by Genovese, CM
Some coughed and one woman even hacked up something into a metallic bowl. They’d been through a lot, that much was clear, and some had gotten sick along the way. The room was freezing. A lot more would get sick if we stayed here for long.
Most of the women sat on bunkbeds lined up in rows. Others, who’d been too slow to claim a bunk, sat on the cold floor.
Nia was one of them. I’d be another.
17
Rain
Slitz handled the music on the way to Closure, and he knew how to put me in the fucking zone, as if I needed any help getting there. He beat the steering wheel with his fist as he sang the lyrics to ‘King of Mercy’ by Nine Shrines. All I could think was there was no fucking mercy coming from me. I clenched my fists so hard my fingernails dug into my palms.
Every second that ticked by was one more second Cassie lived in fear.
If she lives at all.
“I have your woman. I will cut her the same way I cut you, I will fuck her, and I will kill her.” Palach’s words repeated in my head. Each time they did, I saw her bleeding out of her throat the way I’d done on the prison floor. I saw her clenching at her throat while the big Russian bastard fucked her.
“Fuck!” I yelled.
Nobody said a word. BP looked back at me from the front passenger seat. He only nodded in silent agreement that we were about to destroy Closure. Our kuttes were piled up on the van floor. For this, we were going in incognito. Black ski masks. Black clothes. No club colors. Nothing to come back and haunt us. Anyone with a Russian accent was dying tonight.
Nobody in a strip club, pre-opening, at night, speaking that mouth-full-of-shit language was innocent. These motherfuckers would pay.
“That’s it,” Nugget said as he leaned forward next to me until his big frame was practically lodged between the front seats. He pointed out the windshield. “Can’t read the sign, but it says Closure. I’ve seen it in the daytime.”
The building was dark, as to be expected since it wasn’t yet open for business.
We rounded the corner to park on a side street where we’d be less likely to be seen. Unlike Boom Stick, this place might have video cameras and they might already be up and running. They might have guards at the door. We’d never had the chance to enter this establishment like we had the other.
“You ready?” BP asked.
My answer came with the opening of the back door as I kicked my way out of it and stalked toward the building. Nothing was getting in my way. The rest of my brothers could follow me in there, but I’d lead the charge. Guns blazing. My silencer was screwed on, I had my ulu blade tucked into my belt, and my hunting knife was holstered. I rolled my ski mask down over my face as I moved toward the door.
BP, Slitz, Nugget, Oosik, and Pipe followed me in there. We couldn’t bring everyone. Too many would get too out of control. It was hard enough to keep this many of us tame enough to not make too many mistakes.
The second I stepped through the door, a big man grabbed my shoulder.
“Hey, what the fuck?” he asked.
It was an American accent. He was a big, bald, black man. Not Russian. He could live. But he’d hurt. My fist landed at the bottom of his chin and my knee slammed into his gut so hard he fell backwards, and his ass tore through the drywall behind him.
Slitz had his gun up, about to shoot him, when I raised a hand. “American.”
“But he might be in on this shit. He works here,” Slitz argued.
“I just started here yesterday,” the man swore, holding his jaw.
“Get over here and don’t fucking move,” BP ordered, grabbing the man and throwing him onto the floor near the bar.
The room was almost completely dark except two spotlights shining down on the stripper poles that ran from stage to ceiling at the branched-out runways of the typical ‘T’ shaped stage. It made sure customers would get eyefuls of tits, ass, and pussy. Round tables were all around the stage. A bar took up the entire left side of the joint. To the right was a long purple couch and a door that led to the back of the house.
“Where is everyone else?” BP asked the guard, who was about to answer, but didn’t need to.
From the back of the house, a man in a blue velvety suit led the way as four other men dressed immaculately followed him. Blue Suit held a finger up and pointed at the poles. None of them saw us fall back into the shadows at the walls. We covered their entire left flank, but to them, we were invisible. We watched, listened, and waited.
“The lighting is still a little off,” Blue Suit said in a thick Russian accent. “Candy, Nipsy, positions.”
Two women walked out from behind the men and sashayed over to the stage. Both were topless and wore thongs. They climbed onto the platform and each grabbed hold of a pole.
“See what I mean?” Blue Suit said, still having no idea he was surrounded by death. “Her face is in the lights. But her tits. Her pussy. This is what we are selling. Not her face. Her only fucking job is to turn men on, so they see us about buying some of the others.”
Buying some of the others?
The women looked down. They seemed sad, and I wondered if they were forced into this job.
“Candy, do you like the lighting, baby?” Blue Suit asked.
“Mr. Kiryl,” she replied, and she had a Russian accent too. “I think you are always right.”
Her face remained down, her gaze at her feet. They were using their own to draw men in and then what? Selling them foreigners? As much as I wanted to storm out of the shadows right fucking now, BP grabbed my wrist and squeezed it tight, telling me to wait.
“Good girl,” Blue Suit, Kiryl as I now knew him, said.
“My cameras can get them fine with that lighting, but if you want to change it,” an overweight man with a different accent, maybe Italian, said. “I’ll get the photos, the videos, and get them out on the dark web. You don’t have to worry about that. My team is good.”
“Perfect,” Kiryl said. “My employers will be very happy. They are not too excited about the numbers we are bringing in now. But this… this…” Kiryl chuckled and held his arms out. He didn’t need to finish the declaration. His meaning was clear. This was going to change the game.
Closure was going to be their marketing campaign. They would videotape women, like these Russian chicks on stage right now, but I assumed it would be women they brought in through their Black Market Railroad. Women from the lower states, Canada, and other foreign but nearby countries.
“You will have Mexicans and Nicaraguans?” one of the other men asked. He was American.
“You have no idea,” Kiryl replied. “That and much more. Costa Rican, Panamanian, Colombian… have you ever seen a Colombian? Holy shit. It is like pussy from heaven.”
I’d heard enough. These motherfuckers were going down. Right now. BP squeezed my wrist harder. I knew why. We were getting all the information we needed without needing to press anyone at all. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. No chopping off cocks for bits and pieces of intel. They were laying all that shit out in front of us. Free of charge.
The girl on the left, Nipsy, peered into the shadows and I wondered if she saw us. Her face turned serious. Her mouth opened, and I knew we’d been made.
“Shit,” BP whispered.
Might as well get this ball rolling.
“Hey, pretty boy,” I said as I stepped out of the shadows, with my gun pointed at Kiryl. He raised his hands instinctively. The other four followed.
“What is this, Kiryl?” one of the other men asked.
At this point, it didn’t matter what country they came from or who they represented. All of them were involved in this shit. Russian or not, they needed to die. To prove that point and to show how serious this was, I pointed my gun at the one who’d spoken and shot him in the middle of his forehead. He fell back.
The women on stage screamed.
Slitz was quick and pointed his gun at Nipsy, moving it slowly over to Candy and back to Nipsy. “Sit
down and shut the fuck up if you don’t want to catch a bullet yourself.”
“Stay out of this and you’ll be fine,” Nugget’s goofy voice promised them. He was a sucker for anything with a heartbeat and a hole. He probably hoped to get some pussy out of this in the end.
“You fools,” Kiryl said. “You want to rob us? Do you have any idea who I work for? Whose club this is?”
“No, but you’re gonna tell me,” BP said.
“I see,” Kiryl replied. “Maybe I will tell you nothing.”
The man standing closest to Kiryl, the Italian, wore a cocky grin. So I pulled my trigger and put a bullet through it, shattering his teeth. Blood sprayed out the back of his throat, and he fell to the ground dead.
The girls whimpered.
“Shut the fuck up,” Slitz told them again.
Two down. Three to go.
“You can kill all of them you want,” Kiryl said. “Makes no matter to me.”
“Kiryl?” one of the other men asked. So, I shot him too.
Three down. Two to go.
“Dude,” BP said to me.
“I will kill every one of them if they don’t start talking soon.”
“Oh, I know who you are,” Kiryl said. “You visited Boom Stick. That was brutal, but you see…” Kiryl slowly reached for his own zipper and pulled down his pants. He had no cock. It had been removed for him. “I didn’t get in my position by accident. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. But as you can see, I don’t talk unless I want to.”
The man standing to the side of Kiryl stared at the Russian’s missing cock with wide-eyed horror.
“I’m only an electrician,” he said. “I was dragged here by my friend. I don’t know anything, man. I mean, seriously. I only know I’m supposed to help set up cameras to broadcast women. It was my friend.”
“You should have chosen better friends,” I said. Then I pulled the trigger and shot him between the eyes.
If Cassie were waiting for me back at the MC, this night might have gone differently. My thirst for blood would be satiated by thoughts of her, but these fucks and their business practices were the whole reason my woman was with Palach right now. She wasn’t taken because of me. She was taken because she was young, beautiful, and happened to be in the wrong place when the Russians went looking for fresh local women. Cassie was a victim of circumstance. She was these assholes’ fall back plan for fucking up elsewhere and not meeting their quota.
Behind us, the guard whispered a prayer. He would live. Part of me considered shooting him too, just to not have any witnesses. I might have if it weren’t for the women on stage. If the guard was the only witness, he would have died tonight, only to clean up the mess. But I couldn’t kill the women, and if they were going to live, he might as well too. It wasn’t like he’d seen our faces or heard our names.
“Jesus,” Pipe said behind me. “You killed them all.”
“Sucks to be them,” Slitz said with a laugh. He was usually the one to do all the killing, but not today. This was personal.
“Your friends are dead,” I said.
“Not my friends,” Kiryl said with a shoulder shrug. He was a cocky piece of shit.
“I need one piece of information. You tell me what I need to know, and we’ll send you and your girls here back to your country alive,” BP said.
No fucking way is he leaving here alive. BP knows that too.
“You would kill me anyway,” Kiryl said. “Come on.”
“Where do you take the women you pick up in Anchorage?” BP asked.
Kiryl laughed. “Oh, please. I will not tell you that.”
“My woman was taken,” I told him. “All I want is her. She’s the only thing important to me.”
“We took your woman?” Kiryl asked. “Shit. I am sorry. I didn’t realize this was so personal for you. I understand.”
“Help us get her back,” BP said.
“Of course,” Kiryl said. “I will tell you. She is…” He stopped and looked over at Candy and Nipsy. He smiled. “She is rotting in hell already. That’s where whores go.”
“Really?” I asked. “Grab him.”
Pipe and Oosik dragged him toward the door. He didn’t fight back. He didn’t try to run. He was a coldhearted bastard and he clearly wasn’t afraid of dying. The trick with people like that is they think a bullet to the head is an easy way to go. Even torture, they can sometimes go outside their minds to a special place where they ignore pain. I knew what to do with people like that.
“Where are we going?” BP asked. “You plan on filling me in here?”
“Still got that fishing hole of yours?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said.
18
Rain
Kiryl stood naked with his feet in the snow. Shivering uncontrollably.
“I imagine the weather doesn’t bother you much being such a coldhearted piece of shit,” BP said. “Your country is so cold. You must be used to this.”
“What is this?” Kiryl asked.
“This is where you tell me where my woman is,” I said.
He chuckled. “Sure it is. You Americans are so weak. You think you can break a man like me?”
“I think we will figure out a way,” I said. “You see? This is a two-step process.”
Kiryl wasn’t worried at all.
Twenty feet away from us was the river with BP’s small fishing shack and his hole where he’d sit and contemplate while hardly ever catching any fish. Other than meeting his woman in their special cabin hideaway in Canada, this was BP’s favorite place. It was his local getaway to think. The name of the river? I wasn’t even sure. It was some backwoods location he’d found. Quiet. Frozen in the winter. It was perfect for tonight.
Before the river came something else entirely. This would be the fun part.
“Tie him to the tree,” I said.
Pipe and Oosik walked him over to a tree where they forced him onto his ass.
“Fuck, my ass!” Kiryl yelled.
Pipe burst into laughter, followed by Oosik, as Pipe bent down and pulled some tree branches out from under him.
“I think this one poked him in the asshole,” Pipe said, squishing up his nose as if it stunk. “Smells like shit.”
“Fuck you,” Kiryl spat.
For the first time, he seemed to be a little worried about what was going down. The dead bodies at the club didn’t do it, but that jab to his puckered hole woke him up to the harsh reality that he was about to die, and it wasn’t going to be easy.
While my two brothers held Kiryl down, Slitz wrapped a rope around him and tied him securely to the tree. He wasn’t going anywhere. On the way out to the spot, we’d made one stop. Nowhere crazy. Just to the grocery store where I bought a few pieces of cut up liver and some skirt steak. Nice and bloody. Now, I took great joy in spreading the contents of those little see-through butcher bags all over his legs and up where his cock should have been. I put it on his lower abdomen too.
Then we all walked away. We went back to the van and sat.
One thing about Alaska is there’s no shortage of wildlife. And during the winter, they’re all hungry. Especially the wolves. It only took a few minutes before they crept down the hill, through the trees, and settled on their prey. The tricky part was making sure they didn’t eat too much of him. If he couldn’t answer our questions, he was no use to me.
“It’s cold out here,” Kyril yelled. “I’ll freeze to death before anything comes for me. You know that, right? I’m going to freeze to death, and I won’t be able to answer your questions.”
I sat in the front passenger seat now, while BP sat next to me in the driver’s seat, looking over my shoulder to see out my window. Kyril was making all sorts of noise out there, and he couldn’t see the first wolf stalking him from behind. Through night vision goggles, I could see it clearly. Its mouth dripped saliva, its snout trembled with desire, and it was ready to take a chunk out of our Russian friend. No less than eight other wolves we
re coming around from the sides.
I was glad it was wolves. If it had been a bear, this might not have gone down as planned, and I really didn’t want to kill any of the animals. Tonight, they were an instrument. They were a tool to help me get what I needed.
“Cassie,” I said softly under my breath.
BP put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll get her back, brother, but…”
He didn’t need to say the rest. I knew where he was about to go with this. If we went through all this trouble to get her, I better make her someone special in my life. This was the kind of stuff reserved for ol’ ladies, or wives of MC members. Club whores would never get this special treatment. Girlfriends absolutely wouldn’t. Sure, we’d protect them, but all this hunting and killing?
Because Cassie is your fucking woman. Yours. Nobody else’s. Not ever.
“She’s mine,” I whispered. “I’ll prove it.”
“I hope so, Rain,” BP said. “I sure hope so. After this, she’ll need to know that.”
“She will.”
The lead wolf came around the corner as Kyril opened his mouth to yell something else at us.
“You will not get anything out of me—”
The wolf leapt at his thigh and tore into the meat we’d put there. Its teeth clearly went further than necessary because Kyril’s statement turned into a terrified and agonizing wail. He screamed like I’d taken a chainsaw to him.
Another wolf came at him, tore into his side, right at his ribcage.
I hopped out of the truck quickly and aimed a shotgun at the air. Two more wolves were on him. As long as his face, neck, and the majority of his stomach were protected, I could still use him. The demonic dogs tore into the blood we’d smeared on him, ate the meat, and drove their teeth down to his bone.
“Heeeeeelp me!” Kyril screamed. “Oh, God! Helllllllp!”
It was getting too close. The next set of wolves was coming and there wasn’t much more room on his body. They’d aim for his neck. If they got his jugular, he was dead.