Rough: A Hitman Romance

by Chambers, V. J.

  Nikolai shook hands with him but narrowed his eyes. His face was bloated, and it made him look vaguely like a pig. Maybe it was his big, pink nose. “I do not know what you mean. I have no reputation, I assure you.” His own accent was thick and heavy, his English a bit broken.

  “I don’t mean a bad reputation, son.” Ambrose clapped him on the shoulder.

  Nikolai recoiled.

  Ambrose pretended to ignore his reaction. “You’ve got a reputation for being generous.”

  Nikolai raised his eyebrows. “Do I?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Ambrose. “Now, I can be generous too, son. I want you to know that I’m not the kind of cop who’s just out to get people. I want to be fair. I want to give people a chance. You gotta believe that.”

  Nikolai tapped his fingers against his teeth. “I do not mean to be rude, officers, but I am a busy man. Is there a reason that you are here today?”

  “Sure is.” Ambrose grinned widely. “Basically, we’re here about a big shipment of meth that we confiscated. We got three men telling us it belongs to you, and if I put that in a report, then the higher ups are going to want to use it to try for an arrest. You gotta know that the sheriff’s got a hard-on for bringing you in, right?”

  Nikolai stopped smiling. “These men with the meth are lying. I am business man. Respectable business man.”

  “To be sure you are,” said Ambrose. “And a generous one too, or so I hear.”

  “What do you want?” Nikolai’s whole face was getting red.

  “I don’t want anything,” said Ambrose. “I’m just here because I’m a generous man. Before I put any of this in a report, I thought I’d come by here and allow you to be the generous man that you’re rumored to be.”

  “You want bribe.”

  “I never said a thing like that.” Ambrose grinned. “Besides, a bribe would be something you offered, I think. No, this would be more like… blackmail.” He smiled.

  Nikolai smiled too, but thinly. “I could have you both shot right now. I have guards there.” He pointed through the windows to the other building. “And there.”

  “No need for anything like that,” said Ambrose. “All I’m proposing is that you give us a little cash, and then we get out of your hair, and the next time I hear anyone saying that a meth shipment belongs to you, I turn a deaf ear to that.”

  “I already have deal with other police,” said Nikolai.

  “That’s how I knew you were generous.”

  Nikolai shook his head. “No. I will not give cash to you.”

  “You sure about that, son? You sure you want to risk—”

  “What about a trade?” said Nikolai. “I do not have a lot of cash, but I do have women. I have beautiful women, women who will be eager to please you. I can promise you will be always satisfied for free. It is better than cash, you see?”

  “Where are these women?” I spoke up. “Are they in the building next door?”

  Nikolai looked me over. “You. You have been very quiet until now.”

  Shit. Why did I say anything? Did he recognize me?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kiera

  I was sitting behind the computers I had set up, messing with the controls on the program that controlled the microphones. “No, move it down a little bit,” I said to Cass.

  She could hear me over her earpiece. “If I move it down, it’s going to be visible.”

  “Well, is there somewhere else you can put it then? It’s picking up feedback from the speaker on the computer.”

  “Um…” She was quiet.

  I stood up to look over the screens and out the window down into the office. I could see her, but I couldn’t make out much detail from this vantage point. Then I spotted a potted plant. “The plant? In the window?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I can put it there. Hold on.”

  I waited.

  “How are we on time?” she said.

  I checked. “We’re on schedule, I think. You’re about done there, right?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know where Blaze is.”

  It had been radio silence from Blaze since he slunk out of the office to get a lay of the land down there. He was probably in a position where he couldn’t talk or he’d be heard, but it was a bit bothersome.

  “I’m sure he’ll be back in time,” I said. “But just to be sure, I’ll contact Danger and tell him we need more time.”

  I opened up the channel to Danger and Ambrose. Well, just Danger. Ambrose didn’t have an earpiece.

  I had sent one down to him, but there was something wrong with it. I’d offered to try to fix it if someone brought it back up to me, but Ambrose said he’d think better without anyone chirping in his ear, so I hadn’t pushed. I figured it would be fine as long as Demetrius had one.

  I expected to hear something—maybe Ambrose talking or Nikolai’s accent. But all I got was silence.

  “Danger?” I said. “Can you say something and let me know you’re there?”

  I waited.

  Nothing.

  Well, he was in the middle of a conversation. It could be hard to work in a response.

  But still, I should hear something.

  “We need about ten more minutes,” I said. “Please indicate that you copy.”

  Silence.

  Fuck.

  I flipped back over to Cass. “Look, we might have trouble.”

  “Trouble?” said a male voice, not Cass’s.

  “Blaze?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I think I went out of range or something, because you cut out a while ago and just came back on.”

  “That shouldn’t be,” I said. “I’m going to have to look at these earpieces.” Maybe Danger’s had malfunctioned too.

  But I was a little worried that something else had gone down.

  “I think you two should get your butts back over here as soon as you can,” I said.

  “I’m good with that,” came Cass’s voice.

  “I’m on my way back to the office,” said Blaze. “It’s going to take me a few minutes.”

  I sighed.

  I flipped back over to Danger. Still complete silence.

  “Danger?” I said. “Danger, do you read me?”

  Damn it, damn it. What if something very bad had happened to him? I was suddenly flooded with a terror so strong I was surprised by it. I tried to think about Demetrius being hurt, and I found that I didn’t want to think that. At all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Demetrius

  “Have we met before?” said Nikolai to me.

  I shook my head, refusing to meet his eyes. I hoped the hat was big enough to hide my face. “No, sir.”

  “But yet you are here with him to blackmail me?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Why don’t you just forget about him?” said Ambrose, clapping Nikolai on the shoulder again. “Trust me, he’s nothing to worry about. He’ll do whatever I say. He’s kind of big and dumb, if you know what I mean.”

  I stared daggers at Ambrose’s head. So now I was supposed to play the part of an idiot? What was his freaking problem? How did I even do that?

  Nikolai wasn’t appeased. “Take off your hat.”

  My heart sank. Fuck. Here it was. Everything was going to go wrong now, and it was all my fault. I should have stayed behind, but I had insisted on being on site. From now on, I would keep clear of Nikolai if it was the last thing I did.

  “You don’t need him to take off his hat,” said Ambrose. He nodded at me. “Why don’t you wait outside?”

  I had never been so glad of a chance to escape in my life. I didn’t acknowledge anything. I just ran out of the building as fast as I could.

  Then when I got outside, I realized that I hadn’t turned my earpiece on. I reached up and tapped it. “Kiera?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Danger, I thought you were dead!” she yelled in my ear.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot to turn it on.”

/>   “Don’t forget shit like that. I was blind up here. I had no idea what to do.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “Yeah, well, I guess it’s okay. Cass and Blaze are back over on this side, safe and sound, so you guys can pull out whenever you want.”

  That was when I realized that I’d left Ambrose in there without any way to know when he was done.

  “Okay,” I said. How was I going to let Ambrose know that? I couldn’t go back in there.

  “Okay?” she said. “What does that mean?”

  I switched off my earpiece again. God damn Kiera. I didn’t feel like talking to her right at this second. I needed to think.

  Okay, so I could maybe get up close to one of the windows and make some kind of hand signals to him.

  Like what kind of signals?

  And what if Nikolai saw me? He would get even more suspicious.

  No, that wasn’t going to work.

  I was going to have to go back in there, wasn’t I?

  Fuck everything.

  I couldn’t go back in there. If Nikolai saw me, it would ruin everything.

  No, the worst thing that could happen if I didn’t get word to Ambrose was that he would just stay in there all day. That would suck for him, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that would ruin the whole mission.

  I was going to sit tight.

  I turned my earpiece back on.

  “Listen, the thing is—”

  “What happened? Did it cut out? Are all these things malfunctioning?” said Kiera’s voice in my ear.

  “No, I just turned it off again.”

  “You turned it off?” The waves of rage practically radiated through the earpiece.

  “I needed to think.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Danger.” And then it went silent again.

  Huh. I guessed she’d hung up on me. Or, I mean, whatever the equivalent was when you were talking about earpieces.

  I was going to have to talk to her about that. She couldn’t get pissed at me during a mission. This wasn’t the least bit professional. Of course, I’d fucked up by turning off my earpiece. That wasn’t exactly professional either. If it hadn’t been Kiera on the other end of the line, I don’t know what I would have done. Probably not turn it off, though.

  Maybe Kiera and I needed to hash this out, have a little conversation.

  Anyway, we’d have time for that soon enough.

  For now, I’d just wait for Ambrose.

  About twenty minutes later, he came out of the building, all smiles.

  “Hey,” I said, falling into stride with him as we headed for the parking lot. From there, we’d cut over to the building where the others were. “I’m sorry I left you in there without an earpiece.”

  “Had to be done, man,” he said. “He was going to make you, and that would have ruined everything. Once you were gone, he seemed to forget about you pretty quick.”

  “Good,” I said. “So, he wasn’t suspicious at all?”

  “No way.”

  “Why did you stay in there so long, then?”

  “Oh, I was trying to negotiate the girls a little harder. I thought if we could get into the place where he actually keeps the girls, that would solve half our problems, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “So?”

  “He wouldn’t go for it. I kept saying we wanted to select the girl we wanted, and we wanted to see everything he had to offer, and he said that he’d bring the girls to us. Or he’d have someone bring them to us. And no matter how hard I tried, he wouldn’t budge on that.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Too bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But we’ve got the surveillance in place. We’ll find out that way.”

  * * *

  Kiera

  The empty office building wasn’t the most comfortable place in the world, but there was an old couch that had been left behind in one of the rooms, and I figured I could sleep there.

  There was an old break room with a mini-fridge, a microwave, a coffee maker, and a two-burner hotplate. There was a can of coffee in the cupboards, and some dishes, pots, and pans. I’d brought along some cereal for breakfast the next day. Blaze said he would run out and bring me back some groceries.

  I needed to be close to the surveillance equipment to hear everything that was said in Nikolai’s office. I could have left it to record and then come back in and listened to the recordings, but I knew from experience that wasn’t the best practice.

  When listening to recordings, especially ones that last for hours on end, you end up doing a lot of fast-forwarding, and you miss things.

  If I was here, wired up at all times, even while I was sleeping, then if something happened, I would know.

  So, I was going to stay here until we got Nikolai to give up the information that we needed. I was still going to do any work that I needed to do for the guys in the office. I’d just tackle it here. I could work here just as easily.

  I had four separate computers set up next to the window. If I looked out from my perch behind them, I had a perfect view of Nikolai’s office. I was ready.

  “Kiera?” came Demetrius’s voice from behind me.

  I didn’t turn around. “Yeah?” I was still pissed at him for turning off his earpiece when I’d been trying to talk to him. Didn’t he know how important it was for me to be in touch with everyone? I had been the person trying to coordinate everyone’s movements.

  This mission had been completed, and we’d gotten our objective, but we’d been so sloppy that I didn’t think that it should have been.

  He pulled over a chair. “You all set here?”

  “You can’t turn off your earpiece like that,” I said.

  He sighed. “Yeah, I get that was probably a bad move. But we’ll talk about that later.”

  “Later?” I shook my head. “I could be here for days. I won’t even remember what I was going to say after that.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Wait. You don’t think that I’m going to leave you here alone, do you?”

  I wrenched my gaze away from the computer screens. “Of course I’m staying here alone. No one else needs to be here. I got this, Danger. I can definitely watch some screens and listen all on my own. Don’t worry, I’m recording everything, and I’ll get all the pertinent information to you so that you can listen to it yourself.”

  “I’m not saying you can’t do it,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s not safe.”

  I slid down in my chair, glaring up at the ceiling. “Not this again.”

  “You’re right next door to the Bratva, Kiera. It’s not safe.”

  I refused to have this stupid conversation with him again. I made a show of fiddling with my keyboard, even though I didn’t really have anything to type. “Right, right. Not safe.” What he was actually saying, whether he knew it or not, was that I was unable to take care of myself. He thought of me as a child, not an equal, and it made me nuts. That was why he’d disconnected on me earlier today. He didn’t respect me.

  “Don’t sulk about it. It’s not that big of a deal. I’ll be here, but I won’t get in your way. You’ll be free to do whatever it is you need to do.”

  I stared at the computer screen. “You know what could have happened if I needed to convey important information to you while your earpiece was off?”

  “Look, we can talk about this later—”

  “Everything could have gone wrong. You turned it off, and you didn’t even know what I needed to say to you. You have absolutely no respect for me.”

  “It’s not like that.” He leaned forward, so that his face was in my line of vision. “I admit that it was a bad idea to turn it off. But you turned yours off too.”

  “Because you deserved it,” I said.

  “Okay, but that’s the problem,” he said. “We’ve got to get this thing between us under control.”

  My heart sped up for some unknown reason. “There’s a thing between us?”

  He got up and walked ov
er to the window. “Yeah, we’re always arguing.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.” Stop beating so fast, I told my heart.

  “It’s not professional,” he told the window. “We need to get a handle on it.”

  “I agree,” I said. “And I think what would go a long way toward making things better between us would be if you would just trust me a little more. You don’t have to treat me like a kid. I can handle myself.”

  He turned around, crossing his huge forearms over his massive chest. “I don’t think of you as a kid, Kiera. Not at all.” His gaze raked my body.

  Now, not only was my heart still pounding, but I felt myself flush. I hunched over the computer, unsure of how to even respond to that. “You can’t stay here with me while I’m listening in on Nikolai.”

  “Oh, I’m staying here. You’re in no position to tell me what I can and cannot do.”

  “You’ll… distract me.” I gulped, glancing at him.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  I kept going, my words tripping over each other. “Because I’ll get angry with you. You always make me pissed off.”

  He came back over and sat down next to me again. “I know that. And I lose my temper with you a lot too. But that’s why it’s a good idea for us to stay together here for a bit.”

  “How is that a good idea?” I glared at him. Why did he have to be so stupidly good looking?

  “We need to work out our issues.” He held my gaze.

  The places where his gaze settled tingled. I felt flustered. I fidgeted. “I don’t want you here,” I said, my voice unsteady.

  “Too bad,” he said, and his voice did that low rumbling thing that made me all shivery.

  Damn him.

  * * *

  Kiera

  Everyone else had left besides Demetrius and me. We were alone.

  Since I was still annoyed with him for staying here with me when I totally did not need a babysitter, I decided to do my best to ignore him. Which was really easier said than done. He was kind of conspicuous, being all big and hulking like he was. He hovered in the doorway, and he took up more space than he should. And even when I wasn’t looking at him, I could somehow sense him, as if his presence had taken over some aspect of my brain.