by Leah Wilde
“It’s fine, really,” I assured him. The more he talked about it, the more I wanted to run back upstairs, to pretend none of this had happened. But at the same time, I was intrigued. He needed information, and he needed me to talk to someone who only spoke Russian in order to get it. He didn’t come across as a street thug or anything, not after talking to him, so my suspicions were starting to ease up a little bit.
When we got to the parking lot outside my building, I expected to see a motorcycle waiting on us. I’d never ridden a motorcycle, and I wasn’t too keen on starting today, so I was thrilled when he pulled out his keys and unlocked the doors of a black Suburban with blacked out windows. The lights flashed to let us know it was unlocked, and relief washed over me.
I started to think that maybe I had unfairly judged this man.
Chapter 2
Gage
Kings of Hell HQ was in one of the older buildings in downtown Chicago. We’d picked the building because of the old-timey look and feel it had. Years before we came along, the bottom floor had been converted into a mechanic shop with offices and apartments above it. We painted the bricks on the first floor black and painted our name in flames across the top, crossing over the line between where we’d painted and where the old red bricks had faded into a dingy, almost brown color.
Motorcycles lined both sides of the street, leaving the driveway into the garage open so we could pull our cars inside or take in work, which we occasionally did for friends and other connections.
Julia gasped when she realized where we were going as I pulled the Suburban into the bay of the garage to park it.
“You’re in the Kings of Hell?” she asked, appalled.
I couldn’t help but laugh at her reaction. “Honey, I’m not just in the Kings. I’m the MC’s president. I guess you could say I’m the King of Hell.” I killed the engine and opened the door to hop out.
“Take me back,” she said, not budging from her seat.
“I’m sorry?” I turned back to look at her.
She crossed her arms in the thin long-sleeved sweater she wore, looking straight ahead through the windshield. She looked like a child at that moment, not like the world-renowned foremost expert on Russian language and culture from the University of Chicago.
I shook my head and closed my door. I walked around to her side of the car and opened her door. “Don’t be silly, Dr. Danvers. You’ve already accepted the money I handed you, and you agreed to come with me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said without looking at me. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. You were not clear enough, apparently, when you were describing the opportunity.”
While she talked, I took another moment to let my eyes roam over her body, from the heels she wore to her bare legs reaching up and underneath her pencil skirt and, again, the thin sweater that hugged her arms. I looked up to her young face and her golden brown hair pulled up in a bun. It was a shame I’d hired her for this job. I would have enjoyed helping her unwind that mousy little body of hers and getting her to let her hair down.
“No,” I told her with a sigh, “I’m sorry.” I reached across her to unbuckle her seat belt so I could pull her out of the car.
She raised her hands and sat back. “What are you doing?”
My arm brushed her sweater as I reached across her, pressing against her stomach as I unbuckled her. I felt the unexpected curve of her breasts just above my arm, triggering an equally unexpected desire.
I pulled the seatbelt back from her, dismissing what I felt as just a trick of the way she was seated. Surely she wasn’t hiding curves like that under her conservative clothes.
“Get out of the car, Dr. Danvers,” I told her, stepping back from the car and holding my arm out to help her down.
“I’m not happy about this,” she said, taking my hand with one of hers, wrapping her small, thin fingers around mine as she stepped out of the Suburban.
“Just like I’m not happy about having to hire someone to translate for me,” I replied. As long as Dimitri had been stateside, and as long as he’d been on our radar, I did not expect him not to be able to speak English, but once we got him to HQ, we discovered he couldn’t speak a lick of it.
“I can only imagine what someone like you could want me to do here.” She crossed her arms again and looked around the garage.
We kept the two bays of the garage stocked with tools and spare parts in case we needed to do any mechanic work. Most of our stock was in the pit area beneath the bay, where we would go to get access to the underside of cars we worked on, instead of having hydraulic lifts to raise the cars. It was much safer and gave us a basement for other jobs as well.
“Where is everybody?” she asked. “This place is dead, and yet, there are bikes all along the street.”
As if in response, a thud came from upstairs. “Something tells me everyone is upstairs,” I answered her absently. I started to walk towards the office and the stairs leading to the pit and basement.
She stood where she was. “Gage, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this,” she said.
As I turned around, I saw her start to walk out of the garage. I hurried to her and put my arm around her waist to pull her back inside with me.
“Let go of me,” she fussed, kicking her feet and hitting my arm with her little balled up fists as I drug her back into the garage. I felt her body against mine as she struggled with me. Underneath her prim little sweater and her pencil skirt, she was all curves. I found myself wishing again that I hadn’t hired her to work on Dimitri for me. Instead, I wanted to see what I felt under her clothes.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I told her. “I hired you, I’ve paid you, and now you have a job to do.”
She twisted her body and pulled away from me. “You can have your money back,” she snapped. “I don’t want anything to do with violent criminals like you and your motorcycle gang.”
“I completely understand.” I held my hands up and took a step towards her. “You’re not here to do anything but talk to this guy for me. I need you to get some information out of him for me, and after that, you’re free to go,” I explained to her as I closed the distance between us. She had no idea I was about to grab her again and drag her into the basement with me.
“I don’t know if I want any part of what you’re doing,” she repeated. “I don’t want to know what you’re doing to this man, what you want to know, or why you’re questioning him in the first place.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her to me as I stepped around behind her. “I’m not going to take no for an answer, Dr. Danvers,” I told her. “You’re free to leave once you do what I’ve paid you to do. You’re not going to have to hurt anyone. You just have to ask a few questions, get some answers for me, and then everyone gets to go home.” I spoke in a low, calm voice into her ear. I could feel her body tensing up while I talked, turning me on even further.
She didn’t say anything as I walked her to the stairs leading down from the bay to the basement. I held onto her arms as we descended the stairs and walked through the open doorway into the pit area underneath the bay. The thick metal door to the enclosed basement stood across the room from us.
“Is that where you’re taking me?” she asked.
“Yes, it is,” I whispered in her ear. “That’s where your new friend, Dimitri, is. You’re going to go in there with me and follow my cues. You’re going to say what I tell you to say and ask what I tell you to ask. You’re not going to improvise in any way. Do you understand?”
She nodded, closing her eyes to fight back the tears I could see welling up.
“There’s no reason to get upset, Julia. I’ve been told that you are the nation’s foremost Russian expert. Isn’t that so?”
She nodded again. “Yes.”
I loosened my grip on her arms. “All you need to do is convince him to answer my questions so that we don’t have to rough him up. I want to get the information I need from him quickly and painlessly. Then we can
send you both away, and everyone can go about their lives like nothing happened here.”
I was trying to tell her what I thought she wanted to hear. I was going to have Dimitri roughed up either way, and he had been already. I just wanted to get the information first, before we had our fun and taught him a lesson. Dr. Julia Danvers didn’t need to know that.
“I’m just asking questions,” she repeated, as if she was just trying to make sure.
“Right, just asking questions,” I confirmed.
“What do you need to know?” she asked.
“No. Not until we get in there. I will let you know what to ask once we’re in the room with him.”
She pulled away from me gently, taking a step forward as I squared my shoulders to block the doorway back to the stairs.
Julia turned and looked at me with stony green eyes. “I’ll do it,” she said resolutely. “I’ll talk to him for you and try to get the information you need. As long as you agree that we’re not going in there to rough anyone up or torture him for information.”
“We’re just going in there to talk to him. I hired you to talk to him and translate anything he says for me,” I assured her.
She turned back around to face the steel door and concrete wall holding Dimitri in his solitary interrogation room. We’d poured the thick concrete ourselves when we bought the property for the Kings of Hell HQ. Originally, the pit was open from one end to the other, but we needed a room where we could take people for situations like these.
“Are you ready?” I asked her after she stood for a moment staring at the door. I was afraid I was going to lose her. “Take a moment to compose yourself, because when you enter that room, I want you to be one hundred percent professional for me. Do not let him see any distress.”
She took a shaky breath. “Got it.” Her body seemed to relax suddenly. “Let’s get this over with before I lose my nerve.”
She took a step towards the door, her back straight, shoulders squared, and head held high. Her heels echoed each time they hit the floor as she walked across the pit to the steel door of our basement.
I couldn’t help but watch her walk. She wasn’t what I had expected at all, not even after I’d seen her for the first time. I walked into her office expecting to see a frumpy college professor who lived most of her life in her head or inside a small apartment filled with books and cats. Most of the teachers I’d known in school had forgotten that they were women, but not Julia. As petite and mousy as she was, she knew how to take a powerful, commanding posture when she needed to.
As a woman travelling the world and talking to other historians, digging for her own information, and convincing people to give it to her, it seemed necessary for her to be able to put on a strong front when she needed to. I was definitely impressed by her ability to command my attention the way she did. The woman I saw crossing the pit in confident strides was not the same woman who’d been on the verge of tears when we first came downstairs.
“Are you coming?” she asked me, turning back at the door, waiting on me to cross the room behind her and join her for her session with Dimitri.
She seemed to have grown a few inches taller as she crossed the room as well. I chalked it up to her straight-backed posture and her boost of confidence. She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall as I walked over to her.
I’d always avoided women like Julia Danvers, the prim and proper, uptight types. They always seemed too snobby, as if they looked down their noses at everyone. But now that someone like that was right here in front of me, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Chapter 3
Julia
Somehow, Gage had managed to calm and steady my nerves, though I wasn’t sure if it was anything he’d done or just my fear of what would happen if I didn’t play along. Straightening my back and mustering up my resolve, I walked across the lower level of the garage to the steel door of the room where he said he was holding the man he needed me to talk to for him, Dimitri.
As I watched him walk over to me from the opposite end of the room, I realized I’d never met a man quite like Gage Noll before. Most of the men I’d known were academic types—quiet, mild-mannered, studious, and the antithesis of everything Gage seemed to be. Gage was commanding and authoritative. He took charge, and he didn’t take no for an answer once an order was barked.
The men I knew would have killed for his body, but only after calculating the risk of getting caught for the crime. Then, only if they felt the risk was worth the payoff would they have gone through with it. Needless to say, none of them ever seemed to really work on their bodies, not to the point that this man had.
When he walked over and opened the door into the concrete interrogation room in the basement, I was tempted to refuse to go in. I wanted him to grab me again. I couldn’t shake the desire to have his arms around my waist one more time and have him forcefully take charge of me. There was something so sexy about that. It made no sense to want him to manhandle me, but I did want him to, and I thought I saw the desire in his dark, mysterious eyes as he opened the door and let me walk into the room.
“Dimitri,” he said loudly as he closed the door and locked it behind us, “I’ve got Dr. Danvers from the university to help us talk.” He spoke slowly, and his voice boomed in the little room, as if that would help break through the language barrier. Unfortunately, that tactic never seemed to work as well as people thought it should.
“I don’t think that helps,” I told Gage as I looked around the room. The room was essentially a concrete cube with one dim light bulb hanging down from the ceiling over a small wooden table. Other than a small pool of light directly under the hanging bulb, the rest of the room was almost completely dark.
The man he called Dimitri sat in what looked like a metal chair. It was hard to see in the dim light, but it looked like he was tied to the chair. He was also a thick, muscular man a little smaller than Gage. His features were distinctly Russian. He wore his hair cropped closely, almost a buzz cut. He looked up at me as I took my seat across the table from him, and I saw blue eyes that were probably once beautiful, but now they looked tired, defeated.
“Dimitri,” I said, leaning across the table to make sure he was looking at me, “my name is Dr. Danvers. Gage has asked me to come in so you could have someone to talk to.” I spoke to him in Russian.
His eyes focused on me. He glanced quickly at Gage standing behind me, then jerked his head back to me. “You speak Russian?” he asked me.
I nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”
“What’s he saying?” Gage asked eagerly.
“Nothing yet. We’re just making our introductions,” I told him.
“Well, tell him he better talk or else I’m going to start breaking his fingers.” I decided to ignore the perverse pleasure Gage seemed to take in making his threat.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, refusing to repeat Gage’s threat of violence.
“I don’t want to talk with him in here,” Dimitri told me.
I cut my eyes to Gage, wondering if I could bring myself to ask him to leave us alone. He glared at us, at me in particular, from just beyond the pool of light surrounding the table. The darkness fought with the yellow glow of the light to conceal his features. The effect was a sinister play of light and shadow on his face. I didn’t feel I could ask him any favors while he looked like that. He didn’t look human anymore. He looked demonic, as if he really was a King of Hell sent to torture poor souls like Dimitri’s.
“He doesn’t know what we’re saying,” I assured Dimitri in Russian. “He asked me here because he can’t understand a word of Russian.”
“You’re talking too much,” Gage barked. “I need you to get him to talk.”
I turned to him. “I know I’m not making threats and being aggressive, but let me work at him my way. What do you want me to ask him?”
“Ask him where I can find Ivan.”
I didn’t ask who Ivan was. I figured there were things I didn�
�t need to know, and the less I knew, the better. I shifted my weight in the chair and leaned across the table. “He wants to know where he can find Ivan,” I told Dimitri.
He looked at me with his cold blue eyes.
“You know who he’s talking about, don’t you?”
“I’m not telling him anything,” Dimitri said, cutting his eyes to Gage.
I rubbed my brow and sighed. “He’s not talking,” I told Gage.
The behemoth stepped into the light and leaned over the table, bringing his face within inches of Dimitri’s. “You tell him that if he doesn’t start talking, we’re going to make his life a living fucking hell.” Though he looked Dimitri in the eye, he spoke to me.