Three Vlog Night

by Z. A. Maxfield

  They loved their little family. Each other. Not money. Not prestige.

  They loved him, and he’d taken it for granted for years—taken advantage of it. He’d used his privilege like a stupid fool, and now, when it mattered and he had his head on straight, it was going to be all over for him.

  He couldn’t bear the thought he’d never see his mom and dad again.

  What would Mackenzie Detweiler—the man who wrote that stupid book Plummet to Soar—do? He’d fallen from a helicopter and survived. The moment of clarity he’d experienced on the way down formed the backbone of the book. Live in the now. Each moment is precious.

  What should he do, what should he think, now that he knew he was living his final moments on earth?

  Detweiler’s moment of terror would have been much quicker. Ajax closed his eyes and returned to something familiar and reassuring. Calculations…. They were his refuge sometimes.

  It had to take twelve seconds for Detweiler to reach terminal velocity, and after that, he’d have fallen about a thousand feet every 5.5 seconds. Given that most tourist helicopters don’t fly all that high, particularly if they’re wheeling around a crater full of jungle foliage and showing off the beauty of waterfalls, Mackenzie’s miraculous death-free landing happened in a matter of seconds.

  Seconds could drag out, though. His seconds certainly were.

  Detweiler probably didn’t even have a chance to regret all the things he’d done wrong or count all the things he’d do differently.

  He probably didn’t feel like he was mired in the concrete of past bad decisions, running through the molasses of mixed emotions, stuck in the heavy glue of guilt and anguish, like Ajax did.

  How long? How long did he have before Peter and Chet—Christ, he should have realized anyone who called himself Chet was a sack of shit—and Dmytro came back.

  They would never hand him over to his family. Not ever.

  He knew the drill because he’d had security all his life. It had been drummed into him as the son of prominent, wealthy Americans. Outside the country, kidnap and ransom was strictly an opportunistic business enterprise. In South America, in Africa, in Indonesia, there had always been the possibility he’d be taken, despite the security he traveled with. Ransoms would be paid by his family’s K&R insurance, and he would be returned to his family, shaken but alive.

  But being taken by Iphicles—by men whose faces he knew, men who had successfully funneled him to a vessel at sea…. There was no hope they would let him live, no matter what they said to his parents.

  Dmytro couldn’t be fool enough to believe he stood a chance either.

  When Dmytro switched sides, it had hurt. The betrayal shocked him like Chet’s physical blow. It left his body drained and shaky, his spine turned to jelly.

  He didn’t blame Dmytro. He didn’t hate Dmytro. In fact, seeing everything Dmytro was willing to do for his daughters, the chance he was taking, the long-odds gamble he’d made…. Ajax could only admire him more.

  Peter and Chet were the antithesis of men like Dmytro. They had no code. They carried no honor. In his desperate bid to save himself, Dmytro had to throw away the thing he’d been fighting hardest for: being a man his daughters could take pride in.

  Sorrow wounded Ajax’s heart like hammer blows.

  No way was Dmytro walking away from this either.

  Dmytro had to know that, right? He had to know that just as they couldn’t let him live, they would be crazy to come back with Dmytro still alive, because he was already a mass of mixed emotions and old-fashioned guilt.

  He was, as Chet pointed out, a do-gooder.

  It would take exactly no time for Dmytro to make certain the threats Peter made against his daughters could never be fulfilled, and Peter probably knew that too.

  If Dmytro lived, Peter’s days were numbered. Dmytro would kill him for speaking his daughters’ names aloud, much less uttering a threat against them.

  And maybe Dmytro would make them pay for him too? Maybe he’d seek revenge on Ajax’s behalf, or for his parents, or because Anton had once been his mirage in a thirsty adolescence?

  No. Dmytro would wipe Peter and Chet off the earth without prejudice because they were evil, and deep down, way inside him where he hardly ever looked, Dmytro was good.

  Somehow none of that helped. None of it made spending the last hour of his life on a fucking boat with his hands and mouth taped any better. So he fidgeted to loosen his bonds. He tried to chew through the duct tape covering his mouth. And he wept, which was not only degrading, but it was making his nose stuffy.

  At that rate, he was going to kill himself by making it impossible to breathe.

  Outside his door somewhere, the three men argued. Dmytro warned that if Ajax’s parents demanded another proof of life, they should get one. Chet and Peter said they’d had all the proof they were going to get.

  Chet appeared in the doorway with a bottle of water. What were they trying to prove? It seemed absurd that they should offer him comfort when they were only going to throw him from the deck or shoot him, or—

  “Your boyfriend insists we give you water.”

  Something must have shown on his face—some spark of happiness—because Chet laughed cruelly. “He don’t care or nothing. He just don’t want you to look like shit if your parents ask for a last-minute proof of life.”

  Ajax nodded that he understood.

  “I’m gonna take this tape off. You can yell all you want. There’s no one to hear you within fifty miles.”

  He yanked the tape off, and it took some of Ajax’s skin with it. Ajax closed his eyes tightly against the pain, and when he opened them again, Chet stood so close he could smell his unwashed skin.

  Chet stared down at Ajax, tilting his head this way and that. His gaze was blank, his face blank. His eyes were coal black, burning with a hatred that had only been banked until now, when it was fueled with the oxygen of desire.

  Real fear swept over Ajax. He gave a shudder of revulsion.

  Chet gripped the hair on the back of his head in a painful grip.

  “Whatchu looking at, faggot.”

  Ajax averted his gaze in the absolute wrong direction and found himself face-to-face with Chet’s crotch.

  “Ah. You want what I got, huh?” Chet took a step closer and shoved Ajax’s head into his groin. He smelled stale and old, like he didn’t wash his clothes. His body stank of fear and arousal. “You want this, boy?”

  Shoved into Chet’s body that way, Ajax shook his head. He realized his mistake a second too late. Chet’s spindly little cock got hard, his pulse plumping behind his black jeans up against Ajax’s nose.

  “Do that again, faggot. That feels good.” Another evil laugh.

  Maybe he should offer to blow him? He would do it too. And he’d fight back. He’d bite the sick turd’s dick off when it was good and swollen, so he’d bleed out on the floor at Ajax’s feet.

  Come and get it.

  “What the hell are you doing, Chet?” Peter had come into the cabin with Dmytro following on his heels. Like he had the night before, he leaned against the wall, hands stuffed into his pockets. Muscles in his jaw clenched. Whether from anger or dismay, Ajax couldn’t tell.

  “I didn’t take you for one of us,” Ajax taunted Chet.

  “I ain’t a fag.” His grin was meant to rile Dmytro. “No reason not to use one, though.”

  Peter gestured with his gun. “You were meant to get him water. God, I’ll do it myself.”

  Peter came over and held the bottle. Ajax took several gulping swallows. He turned his head to wipe his mouth on his shoulder and said, “Don’t tape my mouth again, please.”

  Chet said, “You don’t tell us what to do.”

  Peter’s gaze moved between the two of them before he shrugged. “He can shout the house down. No reason he needs a gag.”

  Chet huffed and stormed up the stairs while Ajax stayed silent and watched as Dmytro and Peter let him go.

  “You were ri
ght about that one, brother,” Peter muttered darkly.

  “We don’t need him.” Dmytro smiled. “First chance I get in Ukraine, I’ll take him to a place I know where they’ll drug him and roll him, and he’ll never be seen or heard from again.”

  “You could do that?”

  “I have many friends in Kiev of the not-so-lawful variety.”

  “Will they be glad to see you?”

  Dmytro shrugged as though he couldn’t care less.

  Ajax blinked in surprise.

  Dmytro wore the exact look he’d shown up with the first night, when Ajax was just a job and the important thing was finishing his text exchange with his girls.

  But Dmytro hid who he was all the damn time. He hid his goodness, his generosity. He hid his heartbreak. He hid his pride. He hid what he wanted because he didn’t believe he deserved it, and he hid his desire because he was afraid of it.

  Dmytro looked at Ajax as though switching sides was easy because only his daughters meant anything to him, as though he could move on after this like nothing happened.

  But after days of concealed laughter, suppressed smiles, shy warmth, and mysterious kindnesses, what Ajax saw on Dmytro’s face couldn’t come close to hiding what was in Dmytro’s heart.

  Ajax wasn’t going to be fooled by a look. Never again.

  Chapter 23

  NERVOUSLY, CHET spread the chart on the table between them. “This is the rendezvous point.”

  He acted like a scalded cat, jumping at every sound. He put his back to the wall more often, because he was rattled now. He’d thought he knew how this was going to play out, but Dmytro had thrown a massive wrench in his plans.

  Kind of sucked for him, not being teacher’s pet anymore.

  The more Peter lit into Chet for his little stunt with Ajax, the more it seemed Chet was all mouth but no trousers when it came to homophobia. Or else everything went out the window when it came to getting his dick sucked.

  What Dmytro didn’t know until that minute was that Peter’s hatred for gays in general and Ajax in particular went deep as bone. Peter was never going to forget that he walked in on Chet cradling Ajax’s head to his balls, but then, neither would Dmytro.

  Which one of them would Peter rather have at his back? Dmytro knew the answer. He’d proven himself a thousand times over with the toughest men in the field.

  “What do you think, Dmytro?” Peter took him out of his thoughts. “We have fifteen minutes.”

  “I think if the Fairchilds pay the ransom without calling Iphicles or getting an immediate second proof of life, they’re insane. Or they’re desperate enough to cause a thousand problems you cannot afford to have. FBI. Interpol.”

  “Well, hell.” Chet’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “We sure didn’t think of that, did we?”

  Peter glared at him.

  Dmytro returned his gaze to the map. “They’ll have a crew on that boat.”

  Peter shook his head. “Fairchild’s parents made the drop on a junker. They know if there’s no money, the boy is dead. If my radar detects hostiles before the drop, the boy is dead. Anyone follows the drop, the boy is dead.”

  “We both know the boy is dead anyway.” Anger filled Dmytro’s heart. “What about the crew?”

  “There’s only the pilot, and he’s one of mine.”

  Dead, then. The body count just kept getting higher and higher. The trick was to act as if he didn’t know he was dead too. “You think Ajax’s parents have accepted your terms?”

  “If they want their little faggot back, they will.” There went Chet again, the belligerent asshole. Did he think the more often he said the hateful word, the more likely Peter would absolve him of the lust in his heart?

  Dmytro wanted to shove the chart up his ass. Peter wasn’t likely to forget he’d had rape on his mind only moments before. Dmytro certainly wouldn’t.

  But goddamn. It seemed Peter had contingency plans for every single thing. Thinking fast, Dmytro raised the one question still bothering him. “Did you plan all this from the start? Make those original threats in order to set it in motion? Or was Ajax simply an opportunity you couldn’t pass up?”

  “No, God. He dropped right in our lap.” Peter laughed. “Zhenya sent him to the safe house with you and Bartosz, but he put me in charge of logistics. It was the easiest thing in the world to reel you off in a different direction.”

  “You tampered with the safe house alarms.” Dmytro didn’t need an answer.

  Peter nodded. “And Chet booby-trapped the car.”

  “What about the girl?” he asked.

  “At the motel? Oh, she caught me spying on Bartosz,” Chet said. “I gave her a good bang on the head. She probably don’t remember much, huh?”

  “The first of your many mistakes,” Peter said. “God, you’re an ass. What part of ‘don’t be seen’ did you have a hard time with?”

  Chet thudded his chest. “The kid didn’t think any of the threats were real until I shot up the restaurant. Christ, I had his fluffy little head—I had all of you—right in the crosshairs. But I fired into the ceiling. Pew, pew, pew. I made sure y’all got on this boat.”

  “He’s right, you know.” Dmytro threw him a bone. “I only started to worry when the messages changed from that Biblical bullshit to the really nasty stuff—”

  “That was me.” Chet chortled happily. “I did that.”

  Dmytro concealed his revulsion. “Ajax didn’t believe any threat existed until the gunfire at the restaurant.”

  He hadn’t believed it after, necessarily. He’d known they’d be dead if the shooter had wanted them dead. He’d seen the trajectory of the bullets and pointed it out right away. God, they’d walked right into a trap. Oh, Bartosz….

  Dmytro’s heart hurt.

  Peter might be a professional, but Dmytro doubted he’d never done anything like this. In spite of his careful planning, his level of self-confidence and overbright eyes suggested this was an endgame of sorts for him. He was going all in for the ransom drop, and if things went south there, he didn’t have a backup plan. They were all hanging by the spiderweb of Peter’s sanity.

  Chet was simply, as Ajax would say, an asshat.

  “What do we do now?” Dmytro asked.

  “Now, we wait.” Peter snapped his fingers and Chet jumped like a confused dog. “Get me something to drink.”

  Chet found a half-empty whiskey bottle and handed it over.

  “Let’s all drink. To Ukraine and pretty women,” Peter drank deeply and handed the bottle to Chet.

  Chet drank his fill and handed the bottle back. “Or pretty boys. Huh, Kolisnychenko?”

  Dmytro smirked. “They have pretty boys there too, my friend. Rest assured you won’t be lonely.”

  “I meant for you!” Chet blinked when he realized how that sounded. “No way do I want—”

  “Shut up.” Peter snatched the bottle back. “You disgust me.”

  “I ain’t like him, boss. I was just playing with the kid. I wasn’t actually gonna do nothing.”

  Peter tipped the bottle back for another deep swallow. He handed it to Dmytro, who wiped the neck off carefully on his sleeve.

  “I’m equal-opportunity,” Dmytro said before he took a small sip. “If you don’t like it, you can eat a dick.”

  “I don’t like dick, you fag fucker.” Chet glared.

  “Don’t worry, Chet. Is that short for Chester?” Dmytro asked. “In Ukraine I’ll find you boys who dress like girls so no one will be the wiser.”

  “Fuck. You,” Chet muttered darkly. “We’ll see if the boss thinks you’re worth keeping.”

  Dmytro boasted, “No one has lived to complain about my job performance yet.”

  “Me neither, brother.” Peter took the bottle back with a chilly smile. “We have a bargain, you and me.”

  “We do.” Dmytro nodded.

  “Don’t test it.” Peter drained the bottle and threw the empty against the wall. Smash. The reek of alcohol mingled with oil and the o
dor of anxious men.

  Dmytro winked. “With great paychecks comes great discretion.”

  “It had better.” Peter studied him as if to spot any duplicity. “It just better, Kolisnychenko, or I will salt the earth with the bones of your children.”

  Dmytro nodded and rested his eyes while Chet watched the radar and Peter listened to the chatter on the radio. Peter kept a keen eye on him, so there was nothing Dmytro could do but wait. He didn’t know much about boats, and he knew less about navigation. He was only a warrior. His time to act would come, but not while Peter and Chet outnumbered him in the close confines of the bridge, armed and watching him like raptors.

  Dmytro had to bide his time. Look for an opening.

  Find any crack between Peter and Chet and widen it.

  When the call came via a satellite phone Peter wore strapped to his hip, Dmytro made that one more thing on the list of items he would try to get his hands on—either to get help or, if all hope was lost, to text Sasha and Pen one last time.

  Peter activated voice-altering software before putting the call on speaker.

  While Peter argued with the caller, Chet trained his weapon on Dmytro. They still didn’t trust him, which meant he had to sit perfectly still to keep from getting his ass shot. So far they stayed together, making it impossible for him to take one out while the other wasn’t looking.

  Impossible, too, to make things right with Ajax.

  God help him. He knew what Ajax had to be thinking. If he didn’t believe Dmytro was looking out only for himself, then he was a fool.

  Yet… Ajax was a kind of fool too. The hopeful kind. The romantic kind who rushed right in where one might say angels should not go.

  “That’s right. I said no.” Peter’s agitated words broke through Dmytro’s melancholy. “For fuck’s sake, I said no. You got your proof of life last night.”

  Dmytro shot him an I-told-you-so look.

  “Christ.” Chet picked at a scab on his thumb, drawing blood. He hissed softly. “Shit…. What should we do, boss?”