by Nicole Fox
The Boss gave me a weird look, and I just shrugged back at him. “Inside joke,” I muttered as the other guy went sprinting up the stairs to retrieve Benji.
We, though, scrambled down the opposite way as fast as my heels would carry me without snapping in two. And, the whole way, I repeated my silent little mantra: Act normal, Jace. Act normal, Jace.
# # #
Koen
I wasn't sure what to think about the whore beside me in the front seat, or the shit that was babbling out of her mouth. And she wouldn't stop fucking calling me “Boss.”
We sat there for a few minutes in the nondescript sedan we'd brought for the meeting, my hands wrapped in a death grip around the steering wheel as my eyes searched back and forth for signs of Fed and this new girl, Benji.
“Where we going after this?” she asked as she touched up her garish red lipstick in the mirror. I noticed her hand shaking, just the tiniest amount. She must have caught it, too, because she immediately snapped her lipstick back together and put it away in her purse.
“Where are we going?” I repeated back. “Bus station, maybe? You got somewhere you can hide out, get clear of town?”
She shook her head, pressed her lips together. “Nope, no place.”
There was something about the way she did it, too, that gave me a faint stirring in the front of my jeans. Sure, she was a sex worker, but I didn't really care about that. Long as she was clean, right? But, there was just a small part of her that I just couldn’t quite place my finger on. Something just purely sexual about her, like she had no concept of what it would be like to be uncomfortable with her sexuality, with her body.
She turned to me, smiled just the smallest amount. “You really gonna send your little investments away that fast, anyways?”
I blinked, shook my head as I laughed a little. “My . . . investments? What in the hell's that supposed to mean?”
“Means, you got your property back in one piece, Boss.”
My mouth dropped open in surprise, but I remained silent. This sweet little thing had just legitimately stunned me into silence, mainly because the words coming out of her mouth were so damned crazy. F&B may have done a lot of unsavory shit in our times but, unless I was missing something pretty big here, we'd never run girls before. That was a little outside our wheelhouse.
Before I could respond, though, I heard Fed herding along the other girl through the garage, towards us. “Come on,” Fed said, his voice exasperated. “Car's up here.”
Jace's friend was a real looker, too. She looked like she was a couple years older, maybe, but with all the makeup on both of them it was kind of hard to tell exact ages for sure. She moved with less sureness in each stride of her high-heeled leg, though, like she was less certain about what life was going to throw at her, and more wary of the various ways it could downright screw with us all.
“Swear to God, if Jace ain't here with y'all,” said the girl in a higher-pitched voice, “I don't know what I'll do.”
I laughed a little, despite the situation, at how ridiculous that statement had been. I mean, we were all in that “I don't know what I'll do” boat. At least she honest about it, right?
Soon enough, though, Fed had her stuffed in the backseat. “Got her,” he said, almost conversationally, as they both settled into the backseat.
I started the car up and pulled us out of the parking spot. The girls immediately began talking, but I just tuned them out as I ran through the drastic change of plans that had just been forced onto me and Fed.
Not only were we not able to find a better connection, now we had two real Pros dropped in our lap. And, maybe, just maybe, a murder the cops could involve us in. Great.
But, still, I knew we could overcome our problems. Sure, it was a setback, but just a minor one. After all, we had our regular leads in Volkov. So what if we had two girls on our hands? They were only wrinkles in the big scheme of things. Besides, the one who was riding shotgun with me had legs for days.
As we pulled out into the noise and traffic of a New Orleans night, with all its lights and humid heat, I turned slightly to Jace. “Alright,” I said. “Talk. What the fuck happened back there?”
“Yeah,” Benji asked from the back seat, her voice almost quavering, “what the hell happened back there? This guy pulled me away from a client.”
I watched as Jace tentatively licked her freshly-painted lips, as her eyes searched carefully around the car. “Okay,” she said after a moment, before getting up and half-turning in the seat so she can address all three of us. “I was in the room with a John, right? Then, Sven bursts in on us and starts trying to shake the guy down, okay? Sven's getting real mean with the guy, talking all sorts of crazy Russian shit to him, then my John pulls out a gun. Then, next thing you know, my John and Sven, they've shot each other, and I'm just standing there.” She turned to me as she finished, her eyes boring into the side of my head, like she was checking for my reaction to her story.
I'd been glancing her way while she spoke, trying to get a bead on her. Something about this whole thing didn't add up. I'd only heard one shot, but we'd just arrived on the scene. Clearly, we hadn't heard the whole thing, because we hadn't been there long enough. So, there was that.
I chewed on the inside of my mouth. All we had to go on was the word of his hooker we'd just met fifteen minutes before. But, despite my misgivings, there was something about her. Something about those cupid's bow lips, about those big brown eyes of hers, and the swell of her hips beneath that too- tight skirt.
It occurred to me then, as I followed the line of one long leg up to the hem of her skirt in the peripheral of my vision, that I didn't know anything about them. I shook my head, wiped a hand down my face.
“Alright,” I said, “first thing's first. I'm Koen, Fed's my buddy. Now, Benji, where can we take you?”
Before Benji could open her mouth, though, Jace was already interjecting. “We ain't got nowhere, like I told you,” she said. “We're yours now, Boss.”
I shook my head and Fed just guffawed. “Ours? Y'all girls ain't ours!”
“Well, Sven made it seem like you were!” Jace said. “He said you were the Boss, and that we were supposed to listen to you. That you were our new owners. So, now we're your problem. You want the police to get hold of us?”
“Hey, Jace,” Benji started to say, her voice worried, “I don't-”
“We can't go back to the apartment, Benji,” Jace said, cutting her friend off. “You wanna go back to Parish Jail again?”
Benji exhaled a frustrated breath through her nose. “No,” she said, quietly. “Guess not.”
“Exactly,” Jace said, her voice sounding oddly satisfied. She slid a hand down onto my lap before I realized what she was doing, and warmly patted my thigh. “So, the Boss is going to help us out.” She squeezed me through my jeans.
Her tiny hand with its long, painted nails on my thigh suddenly reminded me that it had been a while, at least a couple weeks, since I'd been with a woman. And, something about the way this little thing handled herself told me she'd be quite the ride once I got her motor going. “Alright,” I said before I'd had a chance to think about the words, “you can hole up at Hellfire for a while.”
“Koen,” Fed said, his voice wary, warning.
I glanced up and caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Just for the night, Fed,” I said. “Till we can figure out what the fuck to do with 'em.”
Conversation died down after that, but we were soon pulling up near the club anyways.
We piled out of the car after I turned the car off, with Fed coming around to join me as the two girls embraced tightly in the yellow pool of light under the nearby streetlight. “Koen,” Fed said, his voice quiet and reserved, “we got a major problem here, buddy.”
“Yeah?” I asked, even though I knew we did. But, I didn't want to admit it to him or myself as my eyes traveling up and down Jace's tight little body, still wrapped tightly with Benji's in a sisterly embrace.
“Dude, Koen, man, we don't own these girls, not now or ever. What the fuck we gonna do with 'em?”
Do with them? I could think of lots of things to with Jace, at least in the short term. But, in the long term?
I didn't have a fucking clue.
Chapter Three
Koen
Fed and I got the girls situated in a spare room upstairs. It wasn't the Ritz, or even the Hilton for that matter, but it at least gave them a place to take their heels off and have a moment of quiet. As I shut the door behind me, they began talking back and forth.
At least they weren't doing anything crazy, or making too much of a nuisance of themselves. That was good. Otherwise, this would be a hell of a lot more frustrating to handle.
“Koen,” Fed said as we headed down the hall and started getting the other guys' attention for a meeting, “this whole thing seems wrong, man. We ain't gonna start running girls, are we?”
“What?” I asked, surprised he even felt he had to ask. “Fuck no, man, we ain't gonna run girls. But, I gotta feeling that Jace chick ain't telling us everything. We gotta figure out what the hell she knows. Meanwhile, we figure out our next move.”
Fed nodded, seemingly relieved with my response. But, still, I could tell he had misgivings. “You need to be careful about that girl. Think she's got a thing for you, or something.”
“Or something,” I agreed as we stepped into the meeting room. “But, yeah, I know I need to be careful. But, damn if it ain't been a while. Maybe I could leverage that, though? Get in sweet with her.”
“Hey man,” Fed said, clapping me on the shoulder, “I get it. Been a while for me, too. But, you gotta pick the right head to think with, right?”
I laughed and shook my head. “I know, I know. But, man, what would it really hurt? We could get the info we need, and I could get my dick wet.” I shrugged. “What's the difference?”
Fed started to make his case, but the guys coming in shut him down. Good thing, too, because he probably would've made it well enough for me to reconsider.
“Alright, boys,” I said as the three other officers of the MC came strolling in. Ricky, Spike, and Happy all took a seat around the table. “We gotta problem.”
I laid out what happened at the hotel earlier in the night, down to the girls we'd been forced to bring back with us. “So, we ain't got that inside deal we wanted. We're gonna have to keep going like we have been if we wanna keep the money rolling in.”
“Shit, man,” Ricky said as he looked around the meeting room at all of us. “So, we got the Port Authority on our tails, and we still got those the Thunder Riders laying into us.”
The Port Authority was always going to be a problem, even if we'd gotten Sven on board with us. He was just going to mitigate some of that risk. Same deal with the Thunder Riders, even though our little turncoat would have given us better goods, and therefore better connections with other elements that could help us strengthen our position.
“More or less,” I admitted. “Back to square one. But, square one ain't exactly the worst place we can be, you know? We're still sitting pretty right where we are.”
The men scattered around the table, even Fed, grudgingly agreed. We'd been in a hell-of-a-lot worse position before I took over the MC, that was for damned sure.
“What about these hookers you picked up, man?” Happy asked. He was a skinny little guy, all sinew and gristle and bad prison tattoos, but he was tough and had a good head on his shoulders. If there was anyone I trusted to have my back in a dark alley, it was him. And Fed, of course, but that went without saying.
“Fed and I were talking,” I said as I looked around the table, my eyes falling on each man and boring a hole in their skulls. “I ain't running girls. No fucking way,” I said with finality.
A round of head nods.
“And if anyone in this room wants to get that idea in their head, we can have a conversation in the parking lot out back. Got it?”
A chorus of agreement went around the table. “Dirty shit,” Ricky said, speaking for them all. “Agreed.”
“These girls,” I continued, “saw something that we may or may not be related to. We heard their side of the story, but I don't know if it adds up. Fed doesn't think so, and I tend to agree. Now, that said, we gotta keep 'em around ‘til we at least figure out what the fuck happened in that room, and how much our asses are hanging in the wind ‘cause of it.”
“Got it,” Happy agreed. “Just wanted to make sure, man. Ain't none of us dreaming of getting hooked to that boat, Koen. That shit's just too slimy.”
“Good,” I said. “Glad we're all in agreement then. Y'all wanna do a vote on holding onto them, then?”
Everyone looked back and forth between each other, with murmurs of, “Sure, why the fuck not?” going around the table.
“Keep 'em, and make sure they stay off the streets?” I asked the table.
“Aye,” we all said, our voice having a weird, harmonious resonance in the small room. The single word had a kind of wonderful, golden finality to it.
“Good,” I said, nodding once.
“Good,” a brassy, sensuous voice said from the entryway. All eyes swiveled that way, including my own. Who should be standing there, but Jace. A few inches shorter for lack of heels, but still sexy as ever.
“Glad y'all made everything official with your little club,” she purred, one hand on a cocked-out hip. “’Cause you better know we're all stuck together now. Unless you got some sort of hooker catch-and-release program y'all run on the side, Benji and I really ain't got nowhere else to go.”
Fuck my life.
# # #
Jace
“Besides,” I said, taking a few tentative steps into the room, “Sven said I was supposed to be your girl from tonight on, Boss. Said I was supposed to be a surprise.”
I didn't have anything else to lose at this point, and I knew it. Aside from Benji, Tommy had been the one remaining bright spot in my life. But, Sven had went and fucked that up for me, hadn't he? Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my poor baby brother's face, with the blood running from his mouth. Dying, bleeding out, then dead. On a hotel bathroom floor.
I thought killing a man would tear me up more. I'd been wrong. Sven had bled out in the hallway like a stuck pig, and I'd barely flinched. I'd just numbly wiped the gun down, like they do in the movies, tossed it aside, and ran into the arms of the Boss.
Of course, the real question was, what was this sexy Koen guy really the boss of? It hadn't been me or Benji, that was for sure. They all seemed completely confused and put off by the two of us, and clearly we'd just dropped unexpectedly in their laps. Must have been that Sven had been running some kind of side deal with us girls, some shifty shit to bring in extra cash.
Whatever the case, Koen was still the dead Russian's boss. And, owing to that, he was responsible for enabling what had happened. I didn't care if Koen hadn't pulled the trigger himself, if it hadn't been for him, Tommy and Sven wouldn't have been in the same room together.
I'd fuck him. Hell, I even wanted to fuck him. I'd get him so settled in, so well-screwed, his defenses would be down. Then, when his guard was down, I'd put one between his eyes. After all, killing my first man had been easy. That probably meant killing my second would be even easier.
Besides, I'd felt his eyes on me all night long, felt the way they traveled up and down my curves when he thought I wasn't looking, or couldn't tell. I could feel the heat coming off him earlier in the car, when I put my hand nearly in his lap. He wanted me in his bed just as badly as I wanted him dead.
Koen, though, surprised me. He just sat back in his chair, laughing as he shook his head. “My girl? I don't need some hooker gifted to me. Especially not from some dead wannabe Russian gangster.”
My heart, at least what little I had left of one, sank. Did I just get rejected? Was that my only chance, gone out the window? But, then, I considered my other options. They had to keep me around, didn't they? They'd al
l said it, and all five of them had voted to keep me and Benji here. Until, of course, they got what they needed from us.
With my eyes locked on Koen's sexy, pale blue ones, I stalked into the room, rolling my hips with each step. Even though I was making bedroom eyes at the Boss, I could feel all his underlings shifting their gaze to my slinking body and what it was doing beneath my tight skirt. “Really?” I asked as I stopped next to one of the bikers I hadn't met yet, a short, wiry one with nasty-looking tattoos covering both arms in blackened sleeves. I felt his gaze as he traced my every curve and cranny.
“Yeah,” Koen said, his voice a little less certain than a moment earlier, a little more breathless sounding, “really.”
Let's see how he liked this, then. Nothing quite like having what's been given to you taken away, especially in front of your buddies. I put my arm around the shoulders of the skinny little guy next to me, lightly raked my nails across his rock-hard muscles. He was tiny, not much taller than me, but I could tell he could still throw me around the bed like it was nothing.