Kirill stared at Jax as if he might spit on him.
“Think of it this way,” Jax said. “The longer you keep him waiting, the more he’s gonna torture himself thinking about how long he’ll be able to keep from telling you what you want to know. It’ll be agony.”
Trinity stood at his side, shoulder to shoulder. Kirill glanced at her, saw the solidarity there, and then looked at Oleg. The nod was almost imperceptible—not enough to make the other Russians question who was in charge—but it was clear that Oleg was Kirill’s second, and the boss valued his input.
“Timur,” Kirill said to one of his men, “break both his thumbs.”
Luka did not beg. He glared at Timur and bared his teeth, refusing to show fear.
As Kirill walked up the steps from the empty pool, Timur started his work. Luka screamed. Instead of a triumphant smile, Kirill wore an expression of deep sadness.
“He’ll talk,” Jax said.
“Of course he will,” Kirill said. “But I wish he wouldn’t make us hurt him. We were friends once.”
“You and Lagoshin are at war. Unless one of you waves the white flag, a lot of your friends are gonna die.”
Kirill gave him a sidelong glance, his face a grim mask, but he said nothing. They went out through the gate, and Kirill set off around the back of the hotel. Chibs followed, but stopped outside the gate, where he could keep an eye on them without Kirill thinking he was trying to eavesdrop. Jax and Kirill strode together to a broad swath of scrubland that looked out on the foothills as the sunlight seared the tops of the mountains, the hot line of its glare moving downward, touching more of the land.
Kirill stopped, staring at the golden aura of early-morning light on the mountains.
“Just so we have no misunderstandings,” Jax said, “you should know I’m armed.”
“I expected you would be.”
“That doesn’t concern you?”
Kirill turned to face him. “You’d have to be suicidal to kill me right here.”
“I have no interest in killing you.”
Kirill smiled thinly, as if to remind Jax that the feeling was not at all mutual. “You wanted to speak with me privately,” he said. “Here we are.”
Jax scraped his fingers through his beard, choosing his words carefully. “I’ve had a lot of new beginnings in my life lately. Not anything you’d give a shit about. Personal stuff. The past relationship between the Bratva and my club is complicated. There’s a lot of bad blood there. You think we killed Putlova. Clearly I’m not gonna convince you otherwise, just like you’re not going to confirm it was your men who tried to put me and Opie in the ground the other day.”
Kirill studied him thoughtfully.
“Lagoshin may be down a few guys,” Jax went on, “but I’m betting he’s still got you outgunned. I can help with that.”
“There are three of you,” Kirill scoffed.
“Three of us, but we got you the thing you couldn’t get for yourself … a direct line to Lagoshin’s location,” Jax countered. “And there are three now, but I’ve got a charter here in Vegas who will send in reinforcements.”
“In exchange for?”
Jax threw his hands up. “Hey, I’m just a guy trying to keep his sister from getting killed. She loves your boy, Oleg, and it looks to me like he feels the same. That makes you and me practically in-laws. All I’m suggesting is that we throw in together until Lagoshin’s in the ground and you’re running the Bratva’s operations in the western U.S. When it’s over, we maintain the current status quo. SAMCRO and the Bratva stay in our separate corners … and your people stay away from the Irish.”
Kirill’s eyes lit up. “I see, now. This is business for you.”
“This is family,” Jax said darkly. “My club is my family as much as Trinity is. I don’t want anybody else dying for no reason.”
He held out his hand, kept it rock steady as he waited.
Several seconds passed, but Kirill grasped his hand and shook.
“Good,” Jax said. “Now let’s go see what Luka has to say.”
As if on cue, they heard Luka scream. The anguished cry echoed off the walls of the empty pool and out into the desert sky. A massive red-tailed hawk circled overhead, watching the show.
* * *
Jax leaned against the wall of the empty pool as he and Chibs watched the Russians beat the shit out of Luka. Kirill mostly just observed, leaving the bloody-knuckle work to Oleg and a guy named Gavril. Oleg looked like he had no taste for the brutality. Regret hung on him like a sheen of sweat. When Gavril cut off the little finger on Luka’s right hand, Oleg had turned away. But when Luka still wouldn’t talk, it was Oleg who stormed in with a cry of rage and hit Luka so hard the chair tipped over, and the prisoner smacked his head on the concrete floor of the pool.
Luka had been beaten and cut, lost two fingers and four teeth. His face was split and swollen and bloody, and he slumped in the chair as if he’d been an inflated man and all the helium was slowly leaking out of him.
“He dead?” Jax asked, growing frustrated.
Kirill rounded on him. “You want to take a turn? You think you can do better?”
Jax pushed off the wall.
“Jackie,” Chibs said quietly, worriedly.
Jax strode over and began to circle Luka. “You could cut off his balls, threaten to take his cock as well.”
Kirill and Oleg both blanched. Gavril only looked defeated.
Luka spat bloody phlegm at Jax’s feet.
“This guy used to be your brother,” Jax said. “I get it. Nobody wants to torture a guy who used to get you a beer when he went to grab one for himself. But Luka’s not your brother anymore. He betrayed you. Lagoshin ordered him to stick with me, follow me till I found you, and then call it in. They were gonna come here and kill all of you.”
Oleg glared at Jax. “You think we are so weak?”
Jax frowned. “Nothing weak about brotherhood. You’re men of honor. But we all know this ends with Luka dead.” He crouched down, eye to eye with the prisoner. “Hell, Luka knows that. Thing is, he’s a man of honor, too, right? So the only way he’s gonna tell you what you want to know is if you make it so he’d rather hurry up and die than hold on to that honor.”
Luka glared at him. Jax stood up and glanced around at the Bratva men, who seemed to like him almost as much as Luka did.
“It’s not about honor,” Trinity said, walking down the steps into the empty pool. She tossed her hair back and turned to Jax. “It’s dread.”
“What?” Jax asked.
“They’re takin’ their time, buildin’ up to worse, lettin’ him fill up with pain and fear,” she said, glancing at Oleg and then Kirill. “This is barely torture. It’s foreplay.”
“We don’t have time for foreplay,” Jax said.
Trinity walked to Gavril and held out a hand. “Give me your knife, Gav.”
Gavril knelt and slid up the leg of his pants, retrieving a small dagger from the sheath strapped around his calf. Trinity took it from him as she passed by, moving into the deep end of the empty pool. Jax watched her curiously. Luka sniffed in derision and spit again, disdainful of the very idea that a woman could intimidate him.
She edged past Oleg, her back to him, controlling the space between herself and Luka.
Trinity grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head back. Jaw tight, muscles standing out on her forearms, she pressed the knife against the skin just beside his left eye. In the morning light, Jax saw the trickle of blood drip from the wound.
“Bitch,” Luka sneered, eyes pinched closed.
Trinity dug the knife tip into his eyebrow, and Luka cried out as she sliced downward, splitting his eyelid. He tried to tear his head away, tried to use his body weight to move the chair back, but she held him tightly, and the position of the knife blade forced him not to fight too hard.
“She’s your sister, all right,” Chibs said quietly.
Jax stood away from the wall, staring a
t her. Trinity had grown up with the RIRA in the family, lived a life no stranger to violence and murder, but she had never been a part of that violence as far as he knew.
“Hey,” he said quietly, “don’t.”
Trinity shot him a hard look. If she understood that this blood she’d spilled had changed her, that she’d just given up a sliver of her innocence, he didn’t see it in her eyes. Jax knew she was no little girl, and he wasn’t the guardian of her innocence or humanity, but the moment still felt like a loss.
“Open your eyes,” Trinity told Luka.
The prisoner complied. Blood ran from the slit in his left eyelid, but he seemed to still have the eye. Luka stared at her, all his defiance and disdain obliterated by fear and pain.
“That’s just to prove I’ll do it,” Trinity said. “Five seconds, and I slice out your eye like I’m shuckin’ an oyster. The address where we can find Lagoshin.”
She had barely started counting when Luka blurted out the answer.
Task accomplished, Trinity let go of his hair. She handed Gavril’s bloodied dagger to Oleg and turned from the Russians, walking over to Jax. Where others might have worn a satisfied smile, Trinity had gone pale. She braced her hands against the inner wall of the empty pool and took a deep, shuddering breath.
Jax put a hand on her back. “You all right?”
Trinity took another deep breath. “If I can keep from pukin’ my guts up, I’ll be right as rain.”
* * *
Trinity hurried along the corridor, headed back to her room. The real estate agent had not wanted the water to the hotel turned on, but he’d supplied the surveying map, and Pyotr had managed to do it himself. By the time the water department noticed, they would long since have departed.
Just now she could have kissed Pyotr. There were days when a shower—even a cold shower, which was all they had—could save your life. Her face felt flushed, and she couldn’t seem to unclench her fists as she turned the corner. When she saw the door to her room, she managed to exhale, then shuddered in revulsion at the thought that the stale-smelling, dusty hotel room could offer her such reassurance. The building seemed to be closing in around her.
“Trinity!”
She spun, fists still clenched. Oleg had followed, and now he strode quickly after her. Two doors away, almost made it.
An argument had been brewing between them—she’d kept secrets, he’d thought he knew her—but she couldn’t have that conversation right now.
“You knew it was important, your relationship with Jax—”
“He’s my brother.”
“You knew it would complicate things for us.”
“I didn’t know how much, but, yeah, I knew. Do you blame me for keeping my mouth shut when I was falling in love with you?” She ran her hands through her hair. “Honestly?”
Oleg reached out to touch her cheek, lifted her chin. “And if you have to choose?”
Trinity’s breath quickened. She cocked her head, trying to mask her alarm. “Are you going to make me?”
“If you had to,” Oleg said, “who would you choose?”
Trinity gave a small laugh and shook her head. Her life back home had sometimes been troubled, sometimes lonely, and sometimes dangerous, but to her it had always been a beautiful life. School, working in the bakery and later in Keegan’s Pub, seeing her friends, and fighting with her mother. There were churches and cobblestones, and on a nice day there were musicians busking all through the city. Beautiful.
There was beauty here as well. The badlands and the mountains. At night, even the lights of Las Vegas had a brittle beauty. Trinity had believed that she and Oleg could make a beautiful life, but she felt apart from it now, as if the only loveliness she could see was through the barred windows of some prison cell.
“A man who loved me would never ask me that question,” she said.
Oleg nearly growled. She saw him fighting within himself, the grim Russian demeanor in conflict with his feelings for her.
“A woman who loved me would be able to answer it,” he replied.
“You bastard…”
He reached for her, but she shook his arm off. “All I’m asking is … if it came to that…”
Trinity pointed a finger at his face, bared her teeth. “He’s my brother, which makes him the only thing my father ever gave me. He’s family.”
A brutal silence descended upon them.
They heard the shush of clothing and a heavy footfall, and they turned to see Jax coming around the corner at the end of the hall. He stopped, meeting Oleg’s gaze in an open challenge, and Trinity wondered how much he had heard.
“You got a minute?” he asked.
Oleg scratched at his stubbled chin. “She’s got all the time in the world.”
He turned to walk away, but Jax called him back. “I was talking to you.”
Chin high, Oleg regarded him coolly. “Go on.”
“Me being here complicates things for you,” Jax said. “I recognize that. Kirill and I have an understanding. At the end of this thing, we may not all be friends, but we’re not gonna be trying to kill each other. I get the impression you and I need an understanding of our own.”
Oleg wetted his lips. “Putlova recruited Kirill. Kirill brought me into the Bratva, freed me from an ugly life. I had great respect for Viktor Putlova.”
Trinity watched her brother’s face. His features betrayed nothing, were as smooth a mask as Oleg’s.
“I respected Putlova, too,” Jax said. “But it’s hard to keep respecting a guy when you’ve got a knife in your back. Or at your throat. Trinity loves you, so I’m gonna promise you something. All my cards are on the table. My only agenda is to make sure my sister is safe. I know you want that, too, Oleg, but I have to ask … are all of your cards on the table?”
Oleg hesitated, glanced at Trinity, and a veil of aggression seemed to fall away from his face. “Yes,” he said, “all the cards.”
For a second, Trinity thought they might shake, but Jax did not extend his hand, and Oleg only nodded and turned away, striding along the corridor until he reached the turn in the hall. She heard the sound of the metal release bar on the exit door, then listened as it thumped shut.
“That went well,” Jax said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.
“I think it did, actually,” she said. “He may not want to respect you, but I think he’s startin’ to. Harder to hate a man if you know him.”
Jax laughed softly. “Yeah, that’s not really been my experience.”
“Regardless, we’re allied now, all of us. Once Lagoshin’s out of the way, all of this fear will end.”
For half a second, Jax stared at her as if she’d grown an extra head. His doubts aside, she believed that this alliance would be propitious. Awkwardness lingered between them, but it was quickly being replaced by a deep kinship. Jax had made it clear that he had her back, no matter what, and though she’d spent her life learning to deal with men who disappointed her, she had begun to believe in this man. Her brother.
Trinity told herself she would never have to choose between her new life and her old one. She could almost believe it.
15
Thor felt a hand shaking him. He felt the crick in his neck and the ache in his spine and tried to twist himself into a more comfortable position. The hand shook him again, like God had reached down into his dreams and rousted him. He pulled away, determined to cling to sleep, but as he moved he slid off the sofa cushions that he’d laid out on the floor of the poolroom in a makeshift bed, and just that two-inch drop to the ground was enough to make his eyes pop open.
“Up and at ’em, thunder god,” Baghead said, worried sincerity in his eyes. His breath could have peeled a century’s worth of paint off a barn.
“Bag…,” Thor managed to say, too tired for any imaginative profanities. He pulled away from that hideous breath. Glancing around, he found the hair band he’d taken off the night before and used it to pull his red mop into a topknot, keeping i
t out of his face.
In the midst of this, Bag kept putting his hand out. Thor blinked and realized his friend was trying to give him something.
“Phone’s for you,” Bag said.
Thor squinted, rubbed his eyes, and glanced at the door. Was it morning yet? Had the sun come up? Sure as hell didn’t feel like it could be morning.
He took the phone. “It better be fucking good o’clock,” he said. “Who the hell is this?”
“It’s Izzo,” a raspy voice said. Someone else who didn’t like being awake at this hour. “Trust me, I’m not happy to be talking to you, either. Something I figured you and your MC would want to know.”
Thor felt a tightening in his chest. He glanced up, saw Baghead watching him intently with those mad little rat eyes of his. “Get me coffee, Bag.”
Thor watched Bag retreat from the room. He had to go around Antonio, who’d been sleeping on the floor but who now raised his head to gaze blearily around the room. Jax had sent Thor back to the Tombstone the night before with a request that Rollie keep them ready to move, which meant every member of SAMNOV in the area had bedded down in the rooms at the back of the bar. Baghead had been sleeping in the other crash room with Mikey the Prospect, who was a nineteen-year-old ex-football star, and a short brute with a shaved head and blond eyebrows that they all called Clean.
“You call just to breathe heavy?” Thor asked.
“I thought you were still talking to your buddy,” Izzo said. “Guy sounds half-crazy, by the way.”
“Maybe both. You’re stalling, man. Tell it.”
Thor could hear Izzo sigh over the phone, almost as if the cop was afraid to speak the words that would come next. The sound was chilling.
“Little more than half an hour ago, we got a call from a guy out doing his morning bike ride. Found two bodies on the side of a remote road in North Vegas, runs through an old family ranch that was foreclosed on a couple of years back.”
A small wave of nausea undulated in Thor’s belly.
“One of the dead guys is a Russian. Our gang task force ID’d him as one of Lagoshin’s men. The other is your man Joyce.”
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