by Lauren Smith
“Wes thought we should call Dimitri Razin. He is well connected in the right places, and he will have some idea of where to start when we track down those bastards.”
Royce stroked his chin. Dimitri was a Russian art lover and no friend to the current political regime. Wes said Razin’s family had been a solid supporter of the Imperial family before they were killed in the early twentieth century. Razin was not a member of the mob and never would be. He had his own team of loyal men and women, and he somehow kept himself apart from the reaching fingers of the Mafia. In fact, they stayed well clear of him.
“Dimitri is a good call,” Royce agreed.
“I checked with him before we left the hotel. He’s bringing a weapons specialist with them, some man named Barinov.”
Royce grinned again. If things went south they were going to need some decent firepower, and Razin’s connections would be very helpful.
“Where’s this meeting going to be?” Royce sat up in his seat as the SUV slowed to a stop against the curb.
Hans pointed to the building just outside. “The Sandunovsky Baths.” It was a rather unremarkable structure, probably built in the late eighteen hundreds. Royce paid the driver as they left.
Inside the bathhouse, Royce was impressed by the ornate archway, heavily decorated with sculptures of nymphs on horseback. The nymphs were emerging from the sea and using Triton’s shell trumpets. At least some beautiful things hadn’t been destroyed when the Bolsheviks took over.
Hans whistled low in appreciation as he followed Royce inside. The interior was a flamboyant mix of baroque, Gothic, and Moorish styles. It looked like something out of a James Bond movie. All that was missing were a bunch of aging tattooed Russians with nothing but towels and smoking cigars.
Royce went to the reception desk and gave his name to the young woman monitoring the guest arrivals.
“Dr. Devereaux, your suite is this way.” She waved for them to come with her. The red-and-white diamond floors bore an Iberian influence, but the baroque columns presented a sumptuous counterpoint design. Typical of Dimitri to pick a place like this, he thought. He was one selective bastard.
The woman paused at the door, slipping a brass key from her pocket into the keyhole. Royce marveled at the ornamental mystique of a place like this for a clandestine meeting. The attendant opened the door but didn’t enter. She simply inclined her head with a smile.
“The changing rooms are just inside, and beyond that is your pool. The rest of your party is already waiting.”
Royce entered into the room, taking a moment to study the dark mahogany lockers and the supply of shoeboxes and hangers. Hans waited until the door closed behind them before he started stripping. Royce followed suit. With towels wrapped around their waists, they followed the signs pointing toward the private pool.
The room here was simple in terms of decoration compared to the rest of the bathhouse. The water was clear, and the blue tiles at the bottom contrasted with the white pillars that loomed around the pool like Athenian sentries. The light from the chandeliers hanging above the pool area was soft and muted, letting the water glow. It looked as though Royce and Hans had stepped into the past, to a place of old-world opulence.
Two men stood at the far end of the pool, fully dressed. Dimitri Razin wore an expensive suit, looking intimidating as fuck. A man in a leather jacket with dark-brown hair had to be Razin’s contact, Barinov. Royce was a little pissed that he and Hans were practically naked while the Russians weren’t, but perhaps that was by design. He saw Hans’s eyes dart between the shadows into the nooks and crannies behind the pillars.
“Devereaux,” Dimitri said with a chuckle, his gaze moving between Royce and Hans. “A little underdressed for an arms deal, aren’t we?”
Royce rolled his eyes. “You said to meet at the bathhouse. You didn’t warn us not to strip naked.” He waved at the towel.
Dimitri grinned. “When Russians ask you meet them at the bathhouse, never undress.”
“Duly noted,” Hans said, his voice dry with sarcasm. “Although I’m not totally naked. Got my Barretta.”
Royce glanced at the bodyguard, unable to see where the man kept the gun. “Aside from the fact that I don’t know how you got that through customs, I don’t want to know where you’re hiding it,” he whispered.
Hans chuckled. “You’re right. You don’t.”
“Let’s get straight to business then, shall we?” Dimitri said. “This is Rurik Barinov, a friend of mine. He has a decent grasp on mob activities in the city. More importantly, he’s brought you just the right amount of firepower to comfortably protect yourselves.”
Rurik grinned, and Royce noticed a thin scar on his face that stretched from his forehead down to his cheek turned a pale white. He bent to retrieve two black briefcases and handed them over to Hans.
“This should take care of your little smuggler problem,” Rurik said with a dark chuckle.
“Much obliged,” the bodyguard replied.
Royce turned back to Dimitri. “So what’s the word on Vadym? He’s based in Moscow, but he sent his cronies after me all the way on Long Island. That’s an awful lot of trouble for one guy.”
Dimitri crossed his arms. “From what I know of him, he’s looking for new lucrative money streams. Fossil smuggling and raiding archaeological sites is his latest hobby for cash. He’s been trying to get fossils out of Mongolia, and he needs a paleontologist to authenticate them as Russian fossils instead of Mongolian.”
“But he can’t use a Russian paleontologist,” Rurik added. “It would only raise suspicions later on.”
Dimitri nodded. “Once he gets them cleared, he could sell them to American and European museums or private buyers for a vast amount of money.”
“Fuck, it’s simple, but it makes sense,” said Royce. “Get someone like me to verify the country of origin on fossils, and it’s hard to challenge later unless the original country knows about the thefts and can prove it.” He suddenly felt bone-weary. This was the kind of shit he hated dealing with: people who used the unique and rare bits of Earth’s history to pad their own pockets. It wasn’t just fossils, either. Ancient Russian burial mounds had been bulldozed to get at the treasures inside, not only robbing the world of those items, but of any chance of understanding the history surrounding them. Usually the authorities were three steps behind them at every turn. There was a war going on in the shadows, one that few even knew existed.
“So the bastard picked Royce,” Hans mused. “Because of his high profile, no doubt.”
Dimitri nodded. “It seems so. I heard he’s watching for you, and he knows you’re in Moscow. You threw yourself into the belly of the beast, my friend.”
Rurik chuckled as though his comment was amusing and not damning.
Royce knew it would be impossible to protect the Mongolian fossils. The best he could hope for would be for the man to look elsewhere for his paleontologist. “So what can I do to stop this guy and get him to leave me alone?”
Dimitri and Rurik exchanged a long glance before Dimitri spoke grimly.
“He knows you know about him and his plan. He won’t let go, and he won’t let you expose him.” Dimitri’s tone was soft and deadly. “There’s only one way to put an end to this.”
“You mean put an end to him,” Royce said. He wasn’t a killer—he didn’t just take lives. He glanced at Hans. The bodyguard had killed men before to protect Royce’s best friends, Emery and Fenn, but that had been in the heat of battle with bullets flying.
But you almost killed someone, the voice inside reminded him. You stood over Monte and almost shot him to protect Kenzie. Would this be so different?
“I can get you in the club he frequents and get you close. Then you can take him out,” Dimitri said.
Royce shook his head, balking at the idea. “I can’t shoot a man in the club.” He stared at the ceiling and the mosaic pattern.
“I’ve already thought of that.” Dimitri held out a small vial of a d
ark crushed substance. Royce took the vial, wondering what was inside.
“It’s ricin. Get it in his drink and he’s done.” Dimitri’s deathly calm voice chilled Royce to the bone.
“Ricin is what killed Georgi Markov, that Bulgarian dissident writer,” Hans cut in in a soft voice. “That’s dangerous stuff.”
Royce almost handed the vial back to Dimitri.
“It is,” Dimitri agreed. “But Vadym is a dangerous man. He doesn’t just deal in fossils. He deals in people.”
Royce glanced at Rurik. The man was flexing his hands and curled them into fists, a growl barely audible. Dimitri’s words sank in, and Royce felt his stomach heave. His blood began to boil.
“You mean human trafficking.”
Dimitri slipped his hands into his pockets. “Yes. He’s one of the biggest traders in the flesh markets.”
If there was one thing in the world that could change Royce’s mind about killing a man in cold blood, it was sex trafficking. The monsters who did that to women, who stole their freedom, their bodies, their lives—it was a fate worse than death. It was hell. Royce stared down at the vial of ricin in his hands, and made his decision.
“Then he’s a dead man,” Royce said. He wasn’t going to let someone like Vadym continue breathing if he had a say in the matter. It wouldn’t stop human trafficking in general, but he was going to stop this bastard if he could.
Hans looked to Dimitri. “Guess that’s that. Where can we find him? You mentioned the club he gets into?”
“It’s called the Black Diamond Bar, but it’s not a bar.” Dimitri flashed a rueful smile. “It’s a BDSM club.”
“You ever go there?” Royce asked him. “We need someone who’s familiar with the territory.”
Dimitri stroked his chin. “A few times, but they tend to prefer sadists, and that’s never been my thing.”
“How can I get in?”
Dimitri reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet. He handed Royce a black card with a silver diamond symbol.
“That will get you in, but you’ll need a sub. They don’t let unattached Doms come to play, not unless you’re shopping for a pet who isn’t legal. The club gets used as an auction house for traffickers. When I found that out, I looked for membership elsewhere.”
Royce tapped the black card against his palm. It looked like a fancy hotel card key. “You still have an active membership?”
“Yes. I kept it to help with an Interpol raid once. They didn’t catch everyone, but it did slow the trafficking for a short time. I felt it might come in handy again someday.”
Royce glanced at Hans. “Tomorrow night I’ll go with Kenzie.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” said Hans.
Dimitri’s eyes sharpened. “Who’s Kenzie?”
“The assistant I mentioned earlier.” Royce met the Russian’s eyes. “I brought her to Moscow with me.”
“The assistant Vadym almost killed?” said Dimitri. “You brought her to Moscow, and now you plan to take her to a BDSM club to hunt and kill Vadym? My, Devereaux, you just throw all the rules out the window, don’t you?” The Russians laughed, but Royce didn’t. Nothing was funny about him bringing Kenzie to the club, but he wasn’t going to take anyone else with him.
“You have someone Hans could take, right?” Royce asked Dimitri.
Hans looked at his hands. “That bondage stuff isn’t my thing.”
“But you can’t get in otherwise,” Royce reminded him. “It’s just an act.”
“Fine. But I’m not spanking or whipping anyone.”
“I will hire someone for Mr. Brummer. One who will understand her purpose there,” Dimitri assured Hans. “We will see you at the Black Diamond Bar tomorrow. It’s south of the center of the city. Ask a driver to take you to the Soho Rooms. It’s a tourist spot where the runway models and the Mafia meet for a night of fun.”
“Thanks.” Royce shook hands with Dimitri and Rurik before he and Hans picked up the weapons and headed back to the changing room.
“I kinda hoped we’d get to use the bathing pools,” Royce muttered.
Hans laughed. “You really have been watching too many James Bond movies.”
“You stripped naked before I did,” Royce reminded him.
“Touché.”
“We have to get back to Kenzie. There was a mischievous twinkle in her eye that I don’t quite trust.” Royce reached into his locker and began pulling out his clothes and dressing.
“Mischievous twinkle? She’s not Tinkerbell.” Hans was grinning as he slid his jeans on.
“No, she’s not,” he growled. “But I’m afraid she’s not taking this as seriously as she should. She might be treating this like a game to avoid the trauma of the past couple days.”
“Yeah, well, taking her to this club isn’t going to help that delusion. It’s all about roleplay there.”
He wished Hans hadn’t reminded him of that. He didn’t want to think about all the things he wanted to do to her, bad things, dirty things, things he knew by her reaction to the Gilded Cuff that she would love.
Hans must have seen the look in his eyes because of the way he grunted. “So it looks like I’ll be babysitting both of you tomorrow, because one of you or the other is going to lose your mind.”
“I don’t lose my mind,” Royce said as he jerked his leather jacket on.
“Yeah, you do, kid.” Hans carried the weapon cases to Royce, who was putting on his boots.
Royce looked up at Hans’s reflection in the mirror. “I haven’t been a kid in a long time.” Not since he was eight, when Emery and Fenn had been kidnapped. Everything had changed after that. Everything.
No matter how carefully he’d tried to put his world back together, he just couldn’t make the pieces fit. Masked gunmen kidnapping your best friends had a way of destroying a boy’s innocence. The intangible bogeymen of his boyhood nightmares suddenly became real, and they wore black ski masks.
There was a part of him that would always be that child who spent one evening camping in the woods, sharing ghost stories with his friends, and the next night sitting on his father’s lap in his home, shaking as a policeman asked questions about his missing friends.
Hans’s voice softened. “You went through hell, I know. Trust me, I know. I remember all of it, every damn minute from the day the Lockwoods hired me to protect Emery. I wanted to protect all of you. Just like I am now.”
Royce’s throat tightened and he straightened his leather jacket, tugging it down slightly. Hans was in his fifties, but he’d been close to Kenzie’s age when he started protecting Emery. Half of his life had been spent watching one rich kid with a target on his back.
“You’re a good man, you know?” Royce could barely get the words out, even though he meant it.
Hans nodded, saying nothing. “Let’s get you back to your brown-eyed girl, eh?”
“My brown-eyed girl, huh? I like that.” Kenzie, his sexy, tempting, and forbidden brown-eyed girl.
When they got back to the hotel, they’d been gone far longer than he’d expected, and he assumed Kenzie would have ordered room service and fallen asleep. But as he opened the door, he didn’t see Kenzie. His brown-eyed girl was nowhere to be found. He opened the connecting door to Hans’s room.
“Kenzie there?” He peered around the second suite of rooms. Hans was checking the guns in the cases, and he shook his head.
“She’s gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe she went to the pool?”
“Alone?” Royce almost growled the word. If she’d gone against his orders, orders he’d given to protect her, she was going to be punished. That kind of behavior in this situation could get her killed or kidnapped.
He stormed back into his room. “I’m going to redden that ass of hers.”
“I think you might be overreacting,” said Hans.
“She disobeyed me. If she does that now, what about later at the club? I agreed to bring her along, but I’ll be damned if
I let her put both our lives at risk.”
“Don’t forget to take your swim trunks!” Hans’s laughter followed him as he grabbed a swimsuit from his bag and stepped into the large bathroom to change.
9
One, two, three, four…
Kenzie fell into the cathartic pace of counting her strokes as she did laps in the massive underground pool of the Lotte Hotel. The square blue tiles along the pool bottom seemed to glow like neon from the underwater pool lights. She felt weightless, as if she were swimming in a distant galaxy of glowing stars rather than a pool in Moscow.
She swam until her arms burned. With each stroke she tried to banish the memories of the horrors she’d faced.
Monte gripping her throat, squeezing…wood splintering above her. Glass and splinters raining down on her…gunshots piercing the night, louder than she’d ever imagined they could be…bullets embedded in the wall where her head had been…broken glass glittering on the expensive stone floors like hundreds of diamonds.
She’d never been close to death. She’d never seen the ugliness of true violence or crime. She had lived a sheltered life full of love, happiness, and her textbooks. Dinosaur bones over human bones. She could never have imagined the lingering stain the violence she’d experienced had made in her mind. Dark and yet bright, flashing there so as never to be forgotten, always dragging harder and faster until she thought she’d burst right through her own skin, powerless to erase the images from her brain.
So Kenzie swam faster. Long, furious strokes up and down the heated pool until her limbs felt like lead and her whole body was exhausted. Maybe, if she pushed herself hard enough, she’d be able to sleep tonight. Find peace in the dreamless absence from consciousness.
She gripped the edge of the pool, catching her breath, her cheeks flushed and her body buzzing with warmth. The room was silent except for her heavy breathing, and yet she felt something in the air. She looked up. She saw bare feet, inches from her hands. She tore her goggles off only to see Royce’s thunderous expression staring down at her.
“Little Mac, I told you to stay in the room.”