by Denise Wells
What Daria doesn’t realize? I know who killed Katya.
I’ll share that knowledge with Daria only after she does my bidding. I’ve got a rat in my organization, and I need him taken out. A traitor with plans to try to overthrow me, who’s also been conducting auctions selling kidnapped women using my name for leverage. I get that my kidnapping Quinn, or having Andrei capture her for me, makes me a bit of a hypocrite. But, unlike Andrei, I have no plans of raping the woman or selling her into sexual slavery.
“Is there anything you need, aside from being released?” I ask Quinn.
“Like for real? Or are you just asking to be polite and you won’t really do anything?”
“It depends on what you ask me for.”
“A blanket, more toilet paper, antibacterial wipes, a gallon of water, and a real meal. Maybe a book or magazine to help pass the time?”
Her requests perplex me. They are all things that will make her stay here moderately more comfortable, but nothing that would help her escape or be rescued. And not even things that would make her stay infinitely more comfortable. Still, I don’t need her thinking she can just ask for something and she gets it. It will do me no good to return her to Daria only to have her say I treated her well.
While I don’t believe in unnecessary violence against women, I do have a reputation to protect. And I need my threats to be taken seriously. Hence the deplorable living conditions we’ve placed Quinn in. I’m a bad man who does bad things, no question about it. But women are to be loved and revered. Not raped and sold.
“I will see what I can do,” I tell Quinn.
“Thank you.” She smiles softly. “Oh, and maybe a toothbrush?”
I have to stop myself from laughing. Because antibacterial wipes and a toothbrush? This girl almost makes me want to spend time with her after this.
Almost.
While she’s physically my type, I prefer my women to be a bit more rebellious by nature. Fighters are more my speed. My mother was a fighter, verbally, and when it counted physically. My therapist once said I had “Mommy Issues.”
I had him killed shortly after that.
Granted, my mother was raped and murdered during a home invasion when I was a child. They forced my father and me to watch at knifepoint; he did nothing to stop it; I assume for fear of being hurt himself. I launched myself at her attacker the first chance I got. My forty pound, eight-year-old body doing nothing to deter him, and I received a seven-inch scar across my chest as a result. The blade had penetrated enough to bleed a lot, but not enough to kill me.
In the end, they shot my father in the head and left me to die. I will forever hope that my father’s last thoughts were of what a coward he was. Conversely, my mother fought her attacker until the bitter end when he plunged the knife in her stomach, ripping it up and outward savagely. Leaving her naked body open and bare for anyone to see.
They shipped me off to live with an aunt and uncle just outside Moscow shortly after. They soon tired of my “anger issues” and sent me to my maternal grandmother, who was elderly. She was patient and kind, and my life may have been extraordinarily different had I stayed with her, but she passed away when I was twelve. I spent the next four years in the Russian equivalent of the foster care system before running away for good.
I’m sure I do have “anger issues,” but that’s only for me to say. No one else. The one thing I learned unequivocally is that therapy is for pussies. All a person needs is the ability for self-reflection—honest self-reflection—to fix any emotionality that may be wired wrong.
I head up the stairs to the main floor of the home I’m staying in. One that I’m borrowing from a friend of a friend. I have a few homes in the United States, but I would be easy enough to track if I stayed in any of those. For the purposes of this trip, I need to make sure I’m as invisible as possible.
I settle myself in the study with a chilled glass of vodka to wait for Andrei and a few of the other men to join me. We have a lot to go over, especially with this attempt at anarchy that I know is coming along with using my name to traffic women. Inexcusable, plain and simple. Death to the traitor(s) being the only way to amend the problems that have been created.
My problem is, I’m relatively sure Andrei is my rat.
9
Daria
Quinn is missing. I’m not sure which I feel more of fear or fury. There’s only one person who is stupid enough to take her from me, and that’s Ronan Sinclair. I suppose it could be my father, but he would have no reason for doing so. Especially since he thinks he’s taken over everything at this point.
What my father doesn’t realize is that I still plan to move forward with my own plans regardless of the fact that he’s here. I’m not stopping now just because he thinks he’s able to step in and assume control. I’ve got a list of places I’m checking to look for Quinn. Any place that she’s not at, I’m taking out. Plain and simple.
Explosives aren’t my forte, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy them. Al keeps an assortment of bomb-making compounds on site. It’s been a while since I’ve used anything like Semtex or Pentolite, and we’ve got quite a bit of both on hand just waiting to be put to use. As Alyssa is fond of saying, “Explosives want to blow up. It’s what they were born to do.”
The way I see it, a small homemade bomb is the easiest way to take out a nice section of a house or building. Especially if that section is populated with men I’d like to get rid of. The smaller concentrations of people in a room, the better it will be. I plan to handle this alone, not taking any of my girls with me, not telling them where I’m going.
I know that goes against everything I tell them all to do, but I don’t mind being a hypocrite once in a while. Quinn’s safety is my responsibility, and I’m the one who blew it. Plus, I’m almost positive I’m the reason they took her.
My first stop is Andrei’s warehouse hangout. It’s where he hosts high stakes poker games, sex slave trades, and other assorted debauchery. It’s the same place I was at the other night when I first saw my father. They won’t have Quinn here, I know that for sure, but it will still please me greatly to bring part of it down. Even if no one is there.
I pull up to the small clearing I’d watched from before. But I canvas the entire building on foot before doing anything else. It’s empty. I break a window anyway and check the inside just to make sure.
No one has been here since the auction. Not even to clean up if the trash littered about is any sign. Used condoms, alcohol bottles, bidding paddles, frayed rope, tangled tape, ripped articles of clothing. I don’t even want to think about what happened that night. What I could have stopped but didn’t.
I head back outside and toward my car to collect what I need from the trunk. It’s not the smartest move to carry raw explosives around in the trunk of your car, but I wasn’t sure how much damage I wanted to do and where. So, I figure if need be, I add a little extra hexogen, or what is known as RDX in America, near my blast point and sit back to watch the show.
Al likes to use remote detonators and timers with anything she makes. I’m okay with that, but I also prefer a good old fashion fuse that I can light and watch burn. It’s the way I first learned as a child, and the way I’m still most comfortable using now. Roxie says the longer fuses are reminiscent of cartoons from her childhood, where one character would light it, and another would blow it out. It never fails to make me laugh, mostly because I’d like to see that happen in real life.
The explosion is loud, but not nearly as damaging as I’d hope. So, I set a second, smaller device along the opposite wall and wait for the entire thing to implode. Which doesn’t take long. Once the primary supports of a building are down, the rest just sort of crumbles into itself.
Pleased enough with that, I move on to stop number two. Because the goal today is to destroy as much of Andrei and what he treasures as I can.
I pull around the corner Andrei’s strip club and preferred meeting place, parking my car just over a block
away. Then pick a discreet corner to watch the club for a while, making sure there aren’t any women in residence right now. At this hour of the afternoon, it’s rare since the dancers don’t even start their shifts until seven o’clock at night usually.
But the men seem to always there: drinking, plotting, planning, meeting, accepting deliveries. Like now, the beer distributor has pulled into the lot and is loading assorted cases onto his hand truck to bring inside. He has to wait a good minute at the back door before someone comes to open it for him. Lucky for me, he props it open with a wooden block so it’s ready for his second load.
As near as I can tell from the parked cars, at least five of Andrei’s guys are inside. I’m mostly certain they won’t have Quinn here either, mostly because there’s no place to keep her without someone seeing her. Unless she’s already been put to work. But I’m hoping that’s not why she was taken. That it was more to hurt me and get my attention than it was to gain another girl. I do some quick surveillance anyway, just in case.
As is true with most strip clubs, they’ve heavily curtained or completely blacked out any windows to the outside. But the open back door makes it easy for me to sneak inside to check things out. I duck into the small entryway leading to the dressing rooms and wait for the vendor to leave and reload.
On silent feet, I make my way down the darkened hall toward the main room. As suspected, four guys sit at the bar with one standing behind it, all speaking in hushed voices but definitely in Russian. Andrei is not one of them. I’m surprised no one has heard about the warehouse yet. I mean, maybe they have, but I would think there would be more activity going on if that were the case.
It’s easy to tell who is here and who isn’t. Four rooms make up the entire place, if you don’t count the restrooms: the dressing room, the kitchen, Andrei’s office, and the main room with all the stages and the bar. Besides, I’m not really about taking out bodies right now so much as I am letting Andrei know that I’m after him. And using Andrei to pass along the same message to Ronan.
I wait for the delivery man to pass through the hall one more time, then make my way back to my car and grab what I need. This doesn’t have to be a large explosion, just enough to ruin the back of the building and shut the club down for a while; hurt Andrei’s pocketbook with the loss of income. I plant a small explosive at each end of the building and use a remote detonator this time. I’m already getting in my car by the time it goes off. I can’t afford to stick around to see the results. There are too many people inside, and the potential of being seen is too great.
I’ve only got one more location on my list today—Andrei’s house—the only logical place where they might hold Quinn. Even though I fear they’ve got her somewhere else, somewhere less obvious. Like, a place of Ronan’s that isn’t used much, that I wouldn’t necessarily know about. But with Alyssa’s help, I will soon.
Speaking of, my phone rings and I look down to see its Al calling.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I’ve got the list of real estate holdings for Sinclair.”
“Anything I should know about right now?”
“I don’t think so. Why? What are you doing?”
“Just playing with a little Pentolite and Semtex.”
“Where? Why? Who’s with you?”
“No one. And before you say anything, I’m being safe. I just want to shake the bushes a bit.”
“It’s shake the trees.”
“Whatever.” I sigh.
“Whose trees are you shaking?”
“Andrei’s.”
“Daria.” She sounds upset, not that I blame her. If any of my girls were to do something like this alone, I would be livid.
“I know. It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’ve been doing this alone a lot longer than any of you have been doing it with me. And it’s nothing dangerous, just a little fun.”
“Promise to call me if you need anything?”
“Promise,” I say.
I hang up before she says anything else.
I know that I’m lucky to have such amazing women working with me, not to mention my bar staff. The manager I hired a few months back barely even needs me around. I still show my face every day, but mostly, she handles everything else. Sometimes I miss the day to day in the bar, but other times, like today, I’m grateful for the time to do my own thing.
Namely, find out who kidnapped my best friend, and get Andrei Turgenev’s attention with as much destruction as possible.
I know that a plastic explosive is not going to even begin to take down Andrei’s behemoth of a home. But I can at least do a little damage to the east wing or one of the garages before I have to cut and run. I park my car further down the hill from the gate leading to his winding drive. Then plant myself in a nearby tree to scope out any activity.
I don’t have a problem scaling the fence and getting close to the house. I’m good at being invisible. But, because it’s still daylight, I want to make sure I’m not walking into a situation where I’ll be grossly outnumbered. Everything appears to be business as usual. Two guys at the guardhouse by the gate, two guys patrolling the front of the property, which means another two guys will patrol the back. They will leave the sides unattended, because Andrei is an idiot who thinks no one will attack from the side.
Which is exactly why that will be the first place I target. If I can get a couple devices on each side of the house, I can do some decent damage from the other side of the fence and be down the hill to my car before they realize what’s going on.
I’m about to climb down the tree to go assemble my explosives when I hear a small convoy coming up the road. Five black Escalades with tinted windows speed past me, slowing only to wait for the gate leading to the property to open. The last in line pauses a moment, then reverses down the hill to stop beside my car.
Shit.
Why did I park in front of the house?
Why do I have such a flashy, recognizable car?
Why did I drive that car here?
Stupid, Daria. Unmistakably stupid.
If they see me up here, I’m dead. No way out of it. I have my little pocket Ruger tucked in the back of my jeans, but it won’t do a lot of damage considering Andrei’s guys are usually carrying semi-automatics. I try to make myself as small as possible as the truck idles beside my car; the driver doing something I can’t make out without being closer. A sigh of relief escapes me as he moves away until he reverses again and slides in line behind my car as though to parallel park.
Fuck. They are going to spot me.
I pull my phone from my pocket, my finger hovering over the button to call Al. There’s not much she can do from where she is. In fact, there’s nothing she can do. But at least she’ll know where I am in case he maims and captures in lieu of killing me.
The passenger opens his door and stands on the doorframe of the truck, raising his gun as he goes. Only then do I realize what he’s got planned and how little I can do about it when perched above it all in a tree. I take a chance and hit the button to call Al as the man opens fire on my little car, igniting everything I foolishly have stored in my trunk. The last thing I comprehend before everything goes black is just how deafening the sound of plastic explosives still is at one hundred feet away.
10
Mack
I don’t recognize the number calling, and it’s on my burner phone so I’m tempted to hit decline. Except with all the shit going on right now with Reed going UC and Quinn missing, plus Daria’s father in town, I don’t dare ignore the unknown.
“Yeah.” I also don’t dare to identify myself when I don’t know who’s calling a burner.
“Mack?”
“Who’s this?” I ask of the hoarse but feminine voice on the other end of the line.
“Is this Mack?”
I pause before answering.
Fuck it.
“Yeah, this is Mack. Who’s this?”
“Oh, thank god, I took a chance after tracing Daria’
s burner to see who she called. It’s Al. Um, Alyssa. I work with Daria. We met once a while ago. Anyway, I think something may have happened, I’m just not sure.”
“What do you mean? Happened to who?”
“To Daria.”
“Where is she?”
“I think at Andrei Turgenev’s. But the call dropped before she said anything, and I’m pretty sure there was an explosion.”
“Where are you?
“At the office.”
“Hang on.” Hitting the parking lot at a run, I am behind the wheel of my car in a matter of seconds. “I’m in my car, heading to Andrei’s. Tell me everything, leave nothing out.”
By the time I reach Andrei’s, I’m an emotional wreck, and the street is a madhouse. Police cars, black SUVs, fire trucks, ambulances, along with people in uniforms are everywhere I look. The blackened remains of Daria’s car sits smoking on the side of the road in front of an equally demolished SUV. I park in the middle of the road, flashing my badge at the officer guarding the perimeter.
“Special Agent Mack Murphy, FBI. What happened?”
“Not sure. Car was parked, near as we can tell. Looks like the guys shot at it. Something inside exploded, took the guys out, blew the woman into a tree.”
“She was blown into a tree? Is she . . . did she survive?”
“Looked that way. They took her to Mercy a bit ago.” He shrugs. “What do the Feds want with this, anyway?”
“We’ve had our eye on the guy who owns the house.” I scan the area again, just to make sure I don’t see Daria anywhere. “But the woman, she was alive?”
“Pretty sure, yep. Just missed her by about four minutes. You ain’t gonna get anything out of her though. She was pretty banged up, unconscious I’m sure.”
“Thanks, man.” I pat him on the back as I turn and jog back to my car.
Daria is unconscious.