“You might know your brother, but you evidently don’t know mine. He never gives up. That’s why his enemies always end up dead. He is relentless. As long as there is breath in his body, he never gives up.”
“Then you should give up trying to hide it and let him deal with it. You’re a grown woman. It’s your business who you fuck. What happened to your women’s lib bullshit?”
“The rules don’t apply to family,” she conceded.
Blowing a cloud of smoke from his mouth, Ivan looked down at Arie and moved her hair from her face. He normally detested submission, but Arie made it sexy. Plus, she was the only woman in the world that he had ever truly cared about. Only, he wasn’t sure if he cared about her because she cared so little for herself, or if it was because she cared so much for him despite who and how he was. It was the most confusing relationship he had ever been in and also the only relationship.
With any other woman, he would have gotten rid of her already, but he enjoyed Arie. She was a sociopath like him, but she didn’t try to hide that. It was a match made in heaven…or hell. Dismissing her melancholy and his attention to their present conversation, he switched the subject.
“Are you hungry?” His deep voice was sinister. He planned to feed her alright.
A smile spread across her full, red lips. She knew exactly what he meant. “Starving,” she answered.
“Let’s go grab something to eat,” he said, standing up.
“No one leaves this barn until we get the call from your brother. If you are hungry, there is plenty of food in the cooler or in the baskets,” Dorian shouted across the barn, taking off his headphones.
The other team members looked across at Arie and Ivan and knew that they were stirring up trouble again. It had become their norm.
“He really was reading our lips,” Ivan said, impressed with Dorian’s skill. He winked his eye at Arie’s brother and chuckled under his breath. He’d have to remember that for later. For now, there was something that he needed to clear up.
“I told you that he could read lips before,” Arie said, sitting back down. “I’m getting tired of being in this fucking place!” she screamed so that everyone in the barn would hear her.
Throwing an empty bottle of vodka across the barn into the wall and smashing it, she growled and pushed her head back against the wall.
Ivan smirked at Arie’s fit, then turned to Dorian.
“I’m sorry…who said that we can’t leave?” Ivan asked sarcastically with a growl in his gravelly voice.
“Your brother,” Dorian answered, knowing that if it was just his call, Ivan would have simply dismissed it.
“Next time, you should recommend that we stay and then qualify it with the fact that it’s from my brother, because I don’t take orders from men that I fucking employ!” Ivan challenged. His demeanor changed to quickly for anyone in the room to process. “And the only reason that I am even considering staying now is because I need to kill something…soon. But from now on, don’t read my fucking lips, and don’t tell me what to do, or I’ll cut your neck ear to ear, pull your head back and piss down your fucking throat.”
Arie smiled, turned on by his promise of murder and mayhem.
Dorian clenched his jaw but did not respond. For now, he would simply have to swallow what was going on between his sister and Ivan. There was far too much at stake. Dmitry had already paid the team half of their fee for coming, paid for the farm, paid for guns, paid for the assassination. If he pulled out now over his whore of a sister then it would cost lives, and more than hers…his men and maybe his men’s families. Frustrated, he slipped back on his headphones and continued to listen for their signal.
“There,” Ivan said, turning his back to Dorian to face Arie. “Now your brother has been handled. And for the record, I’ll be 12 inches deep inside of you as soon as this is done.”
“You better, or else, I might explode.” Arie looked up at Ivan and cupped her knees under her. “I can’t wait to kill someone,” she pouted. “We flew all the way over here to sit in this barn like farm animals. How much more degrading can we get?”
Ivan sauntered back over to her and sat back down. “Think of it this way. When we get Dmitry what he wants, which is evidently Smirnov’s head on a stick, then he’ll be so busy conquering the world that he won’t notice us or how much we take for our finder’s fee.”
“What finder’s fee?” she asked, hiding her body behind Ivan’s when she saw Dorian look back her way. The last thing she wanted was him to eavesdrop on this conversation. It could very well be her key to independence, a life without her overbearing brother.
“The way that I see it, is that there is going to be a lot of money to be had when we take over Smirnov’s operations. Dmitry won’t be able to keep up with all of it at first. Sure he’s going to inventory it, but guess who will be responsible for corralling all of his shit?”
“We will,” Arie answered with eyes bright.
“Exactly. And that dream you have of setting up your own operation will be even closer to happening, because we’ll be spread so thin until Dorian won’t always be where you are. Before he knows it, you’ll be running your own team, and he’ll be across the world building bombs for Dmitry.”
Arie smiled. “I’d never thought of that.” However reality quickly slipped into her fantasy. “But Dorian has Dmitry’s ear. And after he helps him pull this off, there is no way that Dmitry will pick me to run my own team.”
“You don’t know my brother as well as I do. He is always open to negotiation.”
Ivan slipped the cigarette into his mouth and looked up again into the rafters with a deadly grin. “They don’t know what they’re asking for. All this power. All this money. They aren’t going to know what to do with it. And the more they have, the more that will be ours for the taking. It’s call getting in on the ground floor. We’ll let them do all the work to get to the top, and then we’ll just take it.”
“What makes you think that your plan is going to work? Your brother is planning to take out the biggest boss in the world or join up with him. Either way, he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he’s going by trusting anyone.”
“Dmitry has never trusted me. I don’t expect him to start now. In fact, that’s the way that I’m going to turn the tables around.”
“I don’t understand,” Arie said confused.
“I’m going to use his own trust issues against him.” Ivan raised his brow.
Arie smiled. “I think you hate him more than I hate Dorian.”
“Based upon the look of that new shiner that Dorian gave you, I seriously doubt that. We’re probably about even,” Ivan said, looking down at Arie’s eye. “Do you ever wonder why I don’t stop your brother from hitting you?”
Arie frowned. “Sometimes. I just thought it was because it would only make bad blood between Dmitry and Dorian. And I know the only thing that matters to Dmitry is money. He would get rid of me. Send me off. And Dorian only hits me when I go against what he asks. It’s not all the time.”
Ivan bent down to her and made sure his voice was barely above a whisper. “I don’t interrupt because a bitch that loses her bite, her anger, isn’t worth anything to anyone. But if you unleash a beaten, used, angry bitch loose on the world, she’ll kill everyone indiscriminately, even her master, if the opportunity presents itself.”
“I’ll kill anyone anyway.”
Ivan smirked. “Except Dorian,” he challenged with a glimmer of malice in his eyes.
Arie was quiet. She thought hard and looked back up. “Except him,” she agreed.
Ivan sucked his teeth. “There will come a time whether I’m around or not when your loyalty will reach its end. Trust me. I’ve seen this before. It doesn’t last. Anyway, Dorian really isn’t your master. He’s your brother, but he needs you, because you’re the best person he has for wet work. I’m not your master, because even though I have some money, I don’t call the shots. You’re real master is Dmitry.”
Ivan took another drag of his cigarette. “When the time is right. We just have to turn everyone against each other first. Dmitry against David and so on.”
“And you against Dmitry?” she added.
“Oh, I’m already against him,” Ivan answered.
“Why?”
“Because he has everything and I have nothing,” he snarled. “In my world, that’s enough to start a war. That’s enough to commit genocide.”
“Didn’t you say that he gave you 35 million pounds for Emma Hutton?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you didn’t give it to her, did you?”
Ivan rolled his eyes. “It’s in an account for my son. The dumb bitch wouldn’t take it.” It had been the only decent, good gesture that he had ever made in his entire life, and she had turned him down flat. Emma said that she would rather eat out of a garbage can than take money from Dmitry.
Ivan wanted to kill her for her stupidity and might have if she hadn’t been so far away and the only one to raise his son. Instead, he had put the money in an account for Gabriel, knowing that there would be plenty of expenses that he could pay for outright as the boy grew. Still, he could not believe Emma’s blue blood, pompous, self-righteous behavior. After all of her Free Rite bullshit, she still was just a little rich girl playing pioneer. He should have known.
“Well, I’ll take the money,” Arie smirked, bringing him back to the present. “And I’ll give you a son.”
“I bet you would.” Ivan grew quiet. “After my fucked up childhood, there is no way I’d knock up a woman on purpose, and the only reason that I give a damn about this one is because of who his mother is. How often do you knock up royalty?”
“So you’re against children?” she asked, intrigued.
“I’ve never seen a use for family. My mother was whore, my father a john. If I ever got a chance to lay eyes on him, I’d kill him. It’s just that simple.”
“So you want your entire family dead?” Oddly enough, she understood him.
“All except my son. When I’m done, there will only be three Medlov’s standing. My wife. Myself and my son.”
“Wife?” This was new. She listened attentively.
“Da, a wife. I don’t mean in the traditional sense. I hate anything traditional, but I want a wife, someone who will spend their life fucking, killing and pillaging the world with me. Someone who doesn’t mind a good threesome, who doesn’t get jealous when I screw other women and one who will do what I say without questioning my every word.”
Arie nodded as if she saw his vision clearly. “And are you taking resume’s for this upcoming position?” she asked cleverly.
“I’m actually going to be setting up some interviews really soon,” he joked.
“Good. I think I might be interested in that. Just as long as it doesn’t call for me being a mother. I hate kids.”
Ivan smirked. “Da, da. Me too.”
He knew even then that he’d never father another child. He wouldn’t put a child through what he had gone through, and Emma would surely raise another Dmitry - a boy who thought that he was better than the world, better than his own blood. And if he had another child, one with Arie, he would just be repeating the cycle. One child would feel inferior or to his big brother. And that would be his fault. He shook it off.
“The best part of my plan is that Dmitry is worth over a billion pounds now. Can you count that high? Do you know what that kind of money means in comparison to $35 million?”
“Don’t be crude.” It was one thing for Ivan to call her a whore or a murderer, because she was both, but to question her intellect was crossing the line. “What of his billions?”
“It will be up for grabs when the dust settles. For now, we have to get him what he wants, and then when he has everything, we take it all.”
Arie narrowed her eyes. “You know, it wasn’t curiosity that killed the cat, Ivan. It was greed.”
“Do I look like a pussy to you?” Ivan asked with a scowl on his face. His coal black eyebrow raised thick with menace. The gleam in his eye was deliberate, evil and terribly clear. He was out for Dmitry.
“No,” she answered in a whisper.
There was something about the ice cold disposition of her new boyfriend that turned Arie on beyond control. Snaking her arm around his bulging shoulders, she leaned in and offered her blood red lips to him.
Ivan could see Dorian eyeing him from his peripheral. Tired of being cooped up in the barn, he almost wanted her big brother to say something to him. With a large hand over her aroused breast, he pulled her into his growing erection and kissed her, deep and long, lapping his large tongue through her mouth and sucking on her tongue.
Chapter Three
Dmitry allowed himself to relax as the door closed behind him to his hotel suite. Two men stood outside the double doors on post. Four bodyguards in dark black suits made their way throughout the rooms, inspecting each, checking the phones, looking out the windows, looking for anything that looked suspicious. When Davyd was comfortable with the room, he strategically placed them throughout the suite and guided Dmitry inside.
After the slaughter of the Hutton Industries board, Dmitry knew that he had to watch his every move. Retaliation was certain, but the time was unknown. They would simply have to be ready for anyone brave enough to try to finish what Brenneman had started.
Slipping out of his suit jacket, he meandered into his bedroom and lay across the bed. His long legs lazily flopped over the edge as he burrowed his head down into the pillow and let out an exasperated sigh.
No one would ever know how much this lifestyle took out of him, but he knew. On a constant basis, he felt on guard, always worried, never relaxed. Most days, he was in a constant state of quiet panic, playing over every scenario and he never trusted anyone…except Davyd…not even his only brother…his only relative.
Now, he had one hour before his meeting with Boss Smirnov. Over the last couple of days, he had played the scenario over in his mind a thousand times, nearly scripted his words, but yet and still he knew that things would not go as planned. He had that rotting feeling in his gut like every time before.
So much was hinging on this meeting. The Medlov Crime family was still a bunch of riff raff, but now it was well-funded riff raff. If he was ever going to arrive at the point where he was regarded in all organized crime circles as a man of true power, he would first have to win over the man who pulled all the puppet strings.
Only a handful of men had ever seen Boss Smirnov, and for all he knew the man that he was meeting today was possibly an impostor. He had thought about that a hundred times as well. Not even Brenneman had seen the man before, only spoke to him through Khalid.
Still, Dmitry knew that he had to make his presence known now or go on being invisible forever. Today, he could walk into this meeting and set himself up for life with the most powerful man in the Vory or write his own death warrant as well as the death warrants for all of his men, including his brother and Elsa.
Smirnov was known only for his reputation of being brutal. There were hundreds if not thousands of stories that were testimony to his vicious reign. But Dmitry had something that everyone wanted, money and the ability to wash it. There wasn’t a crime syndicate in the world who wouldn’t negotiate for that. For once, he was an asset, but he had to strike while the iron was hot.
Slowly, Dmitry’s tired eyes began to flutter shut. His large chest began to hum into a blissful rhythm of sleep and his balled up fists relaxed into the warm goose-down comforter. Nuzzling his face into the pillow, he finally drifted off into a peaceful slumber.
He knew he only had moments to rest, but a power nap would at least allow him to be alert enough to handle himself, if it came down to that today.
At any moment for the rest of his life, he would have to be ready to die, ready to kill or unfortunately do both at the same time. He could imagine no fate wor
se than that. Yet, he knew that there was no backing down or turning away from his life now. He was locked in on a path of destruction.
***
Dmitry instantly recognized Davyd’s tap on his bedroom door. Rolling over in the bed, he wiped his face and pulled his .45 caliber pistol from under his pillow and slipped it in its leather holster under his arm.
“It’s open,” Dmitry growled as he sat on the edge of the king-size bed. Looking down at his feet, he wiped his blood-shot eyes and ran his fingers through his blonde locks.
The door opened and Davyd slipped inside wearing tired eyes as well. Fully dressed in a fresh dark blue suit, guns hidden under his three-piece attire, he looked around the elegant room and stood waiting on instruction. “Would you like something to eat before you go, boss?”
The Chronicles of Young Dmitry Medlov: Book One Page 25