Blaze: Kings of Hell MC (4 page)

When I reached the pit, I found Julia waiting patiently by the door to the interrogation room. She leaned against the wall with her hands crossed beneath the swell of her breasts. I walked up to her, deciding I wanted to keep her around a little longer. I decided not to give her another chance to talk to Dimitri right away, on the off-chance that he might have actually given her some information, bringing our work arrangement to an end. I couldn’t risk letting her walk out of here before I had the chance to work on her myself.

“I don’t think you’re ready to talk to him again,” I told her, watching the disappointment weigh down her features. It was obvious she’d been thinking about the possibility of getting information from him and getting out of here. And it felt good to see that hope stolen from her.

“But I thought that was what you wanted,” she argued.

“Not yet. Get back upstairs. I want to talk to you before you talk to him again. I want to know some specific information.” I figured if I let her in on what she was trying to get out of him, I would have a better chance of getting through to her.

She tilted her head. “I don’t get you. One minute you’re telling me to get down here to talk to him, and the next you’re telling me it’s not time, that you need to basically brief me on what you want me to ask.”

“Just go upstairs and wait for me,” I ordered her in my best patient voice.

“Yes, sir,” Julia snapped, pushing herself off the wall and walking toward the stairs.

“Oh, and, Julia,” I called after her.

“What, Gage?” She turned and spit the words out at me. My God, she was mesmerizing.

“Don’t go anywhere. If you leave, I know how to find you, and I will find you,” I threatened her. “And when I find you, you’ll regret it.”

She didn’t say anything else. She simply turned and finished crossing the pit. I watched her take the stairs back up to the garage before turning around fishing out my keys.

When I entered the interrogation room, Dimitri looked at me with questions in his eyes. He was obviously wondering where his little friend, the professor, had gone. I smiled at him. It was a humorless smile. There wasn’t anything kind or funny about my visit. The smile on my face came from malice. I wanted nothing more than to go ahead and hurt this man.

I knew the only thing causing him pain would accomplish was my own sick pleasure. I knew I wouldn’t get any information out of him. He didn’t speak a lick of English. But maybe pain would be a good teacher.

“You thought you were going to get to talk to your little friend again, didn’t you?” I taunted him.

He just stared at me, deaf to every word I said. He said something to me in Russian, but, of course, I understood him about as well as he understood me. And I had the upper hand here, not him. His eyes tracked me closely as I walked over to the chair I’d knocked over earlier and picked it back up. It didn’t take a Russian scholar to know what he was thinking behind those expressive eyes.

“You’re wondering why I came back in here alone, aren’t you?”

He just stared and blinked.

I walked around to his side of the table and wrapped a hand around one of his wrists, pulling out my pocket knife and holding it where he could see it. “Well, I’m here to get more information from you, of course. You know what I need to know, but if you continue to refuse to talk, I’m going to have to hurt you. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to have to cut off your fingers.”

I held the small, sharp blade over his knuckles.

“Where is Ivan?” I asked slowly and loudly, speaking as clearly as I could.

Dimitri just looked at my blade over his fingers and moved frantically in the chair, as if he were trying to scoot back and away from me. He panted something over and over, begging me not to do it. In Russian, of course, but I could still understand the sentiment in his tone.

I shook my head and laughed in his face. “I can’t understand you, you sorry sack of shit. You’re going to have to try harder.”

I pressed the blade against the middle finger on his right hand and slowly drew it across his skin, slicing open the knuckle. Dimitri strained against the straps and ropes holding him in the chair and groaned against the pain, letting out a string of expletives, all in Russian.

I knew it was pointless to try to talk to him or get anything out of him. I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand what he was telling me, no matter what it was. But it felt good to see him writhe in pain, especially since he was just as unable to express himself to me as I was to understand it.

“You know, Dimitri, I’m starting to like our little arrangement,” I told him. “You can’t understand me. I can’t understand you. You can say whatever you want, and it doesn’t make a difference, and I can just treat you the way you deserve to be treated without feeling bad. For all I know, you could literally be begging me to do it again.”

But no matter what I did, I wasn’t really getting anywhere with him, and that was frustrating. He had the info I needed, but Julia was my only hope of getting any of it out of him.

Dimitri worked for Ivan, the most powerful and ruthless mob boss in the city. We’d been gunning for each other since day one. Ivan had the whole Russian mob thing going for him. He had connections back home supplying him with funds and muscle whenever he needed it. There were even rumors that he was involved in human trafficking, bringing Russian women over with the promise of a better life only to sell them off to American men like pieces of property.

Dimitri was his right hand man. If there was anything to know about Ivan, Dimitri knew it, but the language barrier made him invaluable. He was like a walking safe. The information he protected was only accessible for a select few. The rest of us who didn’t speak Russian were out of luck.

Dimitri had been sent by Ivan to assassinate me. One of my brothers had intercepted the information on the street and alerted me to the threat posed by Dimitri. When he made his attempt on my life, we were waiting for him.

“I haven’t forgotten how you tried to kill me,” I taunted him, leaning down so that I spoke directly into his ear. Though he couldn’t understand what I was saying, I hoped my voice was still unnerving.

We’d gone out for a ride to draw him out and force his hand. What he hadn’t realized, of course, was that when he’d set up shop in one of the old abandoned buildings nearby, he’d been spotted by a couple of my guys. By the time we hit the road, we had people in place to take him down and bring him in.

Juarez and Chase barged in on him as he was aiming his sniper rifle at me. They’d claimed he hadn’t put up a fight, but the bruises he came in with told a different story. The boys had roughed him up a little before bringing him to me, and I couldn’t blame them for that. He’d earned it.

              We had expected some sort of retaliation from Ivan. We’d just undercut him on a drug deal, effectively stealing one of his long-term clients, a local bigshot dealer we’d been trying to score a deal with for the last couple of years. He’d dealt exclusively with Ivan for as long as he’d been on the street, but we knew we had a better deal for him, so we made it happen. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset with us. After all, it was just business. Just like killing Dimitri after getting what we needed out of him was going to be business.

It was satisfying to have Ivan’s top man and number one assassin tied down to a chair in the MC’s basement, even if I couldn’t understand a single word he said. I got endless hours of enjoyment out of going downstairs and taunting him with things he couldn’t understand either, as ridiculous as I knew it was.

I leaned back down to his ear. “If you don’t start talking, I’m going to have to kill you,” I said calmly, giving myself a little chuckle.

I looked at the big strong Russian tied to his chair, helpless, clueless, completely at my mercy. I patted him on his massive shoulder and laughed.

“I guess I’ll send your friend back down here,” I told him. “I might also know a couple of guys who’ll enjoy coming down and getting to play with you a little bit. I might send them down after Julia comes back.”

He tilted his head back to scowl at me, as if to remind me that he couldn’t understand me.

I laughed and patted his shoulder again before walking out of the room. Now that I had someone who could actually talk to him, it wasn’t as fun to mess with him. I realized I was wasting time that Julia could have been using to try to break him down.

Oh well. He still deserved it for thinking he could get one over on us. I glanced at him one last time before closing the door and locking it behind me.

I wondered how a conversation between us would have gone if we had been able to understand each other. It certainly wouldn’t have been friendly. I knew that much for sure.

I shut the door and locked it, turning away to walk upstairs and get Julia. It was her turn to talk to Dimitri and see if she couldn’t get him to come around.

Besides, I had another job to do. I had to figure out how to use this situation with Dimitri to my advantage with Julia. I had to figure out how I was going to seduce her. She wasn’t like any other woman I’d been with before. Julia seemed more sophisticated than my usual taste in women.

On my way upstairs to get her, I decided it was time to sit her down and talk to her about what I needed and why I needed it. I didn’t want to be too open and run her off, but I wanted her to have at least a little understanding of why she was asking what she was asking when she went back in there alone. I figured maybe that would give her a better opportunity to break through his wall.

Plus, letting her in on what we were doing here with Dimitri would help me break down her walls as well. She seemed to appreciate being in the loop, and whenever we talked, I could sense that she wanted more information out of me than just the basic, “say this,” or “say that,” that I was giving her so far.

When I walked into the clubhouse, I spotted her sitting at our table with another glass of wine. My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t explain what she was doing to me, but when I looked at her, I felt a strange, deep desire for her. I had to figure out what not to tell her before I made it to the table.

Julia

“I’m ready to talk,” Gage said as he joined me at the table in the clubhouse bar.

“To talk? What about?” I asked him.

“I think it’s only fair that I explain a little bit about what’s going on before you go back down there to talk to Dimitri.” He didn’t grab anything to drink. He’d just walked straight over to the table and sat down.

“Okay, what’s going on?” I asked him, taking another sip of wine.

“How many of those have you had?” he asked, suddenly sounding concerned.

“This is only my second glass,” I assured him. “I had the one with you, and I started this one after you were downstairs a while. Besides, what does it matter?”

“I don’t want you going down there trashed and trying to talk to him. I need you coherent, so if you get something, you can bring it back to me.” He placed a hand over the top of my glass to keep me from drinking any more. With his other hand, he grabbed the stem of the wine glass and slid it away from me.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I cried. I wasn’t really upset, just more shocked that he was so bold and commanding. I was even more shocked at how it made me feel. I wanted to be offended that he was trying to control me, but I wasn’t. I was turned on by his dominance. I’d never known another man with such a take-charge attitude.

“I want to make sure you’re listening to me. I need you to take this seriously, Julia,” he said, his dark eyes penetrating through my nerves and anxiety.

“Okay, I got it,” I told him. I took a deep breath, realizing that in spite of my reservations, I had allowed myself to get too comfortable being here. The pace seemed so much more relaxed here than what I was used to. It was easy to let it steal my sense of urgency.

“Alright, you already know I need to know where this Ivan person is. I need to know what his next move is and who all is involved,” he explained, diving headfirst into the world surrounding his relationship to Dimitri and dragging me with him.

“Hold on,” I said. I held my hand up to stop him. “Let’s start over. Let me ask the questions. Don’t just vomit random information at me.”

“Okay,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He seemed antsy and ready to divulge any information he had for me instead of letting me pull it from him.

“First, who is Dimitri? What is his background? And if you tell me he’s Russian, I’m going to slap you.”

Gage laughed, visibly relaxing a little in his seat. “Dimitri works for a man named Ivan. Yes, they are both Russian. Ivan is a local mob boss; he’s pretty big news. He has ties to the Russian mob, and we think that’s where Dimitri came from. He’s Ivan’s right hand man, and he’s what some guys would call an enforcer. I think he likes to think of himself as an assassin, but that didn’t work out too well.”

“Wait, he tried to kill you?” I asked, my jaw practically hitting the table.

“Yep. That’s how he wound up in our basement,” Gage explained to me.

“Why the hell was he trying to
kill
you, Gage?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And to think, I was working for this guy. I was getting mixed up in his world of mob bosses and hitmen. I had told myself that I didn’t need to know this much, but I was eating up everything he could tell me.

“We’ve been working to shut own Ivan’s drug operation for a while now,” Gage explained, “and not too long ago, we broke up a pretty big deal between him and a long-time client. So, of course, it just makes sense to send someone to handle that situation,” he explained.

“I see.” I did see. I saw more than I wanted to. He hadn’t said anything but I could tell that he was telling me his guys had taken over part of Ivan’s drug operation. That client they’d shut him out with had become their client, surely.

“So, why do you want to know where Ivan is?” I asked him. “Revenge for sending Dimitri after you?”

“There’s some of that, certainly,” Gage admitted. “But really, we just want to take him down. We’ve been working on taking him out for a long time now, and now that we’ve got one of his men—his top man—we’re finally in the right position to do that.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you just pulled me right in the middle of some sort of turf war,” I stated, summing up the information he’d just given me. “Ivan is the other boss, and his organization is threatening your business, so you’re pulling me in to help you get information from one of Ivan’s top guys to help you shut down his organization.”

“Something like that,” Gage agreed.

“This is not what I had in mind when I got my degree,” I told him, laughing nervously. I had gone from sitting across the table from a biker with the body of a god to sitting across the table from the violent leader of a motorcycle gang, a criminal organization in the midst of trying to eliminate their competition.

“Well, I tried to tell you that you didn’t want to know what you were really helping me do here,” Gage countered.

“Good point. But why tell me now?” I asked.

“Because I felt like you wanted to know,” he told me. “And I feel like you deserve to know what you’re doing here. You’re helping us shut down a violent criminal organization that law enforcement is either powerless against or just clueless about, because they’re not doing anything.”

“Stop,” I told him. “Don’t say another word about it, Gage. I don’t want to know anything else. I just want to talk to Dimitri and get you the information you need on Ivan so I can go home.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “You don’t think you know too much already?” he asked in a vaguely threatening tone.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I snapped at him. “Are you threatening me, Gage? Is that what this is? Are you trying to tell me that now that I know more about what’s going on, I won’t be able to leave at all? It certainly sounds like that’s what you’re doing.”

He waved a hand dismissively between us. “Don’t worry. I was just teasing.”

“You didn’t sound like you were teasing.”

“I know. My voice doesn’t carry humor well,” he said with a dry laugh.

Likely excuse, I thought. I couldn’t believe I had tried to convince myself to trust this man. Unfortunately, it seemed like I didn’t have much choice in my current position but to try to trust him.

“Well, I was going to ask if there was a way I could interrogate Dimitri somewhere besides that little room down there, somewhere a little more conducive to talking. But I guess that’s out of the question,” I said.

“I’m afraid he has to stay down there,” Gage said. “And it’s important that he stays tied up as well. Don’t get any ideas when you go back down there to talk to him again. I don’t want things to get ugly.”

“It’s a bit late for that,” I commented under my breath.

“Yes, it would seem so, wouldn’t it?”

“I mean, you’ve got a guy tied to a metal chair in what is essentially a concrete bunker underneath your motorcycle club’s headquarters. Things are already pretty messy, aren’t they?” I asked him.

“Things are always messy around here, Julia, if that’s your definition of messy,” he countered.

“I guess so. Still, I’d like to think there’s got to be a better way to get information out of Dimitri. He doesn’t seem too interested in talking. Maybe if there was a way I could approach him in a less confrontational manner, you know?” I directed the conversation back to the matter at hand. I couldn’t just solely focus my energy on the fact that I was working for a criminal organization, essentially aiding them in the kidnapping of another criminal.

“It’s really for the best to have him down there,” Gage said flatly. “We can’t really do anything differently with him. I hope you understand after what I’ve told you just now.”

I really wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back down there to talk to him again after finding out that he’d been sent to kill Gage by the rival boss. “When do you want me to go back down there?” I asked him.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Gage answered. “The sooner you can get some information out of him, the sooner all of this will be over, just like you said.”

I really didn’t feel safe going back down there by myself, so I mustered up the courage to ask him, “Will you go down there with me?”

“Of course I will, Julia,” he said. “I’m not going to go back in the room with you, just because I agree that you’ll probably get more out of him if you’re on your own, but I’ll be down there by the door in case anything goes wrong. While you’re here you’re my responsibility,” he said. “I can’t let anything happen to you.”

I found his sense of responsibility for my well-being odd and almost out of place. He presented this rough, bad boy exterior to the world, but underneath, he seemed to be a rather upstanding gentleman. I was having trouble reconciling the two parts of him I was seeing.

I thanked him for his kindness and told him I was ready to go back downstairs.

As we got up from the table, he put a hand on my shoulder. “Remember when you go down there, I need to know where I can find Ivan and what his next move is. See if you can get a timeline of what he’s up to or what he has planned. Also, see if you can get specific locations as to where he is and where he might be,” he coached me.

“I got it,” I said. “Don’t worry. I think I can remember those questions. Now, let’s go before I lose my nerve.”

“What do you mean?” he asked as we started making our way back to the stairs.

“You’re sticking me in a room alone with the man who just recently tried to kill you,” I reminded him.

“Changes your perception of him a little, doesn’t it?”

“Just a little,” I agreed.

“Don’t worry, Julia.” In a change of tone, Gage had become very concerned about me, repeating that I would be alright and that he would be watching out for me.

Normally, I would have been quick to tell someone that I could take care of myself, but my confidence had been shaken by my conversation with Gage. I welcomed his offer to protect me and watch over me while I talked to the assassin that had been sent to murder him.

Gage kept going back and forth between someone I knew better than to trust and someone I didn’t have a choice but to trust. I looked around the room at all of the other bikers in their vests with their Kings of Hell logos and patches on. I knew that if anything went wrong, and Gage simply said the word, each of those men would be at his side to protect me.

Still, if he was supposed to be the good guy, just how bad was Dimitri supposed to be? I didn’t want to find out, but as I stood in front of the door to the interrogation room again, watching as Gage opened it, I knew I would probably find out sooner rather than later.

I shot Gage a look as I walked into the room, letting him shut the door behind me. He didn’t lock it, and I was sure Dimitri heard that as well.