by Tia Siren
“You may think you will be safe in your native Albania, but do you know how many of my Russian friends live and work in your country? If you let my son go, you will have right of passage to Albania and a quiet life. If, however, my son is harmed, you will be hunted down. Your photo will be in every newspaper and on every TV station in Europe. The bounty on your head will be so high, you will have the worst kind of people looking for you. Also, my son is very popular in Russia. Every Russian will feel it is his duty to hunt you down like a rabid dog and finish you. If you want to kill my son, go ahead, but that will be the consequence. The decision is yours.”
Limonov stumbled as he got up. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was through the roof. Jessie, who was standing behind the news cameras, looked at him and wondered what he had just done. He had taken a massive gamble with his son's life, the life of the man she loved.
*****
“Fucking half-wit,” Dritan said as he glared at the TV. He looked across at Milan. “Your father doesn't give a fuck if we kill you or not.”
“He does care. If we kill him, we will be killed. I'm sure of that now. His father is right. If the bounty is high enough, someone will get us,” one of Dritan's two henchmen said.
*****
The following morning, while Dritan and his accomplices were on the way to the airport, Milan managed to struggle free from the bed he'd been tied to and stagger out of the building, his legs still tied together. He tripped on the sidewalk and staggered into oncoming traffic. A lady driving a VW Beetle slammed her brakes on and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was an inch away from Milan, who was lying in front of her bumper.
The young man told her a remarkable story. When he described how he'd swapped himself for the woman he loved, in such a dangerous situation, he almost made her cry. She was only too happy to give him a lift and so curious to see what the young woman he spoke of so highly looked like.
“Oh my God,” Jessie shouted as she ran to him. The lady in the VW Beetle beamed. Milan didn't say anything, just held her to him. “I'm cross with you, very cross,” Jessie said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Doing what you did was foolish. You could have been killed.”
“So could you, and that would have been much worse. Do you think I like seeing you in captivity? Being held by that asshole? Any man would have done what I did.”
“I don't think that's true. Not all men are so foolish.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have paid the ransom and have done with it,” Jessie said.
He laughed. “It's a lot of money. Do you think you are worth so much?”
“She's worth more than that,” Limonov said as he entered the room. “Welcome back, Son.” He put his arm around him. “But if you ever do anything that stupid again, I'll kill you myself. You should learn from this. The sensible thing to do would have been to pay the ransom and take revenge later. You put yourself in a lot of danger.”
“Okay. A lesson learned. You handled it very well, Pops.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. What I said was only partly true. It was a bluff, because once they are in Albania, it won't be easy to find them.”
“Well, it's over,” Milan said as he put his arm around Jessie.
Limonov's cell rang and he looked at the display. It was a number he didn't recognize.
“Mr. Igorevich?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“My name is Kasparov, Dmitri, US Customs. I work at the airport in Las Vegas. I have something I would like to discuss with you.”
Limonov wondered what he'd done wrong. “Go ahead,” he said.
“I saw you on TV last evening. You were talking to a man called Dritan Polyakov.”
“Yes, I was.”
“Do you still want to talk to him?”
Limonov looked at Jessie and Milan. “Yes. I would very much like to speak to him.”
“He is here. I will gladly introduce you to him if you care to come to the airport.”
“Yes. I think that would be a very nice thing to do. What about the police?”
“I don't think there is any need for them, do you?”
“Tell me,” Limonov said, “are you of Russian decent?”
“Yes, sir, I am. Pleased to be of service.”
“Thank you. You have been very helpful. I will send someone to fetch Mr. Polyakov.”
Limonov laughed out loud. Milan looked at him quizzically. “Russians, we are everywhere,” Limonov said.
******
“So you don't think I'm worth five million dollars?” Jessie said as Milan came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around him.
“Who said that?”
“You said as much. You weren't prepared to pay for me. Not a cent.” Jessie was very good at acting, and Milan looked puzzled.
“I would have paid for you. I just though what I did was better. That's all.”
“But it wasn't, was it? You almost got killed just because you didn't want to pay for me. Well, if I'm not worth anything to you, I think I'll have to increase my value.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked.
“Sex. It's going to cost you from now on.”
“You're joking, right?”
“No. If you think I'm worthless, I need to show you I'm not.”
He looked at her, lying next to him in the sexiest nightie he'd ever seen, her breasts gently falling and rising. “How much?”
“Five hundred a time.”
“Jesus. It would have been cheaper to pay the ransom.”
He pulled her to him and kissed her. “That’s ten bucks already,” he said.
“What did your father do with Dritan?” she asked.
“He put him on his private jet and had him flown to St. Petersburg.”
“And what will happen to him there?” she asked.
“The river is deep, and concrete doesn't float in Russia.”
She pulled him on top of her and wrapped her legs around him. “Take off that towel and show me what you've got,” she said.
He reached down and threw the material onto the floor. He entered her in one movement. She flung her head back on the pillow and let out a sigh of deep satisfaction.
As he made love to her, he leaned down and kissed her deeply, his tongue probing her mouth.
His body felt better than ever on top of her. It was wonderful to have him inside her again. She met his thrusts with the movement of her hips, taking him into her hungrily. She ran her hands over the smooth skin on his back and down to his tight buttocks.
“You are darn handsome, Milan,” she said.
“And you are more beautiful than a man can bear,” he replied. He looked deep into her eyes as he picked up the pace. She began to gasp. He knew her well enough now to know what that meant. Any moment he would be rewarded by watching her come. When she did, he stopped and held her face in his hands. He kissed her forehead gently.
When her release came, she relaxed and luxuriated in the movement of his body. She was painfully aware of what had happened, and she felt guilty. Guilty for ever becoming involved with a man as bad as Dritan. It had nearly cost her life, and the life of the man who was so deliciously pounding her now.
He was close, and she knew it. She wanted to come at the same time as him. “Tell me. Tell me when,” she whispered. She began to touch herself.
When he nodded, she rubbed herself furiously and cried out as they came together, kissing and pawing at each other.
*****
On the day Dritan was dropped into the Neva River, Jessie and Milan were married. It was a wedding attended by everyone who was anyone in Las Vegas society. The press turned out to photograph the rich and famous and those who were more infamous than famous.
Jessie and Milan went to the Seychelles on honeymoon in Limonov's private jet. When they arrived back in Las Vegas, Jessie found out she was pregnant. Nine months later she had a boy na
med Milan the second.
*****
THE END
MAFIA Romance – Dangerously His
1
David Carr was used to getting his way. He liked it like that. And he knew he deserved it. He had crawled up from nothing. He ran the drug business in Chicago, and he had done it on his own. He didn’t have family in it before him; he didn’t have friends. He just knew he wanted it, so he took it.
Being the big man at the top had a lot of good and a lot of bad. He went anywhere, spent a ton of money, owned homes across the world, but he had to always keep one eye open. He knew that. Someone was always coming for him, coming for his position.
David worked hard so he could play hard. He loved the clubs. He loved to drink. He didn’t do drugs; he just sold them. Doing them made you stupid, slow. Being slow made you dead. He loved women, and they loved him. Most of them, at least.
There was one girl. She worked as a waitress at a club he went to a lot. The club was called Fire House, and the girl was named Cherry. Well, he was pretty sure that wasn’t her real name, but it was the one on the name tag she wore next to her luscious bosom.
It was a Saturday night when David arrived at Fire House and was led back to his usual table, a small wooden circle with a booth-like bench around three-fourths of the surface. It was up a couple of stairs, kept away from the public by a velvet rope that stretched across the top of the small staircase. The woman, who led David and two men in his employ, was attractive, young, and blond, with a short skirt. But David didn’t return her smile as he sat down. Usually he had women with him at the club, but this time he hadn’t brought any. He wanted Cherry.
She always waited on him, at his request. As soon as David and his men sat down, she was there, making her way up the three stairs on sky-high black pumps. She was wearing a black dress, the neckline cut low to show off the tops of her large, pale breasts. The hem was short, so short you could get a glimpse of the bottom of her butt cheeks if she spun too fast, which she often did to get good tips. Her skin was lily white, and her hair was red. David was pretty sure that was why she was called Cherry. Her lips were even redder, her makeup impeccable. She was beautiful. Sexy. Never trashy, like the other girls who worked at Fire House, or the ones who went there hoping to fuck men like David.
The lights in the place were red, just like Cherry’s lips.
“Hey,” the woman said as she stopped to stand next to the table. David looked her over. She continued. “The usual?”
“Sure,” David said. The usual was three bottles of the most expensive champagne in America, at least to start with.
“No girls tonight?” Cherry asked.
“I came to see you,” David said. Cherry smiled and then rolled her eyes.
“You’re just saying that.”
Of course she knew the man wanted to fuck her. Most men did. And David was handsome, about to turn forty, with a thick head of coal black hair and dark eyes. He was tanned and tall, and his chest was wide and muscular. He was sexy. She wanted him to fuck her. But she knew who he was, in two senses of the word. For one, he fucked chicks, and that was it. She didn’t want to waste time with that. For another, he dealt drugs. Massively. He was rich and successful, but the business he was in was dangerous, and she didn’t want to get caught up in it.
Of course, she had no idea that she already was, but that night she would learn it.
“Tell me your real name,” David asked before she could go put his order in.
She laughed. Cherry wasn’t her real name, of course, but it had been her nickname since she was a baby. Even then she’d had red hair. No one ever believed that Cherry was practically her real name. Only her mother ever called her Jillian, her given name.
“Cherry is my name,” she said, and then, before the man could protest, she hurried away.
David watched the waitress go, her ass swinging back and forth beneath that dastardly short dress. And then someone else caught his eye, and David sighed.
“Here comes this prick,” David said to his men, Mark and Kyle. They looked over and smirked.
The man who owned Fire House was young, only twenty-five. He had been born into wealth and had opened a few successful clubs in a few different cities by the time he was twenty-three. He liked Chicago, though, so he spent most of his time there. He was thin and nervous looking, with a large hooked nose and beady eyes. His name was Nathan.
“Hey there, David,” Nathan said as he slid into the booth next to him. While Nathan had started out with clubs, he had expanded into the drug game, though he was nothing but a speck to David. Still, it paid to be nice.
“Nathan,” David said in his cool and collected voice.
“I got something big going,” the club owner said, unable to keep a smile from spreading across his face. “I thought I would come offer you a place.”
David returned the smile, but his had malice. “Nathan, the day you have something you could possibly offer me other than bottles of champagne, I’ll jump off a fucking bridge.”
Nathan blinked, his mouth hung open. Then he shut it, smiled again, and nodded. He stood up and turned. “Fair enough,” he called over his shoulder, and then he was gone. David watched him go and then turned to his men, and they shared a laugh.
2
Cherry was tired. Her feet hurt, because her black pumps were uncomfortable. Her tits were sore, because the hard wire of her push-up bra cut into the soft flesh of her underboob. The thong she wore was uncomfortable, and after spending hours walking through a haze of cigarette smoke, vapor, and horrible smells that cheap guys sprayed on themselves before a night out, Cherry was covered in stench.
Still, it was good money, working at Fire House. She couldn’t deny that. She was fresh out of college and had been working there for a year before she even graduated. Men liked her, so they left good tips and bought more drinks. Her boss, Nathan, liked her, since those men were buying more drinks, and although it was brain-dead work, Cherry liked it, since she was making a lot more than most of the people she had just graduated with.
The nights that David was there were the best. He tipped a lot. He bought a lot. She knew he wanted her. She wanted him too, but she wouldn’t let herself get involved with him. She hadn’t been involved with anyone in a long time. School had been taking all of her time during the day, and work at night, but now she had a lot more free time, and she had been taking the offers she got from men at work a lot more seriously.
“Hey, hon, can I take you out?” one man might say.
“Come back to my place,” another would say.
She definitely wasn’t looking for cheap sex, so those second guys would get a smile and an easy “no thanks” line. The first, though, she considered. She needed to go on a date; it had been so long since she had done so.
And of course David Carr wanted to take her out. He asked her every night he came into the club. That night was no exception. He had been joined by a number of people at his private table, including a blonde bimbo with fake tits who seemed to be trying to get into his pants but was growing increasingly agitated by the fact that David was pawning her off on one of his friends.
“You should come out tonight,” David said. “What time do you get off?”
Cherry smiled and bent down, flirting with the good-looking man, making sure he got a nice view down the low neck of her dress.
“Three in the morning,” she said. “You want to take me out to breakfast?”
David laughed and nodded. She watched him. He had perfect white teeth. “I’ll take you to breakfast,” he said. “I know a place with the best pancakes.”
Cherry straightened up and shook her head. “I can’t tonight,” she said, though she had never been so close to accepting the man’s offer to take her out before. She couldn’t though. She liked nice guys, and David Carr was the epitome of a bad boy. He dealt in crime. Everyone knew it.
Cherry turned and headed back into the kitchen. Most people in the club were there to d
rink, dance, and hook up, but the place did have a small kitchen, white and silver and pristine, where a couple chefs made hors d'oeuvre for those who ordered it.
She was hoping to sneak a snack; she hadn’t eaten much and was starving, and one of the cooks was a chubby guy with bad acne who yearned for her and was happy to make her whatever she asked for.
But when she entered the kitchen it was empty, or at least it appeared that way from the doorway. She was about to leave, but she heard voices in the back, the people they belonged to blocked from view by a large island in the center of the kitchen with racks above holding various dishes. Cherry edged forward, hoping to find Billy, the chubby cook, but instead, as she turned the edge of the island, she saw Nathan, her boss, and two men she didn’t recognize. They were near the back corner of the room, next to a door that led to the alley that ran behind the club.
Nathan was holding a large binder of sorts, flipping through the pages. From where she stood, Cherry could see that each page of the binder was a large photograph of a different woman. Her boss was speaking as he looked at the pictures.
“Who could have thought there was so much money in this?” he said. The other two men laughed, and Nathan went on. “Seriously, these chicks are from Russia? They’re so fucking hot; I might buy one.”
The men laughed again. It slowly dawned on Cherry what they were looking at and what they were talking about. She backed up, hoping to leave without them noticing her. Nathan was a scumbag. She knew that. But she’s never known him to do anything illegal, and now this, sex trafficking—it was horrible. How long had he been doing it? She didn’t have all the answers, of course, just a small sliver of a secret. She bumped into the island. The dishes above the island clanked and clattered. The three men looked to her.
Nathan saw her and his face fell. “Oh damn,” he said. “I like you.” And then, Cherry hardly able to believe it, her boss pulled a gun from the back of his waistband.
She turned and ran.