she listened to anybody.
Lexa Woods preferred people to be afraid of her and many did. She never smiled or expressed any emotion, he only thing that she was found doing regularly was rolling her eyes whenever people annoyed her or giving them steely glares as to make them understand that she was not to be fucked with.
Upon reaching her destination, Lexa pressed the call button for the elevator and waited impatiently. She could not wait to get the fuck out of that place.
After a couple of minutes, the doors finally opened with a ding, she got inside the lift pressing the button for the underground level garage where her black triumph Bonneville T-100 was located. Lexa had always loved old-school style motorcycles, even since her teenage years she always dreamed of owning and customizing her own bike. And that she did five years ago when she managed to gather enough money, she finally bought her dream bike.
Upon reaching the garage floor, she put on her helmet, got on the bike, fired up the engine making a roaring almost deafening sound in the empty garage and took off exiting the enormous skyscraper located in the heart of Washington.
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Lexa arrived at her “apartment” which was just an old, abandoned storage unit in the south west area of D.C. That she shared with her work partner and close friend Raven Reyes. Lexa rarely ever in her life pursued relationships with other people, friendly or romantic wise. She never had friends throughout her school years nor later in life, she had of course her fair share of romantic or rather… Sexual partners but nothing that lasted more than one night. She could even count the number of people she liked in her one hand and one of these people happened to be Raven.
A smartass, headstrong, genius gadget expert with exceptional hacking skills. Raven often bragged about how smart she was and how she had secretly hacked into NASA’S most classified files and found all kinds of strange information that she would not of course share with Lexa.
“Man… the things I saw in those files, its not for normal people to see I’m telling you woods” she said dramatically and place her arm on lexa’s shoulders, almost attempting a half hug with the brunette.
“Bullshit, Reyes” she shrugged Raven’s hand off. She hated when people touched her without permission even if it was Raven. Lexa would tolerate the touch of the feisty Latina but not when she would get all cocky and antagonize her.
“Fine, keep believing what you believe Woods, but don’t come running to me for help when aliens and A.I’S invade earth” Raven said and took another swing from her beer.
Lexa simply rolled her eyes at the shorter woman and continued with her work.
Lexa had come across Raven for the first time, while investigating a man called Cage Wallace who was believed to be involved in several human trafficking rings throughout the US. From an outside perspective the guy looked “clean” and average. He had a boring office job in a bank, a big ass house in the suburbs, a wife and two children. But of course, lexa knew what kind of a bastard he was. He and his underdogs would lure poor, homeless women from the streets, promising them a better future and a decent job only to force them into prostitution and drug addiction.
And one of his victims was Raven. The young Latina had been living the streets of D.C for months after her alcoholic and abusing ex-boyfriend had forced her out of their shared apartment. Raven could no longer stand the beatings and the verbal abuse coming from her ex-boyfriend, she packed her few belongings into a backpack and fled her home one night after he threatened her with a kitchen knife that he was going to gut her alive if she ever dared to leave him.
That’s when Cage found her, sleeping in a bench in the nearby park on a cold winter morning. He had made her an offer to work for him and Raven accepted.
Looking back now she could not comprehend how stupid she’d been. She had spent many sleepless nights and days beating herself up for her stupid choice but at that time the homeless, jobless and starving brunette could not think clearly. She had no one and nothing in the world apart from her abusive ex and her neglecting mother which she had lost contact with many years ago. Not even the apartment that she lived in was hers, Finn had inherited it when his aunt died couple of years ago.
She couldn’t even call the police. Finn had many mates inside the precinct, and she couldn’t risk him founding her and hurting her again, so Raven took her chance for a better life and ended up regretting it worst way possible. Cage’s men forced her into his van before she had the chance to react, drugged her and drove her to the place where all the other victims were staying until assigned to their place of “work”.
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Lexa had been gathering any information and evidence she could get her hands on in order to put that Wallace bastard behind bars forever and try to save those girls. Photos, audiotapes, files and even an encrypted video tape of the victims from inside an old abandoned basement where they lived under horrible conditions.
When she was sure enough that the evidence she found proved her assumptions, she contacted her boss.
The SWAT team tore down every single one of Cage’s infamous clubs and searched every nook and cranny, but Wallace was nowhere to be found.
When they later questioned his wife, she had no idea where he was.
“Great work lexa” her boss praised her. “I don’t know what we’d do without your help, if only we had caught that son of a bitch…” her boss was just as frustrated as Lexa that Wallace managed to escape justice. But her job here was done. Her boss wrote her a very generous check and she was ready to be on her way.
“Oh, and Lexa!” her boss remembered “One of the girls we rescued from the club basement wishes to meet you, she wants to thank you personally. Now, I know this is not how we do things, but she seemed desperate and I told her I’d check with you first.”
“If you want, I can arrange a meeting, would you care contacting her?” her boss waited for her answer.
Lexa took a couple of seconds contemplating whether she should.
“No” she really shouldn’t get any more involved in this than she already was and meeting with that girl would make things much more complicated. This was just another task that Lexa had successfully completed.
“Ok then, that’ll be all. Thank you again lexa and I hope we’ll get to work together again in the future” her boss raised her hand waiting for lexa to shake it, which she didn’t.
She retracted her hand and cleared her throat. Lexa understood the cue and left the office.
2 months later a young Latina was knocking at her front door asking for her.