by Leah Wilde
“Did you miss the part about immunity? Plus, we’re getting new clients out of this deal,” I explained to Mr. Eager Ambition.
“New clients?” Ricky’s ears perked up.
“From what he was saying, everyone who is supposed to be part of this deal tomorrow is going to start coming to us after Ivan is shut down.”
“And you believe him,” Jorell stated flatly.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “He’s offering us any gear we need for tonight, so what I need you to do is to check back over everything and see if we need anything else. He said he’ll hook us up with anything we need. He’ll have it delivered right to us.”
“Yes, sir,” he said resentfully.
“So, we’re doing this tonight?” Chase asked.
“That’s what he said. Hit Ivan tonight, get Julia back, do whatever we want to anyone not on the list, and hit the road before the authorities show up.”
“What about the drugs?” Ricky asked.
“He said leave the drugs and weapons. He’s got some people coming to handle all of that. Some of it is going to the FBI so they have something to pin on these guys,” I explained.
Jorell shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re working with the law on this one.”
“Hey, it’s going to put us back on top, and Ivan’s going to be gone. This is going to break Ivan’s operation up and put us back on top. That’s what we want, right?” I asked Jorell.
“Yeah, I guess so. Whatever. I mean, you’re the boss, right?” He stood up. “I’m going to go ahead and check our gear.”
We all watched him leave, and as the door closed behind him, we turned to each other.
“Guys, I don’t know about Jorell.” I was the first to speak.
“Yeah, he’s turning out not to be the greatest candidate for his position,” Ricky added.
“No, I think he’s great for security and armed operations, but for a position at this table?” I added.
“I say we demote him after tonight,” Chase said.
“Please. You think he’s going to let go of his position? He’s not going down without a fight. Gage, I’d watch your back as long as he’s around,” Juarez added.
“I mean, if we think he’s a threat, he doesn’t have to be around long,” Ricky suggested. “Shit happens when you get a bunch of guys together in the dark firing their guns off.”
“I think we can all agree we didn’t hear that,” I said, cutting my eyes to Ricky. Losing Jorell in the middle of a gunfight was definitely preferable to having to fight him down from his position. He had seemed like such a good fit, too.
“What have your eyes told you?” Ricky asked.
“Nothing out of the ordinary. We may just be looking at an internal threat here,” I said.
“That’s not good either.”
I hit the table, breaking the growing tension in the room. “Well, look, we have a lot bigger things to worry about right now. We’ll revisit this problem after tonight,” I said. “Right now, we need to focus on making sure everything’s ready.”
Chapter 29
Julia
“Well, it seems I underestimated your friend Gage.” Dimitri came back in and sat down on the crate again. “So, I guess he will be coming to see you after all.”
Despite how panicked the others sounded when they were talking to him outside, Dimitri didn’t seem fazed at all by the news that their attack on the Kings of Hell had failed. His tone and face remained calm as he talked. I suspected he was either impressed or trying to pump himself up for the coming fight.
“We have a surprise for him, though. If he tries to show up and disrupt the deal, there will be enough firepower on this boat to blast him into oblivion. He doesn’t stand a chance, you understand? Not a chance.”
“Are you trying to convince me or just yourself?” I asked. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to poke at him.
“I’m just letting you know,” he said. “I don’t want you to be surprised when your knight in shining armor gets dumped in the lake along with all of his little friends because they took on more than they could handle.”
I nodded. “This is all just talk,” I told him. “I’ve heard it before. You must feel really small inside to always have to talk so big.”
He laughed. I mean, he really laughed. I didn’t think that what I’d said was that funny, but he cracked up.
“You’re funny,” Dimitri said, wiping tears away from his eyes. “You have me in tears over here.”
He shook his head, still snickering, and turned to leave the room. Once the door closed, I was alone again in the utility closet on Ivan’s yacht. I realized that inside this little room, I had no idea what time it was outside. I did know that I needed to pee. I wondered if Dimitri would let me go to the bathroom or if I had to wet myself here in the chair. I hoped for the former over the latter, but I also wasn’t going to hold my breath.
I tried to focus on the swaying of the room to keep my mind from floating back over the last several days of my life. I imagined myself sitting on the crate in front of me, asking me questions about what all had happened.
“Do you regret leaving your office that morning with Gage?” I would have asked myself in that situation.
I caught myself actually thinking about the answer to that question. My knee-jerk reaction would have been to say I did regret my decision to go along with Gage, but I wondered if I really did regret it. I finally decided my real answer would have been different.
“No, I don’t regret it,” I said aloud. “My only regret is that I didn’t trust the right one.” Gage was dangerous and exciting. He showed me that there was so much more to life outside the stuffy libraries and universities where I had spent most of my adult life, and even a good bit of my life as a student.
“What would you have done differently?” I continued interrogating myself.
“I would have trusted Gage.” I nodded. Gage knew what he was talking about. This was his element, his world. In academia, I knew my way around, and I was an authority. In this world, he was one of the authorities, the experts. Because I hadn’t trusted him, I was tied to a chair and stuffed in a utility closet on a thug’s yacht in the middle of Lake Michigan. I awaited my judgment. I knew my time was limited now.
“If you survive this, will you change anything?” I asked myself.
It was the million-dollar question. Would I change anything in my life after this? I didn’t have an answer for that one. I wasn’t really sure I was going to get out in the first place. These men were never going to stop going after each other, and that left me sitting right in the middle as long as I was lined up beside either of them. If I got out, I’d have to think long and hard before deciding whether I thought a relationship with Gage was really worth all of this.
The door opened, and it was Dimitri again.
“Oh, you’re still here,” he taunted me. He sat down where my imaginary self had just been sitting, vanishing her from the crate.
“Well, I thought about leaving, but I figured you wanted to keep your chair,” I joked back.
“No, you can have the chair, Dr. Danvers. You look too comfortable in it. We wouldn’t think about taking that from you,” he said back to me.
“You know, it was really peaceful and quiet while you were gone,” I told him. “Why do you keep coming back in here?”
He actually looked hurt. “I didn’t want you to get lonely.”
I was touched. He actually seemed genuine in that moment, but he continued talking.
“I figured you needed to have someone with you in your final hours. Everyone should have someone by their side. Someone they know, at least, if not someone close to them. I think we know each other pretty well, don’t you?”
I just stared into his blue eyes.
“That’s right, Dr. Danvers. It won’t be long now. When your boyfriend shows up, you’re going to get a front row seat to his death. Then,” a perverse smile spread across his face, “we’re going to dispatch
you.”
Again, I found myself fighting back the words that wanted to come crashing forth. There were so many things I wanted to say in protest, but I didn’t want to give him any ammunition against me.
“Do you want to know how we’re going to do it?” He sounded like a guilty child taking pleasure in whatever it was that he wasn’t supposed to be doing.
I didn’t answer, but the giant Russian still leaned forward to speak in my ear.
“I’m going to cut you free from this chair with the knife you gave me. Then, as you try to get free from me, I’m going to give the knife back to you. I’m going to stab you, Dr. Danvers. I’m going to stab you so, so many times.”
He sounded like the idea of stabbing me repeatedly was getting him off. My skin crawled at the creepy, erotic tone in his voice.
“You’re a sick man,” I hissed.
He took a shaky breath in my ear, and I felt my stomach heave. Then, he laughed at my revulsion.
“I never told you how much it meant to me that you would come down and talk to me by yourself, Dr. Danvers. Your personal interest in my captivity was touching,” he said. “I want to thank you.”
I tilted my head, unsure of what he really meant.
“You inspired me. I waited to see you. I knew that eventually the tables would turn, and I would be faced with the same decision you had to make, where to place my loyalty. In realizing that I would be faced with that choice, I had to evaluate my loyalty in the basement of Gage’s clubhouse,” he continued tormenting me.
“What did you decide?” I asked, though I knew the answer already. I could tell he wanted me to ask.
“I decided that, unlike you, my loyalty is unwavering. I am loyal to Ivan. Are you even loyal to yourself, Julia? I imagine if you were, you wouldn’t have even taken a job from someone like Gage in the first place. Or were you bored with your life? Were you searching for a way out? Is that why you took the job from an obvious thug like him? Were you trying to shake things up?” He flooded me with questions. He was good at filling my head with doubts.
They were all good questions that I needed to be asking myself, especially since I didn’t have any good answers for them. I’d been wondering why I had taken Gage’s job offer since that first day. So far, I couldn’t think of any good reasons beyond needing the money to help with my mother’s bills. At the same time, being stuck in this life, I hadn’t been able to take the time to address any of the important daily concerns of my normal life.
Oh, but if I made it out of this mess, I would have a great story to share. That thought brought a smile to my face. Dimitri didn’t seem too amused by my smile, though.
“Is something funny, Dr. Danvers? Is your betrayal of yourself and of your boyfriend funny to you? It’s not going to be funny to him when he sacrifices himself to try to rescue you,” he taunted me.
I didn’t respond. In fact, his reaction made me settle into that smile, allowing it to spread further across my face, ear to ear, just because it drove him crazy.
“Wait,” he said. “If we let him see you here, if he knows you’re alive, you might be in even more danger. He might decide to sacrifice you so he can escape with his life again. No, no, we can’t have that, Dr. Danvers. We’re going to have to kill you first, I guess.” A smile crossed his face now. “We may even kill you before he gets here so that he finds your body when he arrives.”
We were back to his little fantasy about murdering me. I was beginning to understand why he’d taken this line of work over many other things he could have done with his physique. He took far too much pleasure in the violence of it all.
“The possibilities are endless,” he continued, smiling like a schoolboy. “If you’ll excuse me, Dr. Danvers, I’m going to go work this out a little more. I need to decide exactly what I’m going to do, how I’m going to do it, and when it needs to happen.”
I rolled my eyes as he stepped out of the room again. I began to wonder if there was a practical reason for his restlessness. I wondered if he wasn’t talking so much shit to cover up the fact that he really was scared of Gage and his men. After all, they had defeated men who had presumably been trained to kill their targets with some measure of efficiency.
I took his apparent concern as a good sign for me. It meant I had a chance to make it through this. Not being someone who wanted to depend on someone else for security, however, I continued working the chair after he left the room. It was wooden, for crying out loud! I had to be able to break it eventually. Eventually the wood would give, right? At least that was my thinking on the matter.
The chair didn’t seem to budge. There didn’t seem to be any distress or any weak points I could exploit to free myself. I didn’t want to be stuck on this boat waiting for Gage to arrive or for Dimitri to decide he was tired of playing with me.
If my theory about the bear’s concern over Gage’s arrival was true, it meant that I offered him a distraction. As a useful distraction, he would probably keep me around until the last minute, which increased my chances of being rescued.
My mind filled to the brim with possibilities and theories, questions and reflections. Just as Dimitri seemed to need me as a distraction, I was beginning to realize I needed him, too. I felt like there was some truth in what he’d told me earlier about looking forward to talking to me at Kings of Hell HQ, but not because he knew he was going to talk me into helping him at some point. I felt that I understood why he had looked forward to talking to me, because in my wooden chair, locked away in a closet and unable to tell if it were day or night, I felt the same way.
I caught myself wanting him to come back in so I would at least have someone to talk to or listen to besides my own thoughts, which were getting more and more persistent, and more and more panicked. Dimitri was becoming a comfort, offering me solace from the growing noise in my own head. I wanted him back because he also helped me pass the time faster than the waves rocking the boat. Even if it meant having to listen to him fantasize about killing me.
Chapter 30
Gage
We took two boats out in the middle of the night, shrouded by darkness. The mayor had given us night vision goggles and made sure we were equipped with the right gear for jumping in the water in the middle of the night to swim a good bit of the way to the yacht.
There were five of us in each boat. We had fully automatic assault rifles, handguns, and knives, just in case it got down to hand-to-hand combat. We even had radio headsets so that we could communicate with each other across the water.
“Alright, guys, let’s get a little closer. We’ll stop when we can see the boat,” I told everyone. We had a GPS app that had locked onto Ivan’s cell phone, courtesy of the mayor, again. He’d pulled some strings to get access to the phone system he used.
“I still don’t like using all this stuff the mayor gave us,” Jorell chimed in. “It feels too much like we’re working for him.”
“Let’s keep the line clear for important updates,” I responded. “And, Jorell, think of him as a wealthy partner with incredible connections. You’ll be surprised who you ended up using as partners in our line of work. So let’s be grateful that he was willing to help us.”
“Right, he could have been a dick and turned everyone against us. We could have been picked up by the Feds instead of being attacked by Ivan’s men,” Juarez chimed in.
“Alright, guys, that’s enough. We’ll air this out when we get back to HQ. Right now we have a job to do, so let’s get to work. Keep your eyes out for Ivan’s yacht.” I listened as the line went dead.
Jorell was becoming a problem. He seemed to want to foster dissent, but little did he know, his time with us was coming to a close. As part of my new push to better the MC, I wasn’t going to be able to tolerate him for much longer. His attitude wasn’t productive or helpful.
“I think I see something,” Ricky said over the line. Sure enough, there was a small green blip on the horizon.
“That looks like it,” I said.
/> “Hey, if we’re out here with night vision goggles on, how do we know Ivan doesn’t have anyone watching for us with night vision?” Jorell asked. “Sorry, it just occurred to me.”
“You know, you’re right,” I replied. It seemed that none of us had thought of that. “I’m sorry, guys, but I think it’s too late to do anything about it. Let’s get a little closer to make sure it’s actually him, and then let’s ditch the boats. The best way we can avoid being detected is by splitting up in the water instead of sitting together in these boats.”
“Right,” Jorell agreed.
“Hey, there aren’t any sharks or anything we need to worry about in Lake Michigan, right?” Juarez asked, getting a laugh out of everybody.