by Leah Wilde
“If you wish to call my bluff, Mr. Mayor, I’m sure my guys will be happy to prove you wrong,” I said.
I nodded to Chase and Juarez, and they closed in on the mayor and took turns slugging him once each right in his gut. He started to double over, but they grabbed him and held him back against his chair so that his wincing face stared at mine.
“As you see, we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty, not even with you,” I said, leaning across the desk. “Now, when and where?”
He looked at me and groaned from the pain in his stomach. “What does it matter to you?” he asked.
“We’re shutting Ivan down,” I said. “We’re going to take over his supply chain, and we’re going to take this city back. It belongs in the hands of people from here. He’s not invested in this place. It’s just another market to him. He doesn’t care beyond his clients.”
The mayor sat and thought for a minute. “So, you’re not planning to interrupt the flow; you just want to take it over?”
I yawned dramatically. “I’m growing bored with our conversation, Mr. Mayor. Just understand that you don’t need to know what my intentions are. You just need to know that if you don’t comply with our wishes, you’re going to be a dead man.”
I nodded at Chase and Juarez again, and they slugged him once again, planting their fists deep into his gut and letting him double over. I nodded again, letting them plant a few more punches into the crooked politician.
Finally, he held up a hand. “Alright, stop. I’ll tell you.”
My boys held him back in his chair.
“I’m meeting up with him in two days on a yacht on Lake Michigan,” he said desperately.
“Who else is supposed to be there?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. I swear. All I know is I’m showing up with my people, and we’re making a large purchase,” he answered.
Chase clocked him in the mouth.
I shared a look with Angelo. We had the information we needed. We knew where Ivan was going to be and had a rough idea of when. This was our chance to take Chicago back from these commie bastards.
“Thank you for supporting local businesses, Mr. Mayor. Boys, make sure he doesn’t tell anyone we were here,” I said as Angelo, Rick, and I turned to leave.
“Wait, what?” the mayor asked right before a few punches landed on him.
“I want you to remember that if you talk, we will be back, and you won’t walk away.” We turned and left him sitting in his chair while Chase and Juarez worked him over for me.
Chapter 22
Julia
While Gage and the leadership of the Kings of Hell MC were out talking to the mayor, I ran downstairs to see Dimitri again. I wasn’t sure what I expected to gain by going to see him, but I felt like visiting him was necessary. I felt trapped by Gage and the MC, and I knew Dimitri was literally in the same position I was in. Sure, I wasn’t tied to a chair, but I might as well have been. I had tried to leave once, only to be drawn back in, as much by my attraction to Gage as by anything he’d done to persuade me.
“I’m surprised to see you again,” he said when I entered the room. “I figured you would have been long gone by now. I gave you what you needed. Why are you back?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed to him. “I just felt like I needed to come down here.” I really couldn’t explain what had driven me to come back to see him. I felt responsible for him for some reason, like he was my prisoner as much as he was Gage’s or the MC’s. I’d spent so much time working with him that he had become my personal project by that point.
“You seem confused,” he said. “Have a seat.” He nodded at the chair in front of me. His voice was still rough sounding.
“How are you feeling?” I asked him as I took the chair in front of him.
He shook his head. “They beat the hell out of me to get me to talk to you,” he told me. “I can’t believe I gave in, but they were very persuasive with their fists. How did you get mixed up with these guys?”
“Gage offered to pay me a large sum of money to come down here and talk to you. I had no idea this was what I’d be doing,” I opened up to him. I needed someone to talk to, and I knew that if I had reached out to anyone in my life outside the Kings of Hell, it would have been nothing but questions about where I had been and what I had been up to. Dimitri was the best option I had right now.
“Easy money, huh?” He shook his head and smiled at my foolishness. “You should know better. There’s no such thing as easy money, Dr. Danvers.”
“Please, call me Julia.” I put a hand on his knee and recoiled immediately from my tender gesture.
He heaved a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry you had to witness all of this. This isn’t the place for someone like you. I’m going to assume you’re a very successful professional outside of here.” He narrowed his blue eyes as he talked.
“I wouldn’t say very successful. Moderately, maybe. But, yes, I’m a professor of Russian history and culture, but I thought you already knew that,” I told him with a smile.
“You might have told me,” he said thoughtfully. “It sounds familiar. Still, you definitely carry yourself more like a professional than one of their girlfriends. You don’t seem like the type to hang around thugs like Gage and his men.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re right. I’m definitely not.”
“Well, look, let’s get out of here,” he said nonchalantly.
“I don’t know, Dimitri. There are a lot of guys still here. What if they see us?”
“They won’t notice. And if they do, we’ll be far enough away that it won’t matter. Besides, it’ll be easy to get out without being seen. I saw how little they guard this place,” he persisted.
I thought about it. I really did pause for a moment to let it roll around in my head.
“It would be nice. I already tried to leave once. I think you remember that, but Gage came and pulled me back in,” I explained.
“No, he didn’t. Julia, I’ve already read you. You came back because you wanted to. You felt like you had some kind of responsibility to finish the job you started. And I know why you took this job in the first place,” he said.
My veins ran icy cold, and my stomach dropped. Did he know about my mother? Did he know the financial state I was in? How did he know about me? Did everyone out here on the street know about Dr. Julia Danvers?
“You took this job because you can’t resist the opportunity to work with someone from Russia. You can’t resist the way Mother Russia calls to you. I see it in your eyes when we talk. No matter what else you’re thinking, I can see that letting the Russian words roll over your tongue is like magic to you. It is like exploring a mystery or searching for long lost treasure. What did you lose in Russia?” he asked.
“I didn’t lose anything,” I answered. “I just fell in love with the sound of the language and the people I met through my mother. There’s such a rich history there. The Russia I saw when we visited was not the Russia I saw from home when we came back here. That’s why she draws me in so much. That’s why I can’t resist her. She is beautiful in a strange, misunderstood way.” I let my voice trail off. Why was I opening up to this man? Didn’t Gage tell me that Dimitri would rape and kill me if he had half the chance?
Yet it was Gage who had used sex to keep me here. He knew I wanted him, and he exploited my desire to make me work for him.
“Listen, Julia, I don’t care why you love my home. I am flattered that you do, for sure. But if you let me go, I will make sure you get out of here. I will help you escape with me. Then, you can return to your scholarly life and get away from these hellions.”
I stared into his eyes for a moment. He certainly looked genuine. The worst that would happen would be getting caught and ending up right back here with him, I figured.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I told him.
“Good. If you go out into the garage from here, you should be able to find a knife or something else that will cut these ro
pes. Then we can leave, and I’ll show you how easy it is to get by these drunks without being seen,” he said.
I opened the door and crept into the pit under the garage. There were a couple of workbenches on the adjacent wall, and sure enough, one of them had a large hunting knife sitting on it.
“A hunting knife? Really? What do you guys need a…” I started to ask, but I figured I already knew the answer to that question. Dimitri was probably supposed to end up on the receiving end of that knife, or one like it.
I grabbed it. Wrapping my fingers around the rubber grip, I felt a strange surge of power rush through me. It was as if the knife was asking me to use it for its intended purpose. I pushed that idea out of my head and laughed at myself. There was no way a knife could be telling me that. No, the real reason I felt that power in my hand was much more disturbing. It was coming from a meaning and purpose I had attached to the knife as soon as I touched it.
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to use it to hurt anyone. I rushed back into the interrogation room in the basement and started cutting the ropes holding Dimitri down while he kept talking, apparently still trying to seal the deal with me.
“You know, I bet Gage is talking to the mayor right now. I bet they’re roughing him up and trying to find out when and where the deal is going down. See, I already know this information, but I’m using someone else’s knowledge to get them out of here so I can escape. And I’m helping you in the meantime.”
“You don’t have to keep trying to convince me,” I told him while I cut the ropes from his arms on the bottom of the chair’s arms.
“I’m just explaining to you what will happen if you decide to stay. When Gage gets back, he’s going to be the Gage I know. He’s going to be focused on handling Ivan and breaking up that deal. Suddenly, the sex you think meant something won’t mean anything. He’ll put you down here with me. And you’ll probably have to see shit worse than what you’ve already seen.” He talked as if he were imparting the meaning of life.
I stood up and held the knife under his chin. “I have the power right now, Dimitri. If you keep running your mouth, Gage will have to figure out what he’s doing with your corpse when he gets back.”
He swallowed hard. “Okay, got it.”
He held his free hands up while I freed his legs and then cut the ropes wrapped around the back of his chair.
He groaned as he stood up. He stretched his arms and legs. Then, he twisted and stretched his back. He towered over me, taller than Gage and almost twice as wide. He had to have been close to seven feet tall.
No wonder it took two men to bring you in, I thought.
“Give me that,” he said, reaching for the knife in my hand. “You don’t need to be waving that thing around and sticking it in people’s faces. Let me carry it so that we’ll have some kind of protection in case anyone wants to play hero.”
I handed it to him reluctantly. His large, meaty fingers wrapped around the grip, and he pulled the knife gently from my hand. He held it up and looked it over, turning the blade so that the light reflected on it passed over his face.
Suddenly, he had an arm around me, and the knife was against my throat. I tried to struggle, but the blade pressed against my skin and felt like it was trying to dig in.
“Now who has the power, Julia?” he asked. “You’re going to make great bait for Gage. Just don’t struggle and you might actually make it to see him when he comes to your rescue.”
He pulled me to the door, and we walked through it into the pit. Then, we walked up the stairs sideways so that the blade stayed on my throat the whole way. I couldn’t believe he’d tricked me! Gage had been right about him. He was going to kill me.
I realized as we walked outside that they had both been right about each other. Neither one of them was to be trusted. Neither one of them was the good guy in this situation.
“Listen, you said if I helped you get out, you’d let me go once we got away from the clubhouse,” I pleaded, forgetting to phrase my words in Russian.
“You forget, I don’t speak English, Julia,” Dimitri reminded me. “You can beg all you want, say anything at all, and I won’t understand you. But I don’t care, because you can still understand me.”
I repeated myself in Russian, and he laughed.
“I am helping you get out of there.” We walked along the side of the building, directly underneath the second and third story windows, hugging the wall.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked him.
“With me. That’s all you need to know for right now, Julia. You are my prisoner now, and if your little boyfriend wants you back, he’s going to have to come get you and free you from the same tortures he visited upon me. And believe me, it’s going to be a lot more fun for me than it will be for you. I promise.”
Chapter 23
Gage
“He won’t be talking,” Chase assured us as he and Juarez climbed back into the Suburban.
“You can even take that literally if you’d like,” Juarez added.
“Did you two knuckleheads do something stupid?” Angelo asked, irritated by their enthusiasm.
He turned to me. “I told you these two needed to just stay muscle. They didn’t need any official titles or recognition by the MC.”
“Hey, bro, they wanted in,” I said, defending them. “They do a lot of good work. If it hadn’t been for these two knuckleheads, we wouldn’t have found out about this drug deal. It would have gone down in secret on the lake, and no one would have been the wiser.”
“That’s right. Who’s the knucklehead now?” Juarez joked.
“Yeah, I’m convinced, these guys are idiots,” Angelo added.
“Well, guys, we’ve got a lot of celebrating and planning to do,” I told the car.
“Hey, does that mean we get to finish Dimitri off?” Chase asked.
I heard Angelo groan in response.
I thought about it. It would have been incredibly satisfying to go ahead and handle Dimitri. He’d caused me so much trouble since we brought him in.
“No,” I finally answered. “No, we need to keep him as collateral for when we approach Ivan.” I decided it would be more satisfying to murder Ivan’s right hand man right in front of him. It would feel great to break Ivan and watch him crumble before dispatching him.
“Speaking of Ivan, how are we going to do this?” Angelo asked.
“Yeah, we’ve got to find the yacht. We’ll need to identify who all is aboard it. We’ll probably need to board it ourselves,” Ricky chimed in, starting the list of everything we needed to plan for.
“We’ve got to bring enough people to handle whatever they have waiting for us. You know Ivan isn’t going to try to pull something like this off without some sort of firepower,” Chase added.
“You’re all right, but that’s something to discuss when we get back to HQ. For now, I think we should just enjoy the fact that we now know when and where this is taking place. I think we need to have a few drinks. We should take it easy tonight and spend tomorrow getting ready,” I told everyone.
Angelo nodded. “Sounds fair to me, bro.”
“Yeah, sounds like a plan. Hell, that’s what I was going to do anyway,” Juarez added.
I couldn’t wait to get back and share the news with Julia that all of this would be over soon. I couldn’t really get a handle on her, though. I still couldn’t figure out why she made me feel the way she did.
All the way back to HQ, I had butterflies in my stomach. It was like being in grade school again. After I told her the good news, I was planning on asking her if there was any way we could see each other outside of the MC after everything was said and done. I wanted to get her as far away from Ivan and his drug deal as I could. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened to Lisa.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Angelo said, and I realized how quiet I had been, absorbed in my thoughts of Julia.
“Nothing, bro, just thinking about finally taking Ivan down. You know, thinki
ng about the work ahead,” I lied. I was thinking about those beautiful green eyes. I was imagining pulling her beautiful golden brown hair down and letting it spill over her delicate shoulders. I was thinking about taking her away from all of this and making her mine. I wanted more from her than just sex. She was good at it, but there was so much more to her than just her magnificent body.
“You’re lying,” Angelo said, “but I know what’s on your mind. Just be careful, kid. Remember what happened last time.” Angelo had a few years on me. He was an old-timer, a throwback to a rougher time, when clubs like the Kings of Hell ruled the streets and shut other criminal elements out. He always seemed to know what was best for the MC.