“Stop panicking or I’ll have Nurse Ratched turn up the morphine drip,” she warns.
“I don’t panic.”
“I guess your voice feels better. The doctor said you were having trouble talking, but you seem to have plenty to say now.”
I didn’t even notice, but she’s right. My throat feels a lot better. How long have I been asleep?
“How far away are they?” I ask. “Because the Russians—”
“Stop.” She holds her hand up. “Last time your beloved checked in with me, which was like five minutes ago”—Jade rolls her eyes for dramatic effect—“she was about an hour from the station.”
“You talked to her?”
“Yes, she’s fine. She, Knox, and Juliette are on an express train bound for Thirtieth Street station. We didn’t send a car because the train is faster and there’re no planes flying out of bumblefuck-wherever-she-is Pennsylvania.”
“Call her right now.”
“No, you’re just going to make her cry all over again.”
“She was crying?” My stomach rolls from hearing that news.
“Her baby’s daddy basically flatlined on the operating table, so yeah, she was bawling.”
“I died?”
“Pretty much.”
“And you told her that shit?”
“She’s damn near your wife, so yes, I told her.”
Fuck me.
“And who’s handling—”
Jade holds her hand up to stop me from asking any more questions.
“You’re not running the show right now. You fucked around and got yourself shot, so now the rest of the grown-ups are in charge.”
I’m not in the mood for Jade’s snark. This is a serious situation.
“Listen, you little chicken nugget—”
“Uh, uh, uh.” She wags her finger at me. “I’m not the one who got tased and abducted from in front of his own neighborhood supermarket. I mean, how did you let that shit happen, anyway?” She laughs at me. “That’s some amateur shit.”
“Where’s Camden?” I ask, ignoring her dig. It’s enough that I’m going to be kicking myself in the ass for that mistake for the rest of my life. I don’t need to hear it from her. I got too comfortable. Too soft as Joseph would say. I will never make the same mistake again.
“He’s taking care of a few out-of-town guests.”
“They’re still alive?”
“Three breathing Russians are still on the menu,” she answers casually.
“Call him now, Jade. As long as they’re still breathing Elizabeth and Knox are in danger.” I grimace from a shooting pain in my stomach. “Fuck, did those quack doctors leave the slug inside me?”
“Hello?” Jade mockingly raps her knuckles on the bedside table. “Roman, are you there? You can’t even take a shit by yourself right now and you want in on the Russians? Not happening.”
“Help me get out of this bed.”
“Nope, I’ve been ordered to keep you in the hospital and quiet by any means necessary.”
“I pay you an ungodly sum of money to do whatever I tell you to do. Now get me my pants.”
“Now get me my pants,” she mimics me with a contorted look on her face.
“You’re such a bitch sometimes.”
“Actually, I’m a bitch all of the time but that’s why you hired me.”
“Did you at least take care of my phone and ID. They’ve got all my real shit.”
“We were able to salvage your wallet with your ID from the warehouse, but I’m afraid your phone took a bullet straight in the eye.”
All this talk of bullets is making my eye twitch.
“I need to talk to Cam.”
“Can’t do that,” she singsongs.
“Do you remember when I generously offered you this gig? I specifically told you that you’d work for all of us, not just your favorite.”
“Do you have a concussion too? Camden King is hardly my favorite!”
I flinch from a spasm near my broken ribs as I try to stop myself from laughing.
Jade is full of shit.
She has no clue what’s coming for her. Cam’s going to spin her head around ten times before she realizes what’s happening, and I hope I’m lucky enough to have a front-row seat when it happens. How can someone this smart be so clueless when it comes to men?
She continues to crack a wad of gum she’s been chewing on, trying to act like a hard-ass, but I know her. The little spitfire has probably been in this hospital since they wheeled me in here, giving the nurses and doctors hell all day and night worrying about my care.
“Oh, look at this.” Her phone flashes. “You’re in luck. It’s the king himself.”
Jade jumps from the chair, standing by my bed, and holds her cell to my head.
“I can hold it,” I argue, not wanting to be treated like an invalid.
She pulls the phone back.
“You want to talk to him or not?”
“When Elizabeth gets here, I’m going to sic her on you for treating me like this.”
“Ooh, I’m shaking in my boots.”
Jade returns the cell back to my face.
“King.” I greet him by one of my many nicknames for him.
“Rome. You good in there? Heard you might have seen the white light at the end of the tunnel last night.”
Damn, does everybody know I almost died?
“Other than I feel like I’ve been run over by a Mack truck, I’m good. I guess God wasn’t ready for me yet.”
“I guess not, homie. Did Jade tell you Elizabeth and Knox are safe?”
“They aren’t safe until I’ve got eyes on them.”
“Understood.”
“So are they Bratva?” I get straight to the point of this call.
“They’re from the Popov family in Maryland. The woman’s name is Irina and she is from the bloodline. Her son isn’t in the family business because he’s an idiot. They set him up out here with a few rentals to keep him out of the way, but Philly Bratva keeps an eye out to make sure he doesn’t get into any real trouble.”
“How did they know how to find me?”
“They frightened the girl. They threatened to kill her family in Utah and roughed her up a little, but she’s okay. She didn’t tell them much. But enough that they were able to put a tail on you. We put the girl on a plane back to Oregon, but to her credit, she tried to warn Elizabeth that the Russians were coming for you yesterday, but I guess she didn’t get the message.”
I don’t give a damn about some sort of missed warning. All I care about now is that Elizabeth and Knox are safe and stay safe. I will regret for the rest of my miserable life if something happens to them because of my missteps, especially because of how angry Elizabeth and I were with each other when she left. I said goodbye to my boy, but I should have never let her get on that train without telling her that I loved her. I will never do that shit again. I’ve learned my lesson.
“I promised that bitch a reckoning for shooting me and threatening my family. Just keep her on ice for me. I’m going to handle her personally when I get out of here.”
There is an awkward silence between us for a moment and the hair on the back of my arms rise.
“What aren’t you saying, King?” There haven’t been any lies between me and Camden since we were teenagers and he better not start now. “Spit it out.”
“I don’t have them yet.”
“What do you mean?” I look at Jade as I continue talking. “Jade said they’re alive.”
“Cutter went a little overboard with the bomb and because of the amount of smoke we couldn’t see that well. So they’re alive, but I don’t know where just yet.”
Jade lowers her eyes as if she can run from the fact that she didn’t tell me quite everything.
“So the three of you came in that warehouse like McGyver with homemade bombs and shit and didn’t nail one of them!” I exclaim.
“Stop yelling,” Jade chastises. “You’re going
to hurt yourself.”
“The mission was to get you out of there, Rome, so it wasn’t a total loss.”
“We need to finish this. She will not stop coming for what’s mine because I manhandled her precious little boy. I saw it in her eyes, Cam.”
“I know this is easy for me to say but don’t worry. I’ve got a lead on one of them, and where I find one, I will find the others. I always do. Plus, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll even include the old man on the search and you know how I feel about him.”
“Cam, don’t fuck this up. You owe me.”
“When have I ever fucked up a fix? And let’s not forget that it was my tracker that saved your life last night. If anything, you owe me one.”
“My hand is tired,” Jade deadpans. “Can you two wrap this up?”
“Well, hand over the phone then,” I tell her. “We’re not done talking.”
“Sorry, dude, but you’re done. My phone needs charging.”
She steps away from my bedside and says something I can’t discern to Camden. I’m about to curse her out something awful when she walks back over to my bed smirking.
“Your beloved will be here in fifteen minutes, but if you don’t behave I’ll tell them not to let her in the ICU.”
“I’ll have them kick your ass out instead.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Elizabeth is not your wife yet, so she has just about as much say in this place as I do. The difference between us is I’ve been here since you were rolled inside half-dead on a gurney, so I’d say the nurses who I bought a nice hoagie platter by the way are not going to throw me out—ever.”
“You’re fired.”
Jade laughs. “No one else could stomach working for you and you know it, so I’ll just chalk that up to the painkillers talking.”
Then we’re interrupted by a knock at the door.
20
CAMDEN KING
There is an unfinished basement underneath Club Lotus that is too humid and moldy for storage but great for interrogation. There are no windows and there is only one door which is bolted on one side.
I’ve successfully tracked down and have been hosting Roman’s Russian guests down here while working on their final arrangements. No one knows they’re down here besides me and my brothers because Jade probably wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret from Roman, and that crazy fucker would figure out a way to roll his half-dead body out of bed and put a bullet in each of their heads.
While that would be a satisfying solution to end this story, the Bratva is a bitch to deal with when you decide to murder someone in their family, so it’s probably best that we handle this another way.
With the help of my brothers, I’ve taken the prints of Irina’s son and planted them in the dead girl’s apartment from our fix in Chicago. I’ve also switched out Whitfield’s prints for the son’s in the Chicago PD’s evidence database, and made the son look like a passenger on a flight to Chicago a day before the murder.
With a little help from Joseph, we hope that the department will avoid an investigation into their “fingerprint mistake” as long as there are some prints in the system that are linked to the case. It was completely wiping all prints from the case that was the problem. Hopefully, I’ve fixed that with the plant.
Heads will roll in the department and someone will lose their job for arresting the wrong person, but the bottom line is that they must allow our client to return to Miami and we would have done our job and get paid by Kat.
“So you see, Irina, I’ve arranged it so that there is a very long digital trail linking your son to a young girl’s murder in Chicago. There will be no doubt that your son was there at the time and place of the killing, and he will go to prison for a very long time.”
“What do you want from me?” she asks, looking like she’s aged several years after hearing my revelation.
“This could have been a lot easier if you had pursued this whole matter with some civility. Do you just go around kidnapping people you don’t know all the time?”
“I didn’t know who Mr. Masterson was at the time.”
“But you know now?”
“I’m starting to understand, yes.”
“Then let me explain even further. You’ve made such a huge mistake that Ivan is not even coming for you. No family within two-hundred square miles of this place is going to help you.”
Ivan is the head of the largest Bratva family in Philadelphia. He and Joseph have a long-standing relationship that dates back at least twenty years. Ivan owes the old man a favor and has agreed to turn a blind eye to this matter since it’s personal and not Bratva business.
“You talked to Ivan?”
She swallows thickly and starts to look a tinge green. She’s worried because I know who Ivan is and seems to be truly starting to feel the weight of her miscalculation which gives me a feeling of satisfaction although I can’t probably say the same for Roman. I’m not the one who got shot twice and kicked in the ribs.
“Do you want to know what he said?”
“How do I know that you truly spoke to him?”
“He said you’d say that, so I’m supposed to remind you of Paris in 2005.”
Her face drops.
I do not understand what that date or place means to her, but it seems to satisfy her need for validation and she suddenly becomes more cooperative.
“What do you need me to do so that my son doesn’t go down for these bogus charges?”
“Your son will not go free.”
“What?”
“Your son terrified a young woman who means something to a friend of mine. He has to pay for that.”
“If he goes to jail, then why must I negotiate with you?”
“Well, first, you should negotiate for your own self-preservation and second, I could arrange it so that your son never leaves prison for the rest of his miserable life. It’s easier to do than you think. His appeals will get lost, his parole will get pushed back, and then next thing you know, nobody cares anymore and he’s forgotten.”
“What do you want, mudak?”
“First, I’d prefer it if you’d avoid calling me a Russian asshole or bitch or whatever the hell you just said.”
“You keep a woman like me in a disgusting basement then you’re a mudak.”
“I fed you a nice chicken dinner.”
“In a basement and it was cold.”
Whatever.
“Next, we want a piece of your business as payment for the pain and suffering you’ve inflicted on my partner. He will have to spend some time recuperating, which is time away from our business.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five percent.”
“I cannot give you twenty-five percent of Bratva business!”
“Twenty-five percent of your profits not Bratva. No one will ever know that you’re giving a quarter of your money to us unless you tell them.”
“Thieves.” She spits close to my feet.
“Partners.”
“I’m not giving a quarter of my business to you mutts.”
I ignore her tirade. She will do exactly as she’s told or she’ll find herself six feet under.
“Finally, you will put these two lowlifes out of their misery. They’re not important enough for me to have their blood on my hands, but they’ve got to go.”
Her two enforcers start speaking rapidly in their native tongue. Probably begging for their lives. One of them even puts his hands in a prayer formation, but the woman shakes her head.
“I’ll let you three say your goodbyes. The weapon is taped behind the pipe of that sink.”
She raises an eyebrow, probably surprised that I’m allowing her access to a firearm but there’s a method to my madness. I know what I’m doing. I return to my office upstairs where we watch the three of them from the camera monitors we had installed about a year ago.
“There’s no way she’s going to do it, Camden,” Stone says. “I don’t think the old woman is a
cold-blooded killer of her own people.”
“You better hope she doesn’t do it,” Cutter says. “Roman wanted to deal with them himself and I’ve got to agree that he has every right after what they did.”
“Roman almost died from that slug to his gut. He will not be on his feet for a while and we can’t keep them down here indefinitely,” I tell them.
“Did you ask Joseph about it?”
“I did.”
“Okkkkay then,” Cutter replies unconvinced of the soundness of this plan. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
While Irina’s two enforcers’ hands and feet are bound in front of them, we’ve allowed her to have some freedom around the basement. She searches for the weapon and says something to them in Russian once she locates it. They both frantically shake their heads no until she raises her voice at them.
My assumption is that they are begging for their lives, but that isn’t it the case. She hands the one on Roman’s shit list—Sergei—the weapon and sits on the bed. After smoothing her hair and placing her hands in her lap, she gives the directive.
“What the hell are they doing?” I wonder.
Sergei points and aims the gun at point-blank range to Irina’s head.
“Oh, fuck!” Cutter exclaims.
I’m pretty stunned myself. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go.
“Maybe that wasn’t a good idea,” Stone says to me. “Now their boss is dead and those two maniacs have a gun. How are we going to go back down there without getting our heads blown off?”
“Let’s just watch,” I assure my brothers, but I’m not truly sure of anything.
The two men have another heated conversation in Russian. They argue with each other over Irina’s dead body until the arguing abruptly stops. Sergei shoots the other man, whose name I could never find, in the head.
Now there’s just Sergei.
He sits on the floor and bends his head into the nose of the gun. When he pulls the trigger, nothing happens, and he slumps over in defeat.
“What just happened?” Cutter asks like he just watched a horror flick.
“I only put two in the chamber.”
“Purposely?”
“I knew that whoever remained alive was going to take the fall for killing the other two. If she had killed them both like I told her to it would have been Irina which was the ideal outcome. I’d made us a sweet deal for us to get a good chunk of her profits, and I thought she’d do anything to save her son. But plans change, so now we deal with who we’ve got left–Sergei.”
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