Mr. Mysterious In Black (27 page)

“Let her go,” I told them. “Take me.”

If they didn’t, I was pretty sure Kelsy would faint of fright within the next ten minutes or so. She was a spoiled girl from a well-known, affluent family. This nature was not for people of her kind. But on some level, it’s good for her to see the penalties of dating men like Tevin.

“Shit, T.
Shit.
That’s Nelly’s girl,” Kelsy’s assaulter said.

What? Nelly?

“Fuck, I didn’t—” My assaulter swore again and pressed the gun against my skull. “You weren’t supposed to be here!”

My head was spinning. I honestly could
not
take any more bullshit. I was afraid I would explode, sending blood, guts and shit splattering everywhere. “What do you want?”

“Hurtin’ you would be trouble. So injury’s off tha’ list. Though, it would give me
great
pleasure to break your delicate bones,” said my assaulter through clenched teeth. “You’re Nelly’s bitch and his men watch your ass twenty-four-seven. So though we really don’t wanna, we’ll have to let ya’ go unscathed, because we don’t wanna trigger any unnecessary rivalry. Your assigned men are probably outside right now as we speak. So now, you two will ensure that we get what we want and we will ensure that you leave in one piece. You will raise no alarm and everyone will be happy. Got it?”

What the hell? I have securities that follow me around?
That would explain how Natalio knows everything. My God, the man is…ugh! “Yeah, sure. But
what
do you want?”

“Tevin has messed up big time. We’ve lost a great deal. We’re aware he has underground stacks. Let us have it and we’ll be out of your air.”

My eyebrows shot up in surprise. Tevin had underground stacks? The dude was so much more illegal and hazardous than I thought!

“I don’t—”

“She knows,” growled my assaulter, nodding to Kelsy.

Puzzled, I glanced at Kelsy, awaiting her word. But she merely stared at me, wide-eyed and dumbfounded.

Kelsy cried out in pain when her assaulter twisted her arm. “Spit it out, bitch!”

“Kels, do you want to live?” I asked her.

She nodded frantically, looking like an electrocuted cat.

“Then tell them where it is. I don’t think Tev would be able to retain his sanity knowing you lost your
life
trying to save his
dope
.” I tried to remain serious, fighting the inexplicable urge to laugh. Why do I always have such anomalistic compulsion to laugh in deadly situations?

I must not laugh. I must not laugh. This is serious.

Kelsy’s assaulter pressed his gun against her temple, his finger twitching on the trigger, and I swallowed. Hard. “Hurry up, bitch! Our beef is with Tevin, but now you’ve brought Nelly’s bitch here.” He looked over to me and blinked with reasoning eyes. “We don’t want no shit with Nelly, okay? We just want to get our worth of what Tevin’s fucked up.”

Why did they keep saying ‘Nelly’? Did that mean Natalio was still heading cliques and still playing Nelly? I had no idea. And how was
I
his bitch? I haven’t spoken to the man in over forty days. If they knew that, and how clueless I was, they’d retract their suppression of breaking my bones.

Kelsy’s soft, crackling voice spoke, “Okay. This way.”

With rough fingers grasped tightly around my upper arm and a gun pressed against my skull, I followed where Kelsy led. We traveled down to the basement and there stood another three men who seemed to have been searching to no avail.

“Under here,” said Kelsy, pointing to an immense red rug that dominated Tevin’s man cave.

“You two,” Kelsy’s assaulter ordered two of the guys. “Roll it up. Hurry!”

The men rolled away the carpet, and then all eyes averted to Kelsy in questioning. That’s because there was nothing but wooden floor beneath it.

Kelsy pulled from the grasp of her assaulter and walked along the area in a concentrated pattern, then stepped back. Ten seconds later, a rectangular trapped door automatically opened. Reflexively, I leaned over to take a peek and eyed a wide wooden ladder leading down.

Whoa. Tevin had a freaking underground stack-up and I hadn’t known? I think I could guess why he hid it from me; he knew I’d encouraged Kelsy even more to stay as far away from him as possible. But then, she knew, too, and kept it a secret. After all the horrendous things Kelsy saw I went through with Cali D, she still wouldn’t take heed. Oh well…

My assaulter gave me a rough tug backward. “Keep still.” He waved his gun at the other men. “What tha’ hell are y’all waiting for? Start packin’!”

Impatiently I stood, shifting from foot to foot for fifteen minutes and counting. Watching as the men came up with bags and bags of cocaine, guns and ammunitions.

Sweet mother Mary!
What the heck was Tevin saving up for? Not a rainy day by the looks of it, but a freaking tempest. The dude was on some American Gangster meets Scarface shit. I’d never seen so much cocaine in all my life. Was he planning on opening a drugstore? Pun intended.

“You know, I was really looking forward to fuckin’ ya lil friend into oblivion. We had plans for her,” whispered my assaulter. “But you just came along and fucked everything up.”

Insouciant, I shrugged. “Sorry.”

“You think because you’ve been with men like Cali D and Nelly, that you’ve seen it all?” he growled, obviously pissed at my nonchalance. “I could still fuck you up, ya know?”

Oh, they know about Cali D, too. Boy, what a history I had at age twenty-four.
“Go ahead. Do me the honors. Believe me, this is not an affectation.”

“You lil bitch.” He laughed acrimoniously. “Life means nothing to you?”

“Asks the criminal who’s holding a gun to my head,” I muttered back with hot sarcasm.

“Even though I’m forced to live like this, my life means a lot to me.” His tone was suddenly soft and, if I wasn’t not mistaken, wistful.

One of the men spoke before I could say anything else. “That’s it. We’re good to go.”

In union, both men released Kelsy and I and shoved us towards the stairway. “Good work girls. Now, you two are gonna leave with smiling faces like nothing happen. Just in case the men assigned to watch your ass are outside.” He waved the gun at me. “Once you leave, they’ll follow. Then we can leave quietly and undetected. No one getting hurt. No alarm raised. Capiche?”

“Will you take anything else from the house?” I asked. Tevin’s house was huge, abounded with valuables and a garage of cars and bikes. He was my friend, no, my brother—as much as it pained me to acknowledge such. But as rotten as he was, I loved him. It would be pleasing if these men didn’t clean him out entirely.

“No. We’re not paupers! What we have here is worth fifty times more than what Tevin cost us. Served him right,” he said. “Now get ya tight asses outta here!”

I glowered, wanting to say something nasty but Kelsy tugged at my hand and dragged me up the stairs. We tried to look as casual as possible as we exited the house. The news that I had guards who followed me around was unnerving. Oh, this has got to be the worst weekend of my life.

“I’ll drive,” I told Kelsy. She was still shell-shocked and shaky, and I feared she might send us crashing into a wall. I’ve escaped death twice in twenty-four hours and I might not be so lucky the third time around.

As I entered the car, I looked around for any suspicious-looking men or vehicles. Nothing. No one. Night had fallen and the evening was still and dark. Where were these men who were supposedly watching me hiding? Where was Natalio? And why would he still have me watched if he’s ‘moved on’?

Jeez.
As soon I get my wits together, I was going to call him and demand my goddamn life back. How dare he!

Ha! Yeah right…

Putting the pedal to the metal, I sped off into the night, trying to convince myself that the inert Kelsy, whose head was slumped onto her shoulder, was asleep and hadn’t actually fainted.

“T
hey’ve just left, Sir. Unscathed.”

“Those men are smart men,” he gritted out. “Get in. Disarm them. I’m a minute away.”

“Do you want us to drill them, Sir?”

“No. I want to know who really sent them, and they’ll only tell you whatever name comes to their lips. They see me, they’ll know better than to bullshit me.”

“Okay, Sir. On it.”

Natalio clicked off the call and looked out his window just in time to see Kelsy’s convertible zing past his Bentley in the opposite direction.
She
was driving, and his heart constricted at her weariness. As swift as the car had passed, he’d noticed her pallor; because when it came down to her, all his senses were sharp. She was
that
important to him.

That she even had to spend over a day in a stinking jail cell made him all the more irate. He’d warned her about Devon, but he guess he should’ve warned her about her own best friends, too.

A few weeks back, he’d gotten the heads up that there were plans to clip Tevin’s wings. The blasted idiot had painted a bull’s-eye on his forehead by bragging to the wrong people about his bunker. He’d never paid much attention to the news of Tevin’s inevitable culling, because he didn’t like backing druggies and he cared not that the numbskull was Sadie’s best friend. When he’d gotten a phone call that informed him of Sadie being embroiled in a police chase with Tevin, however, in that same hour, he was jetting out of Tokyo.

Upon landing a couple of hours ago, it came to his ears that the men’s plan to find Tevin’s bunker was being executed this night. By the time he was leaving Sergeant Smith’s office where he’d made his visit to redeem his favor of having Sadie released from that filthy jail cell, he was alerted that she and Kelsy were heading straight into the men’s hands.

He wouldn’t say he’d been worried, or panicked, or frantic. Maybe if it was just Kelsy. Because, though Sadie didn’t know it, she was
known
and respected by all toppers in LA. They see her, and they’d think twice about touching so much as a hair on her head.

It was known. She was Nelly’s.

Taking all the credit for her respect wouldn’t be fair. She’d earned it on her own. She’d spent the last six years being a don’s Donna. Of course, Cali D wasn’t in his strata, but he’d still been a don, for a while, at least. He couldn’t speak on behalf of their relationship aspect, but he knew her respect came from her die-heartedness and her loyalty. In the midst of his deals, chases and shoot outs, she was there.

What she didn’t know was that those natural characteristics were what every leader sought for in their women. And all had rated her for it. Nevertheless, Cali D was dead now. Which meant his rotting bones couldn’t have saved a single bone of hers from being broken. Thus, it all came down to the fact that she was Nelly’s. She’d been Nelly’s seven years ago, there was a hiatus with Cali D, but she still was Nelly’s and forever will be. Cali D was temporary, even his life was. You live your life fast and illegal, it automatically becomes a short-term life. There was no growing old in this shit.

As his driver careened onto Tevin’s complex and came to a brief halt at the facade of the unlawfully earned house, he dipped into his duffel bag and retrieved his disguising hat with attached hair. Not many people knew that Nelly was Natalio Nelson. It was a secret he’d fought to keep. For the majority, his identity was befitting to the description of blue eyes and fourteen-inch black hair, not the trimmed-hair billionaire that he really was. To maintain that image, he’d had this hat custom-made ever since his fourteen inches of hair had been cruelly trimmed. When he was to face criminals, he would simply pull on his hat. There was no telling the difference between Nelly back then and now.

He strapped on his foot weapon and attached his CZ 75 Matte to his belt. For him, weapons weren’t necessarily needed; he was confident enough in his status to know that none of these men would try anything dumb. Stepping from the car, he held up five fingers to his driver, Moore. It shouldn’t take him more than two minutes to get a name out of these klutzes, but five minutes was practical enough for Moore to send off an alarm, should anything go awry.

Firm, purposeful and determined feet jaunted into Tevin’s house, a house he was more than familiar with. The very night Sadie had told him that Devon had been shooting suspicious questions about Tevin, he’d sent his men to have this place under surveillance. He’d wanted to know what it was that Devon was after, so he’d had them set up cameras in the house, all to Tevin’s obliviousness. As a so-called gangster, Tevin didn’t seem to protect himself very well. Guess he thought of himself as invincible. Because just as his men had been in and out of this place as if they owned it, someone with wits parallel to his could’ve done the same. No wonder those men got in.

Despite all the trouble, though, he’d never uncover Tevin’s underground stack. So maybe the boy
did
have a bit of tidiness in him. Who would’ve thought it could only be located by a concentrated foot pattern? He had to nod his head once at such an ingenious move.

The sound of his heavy boots thudded off the laminate stairs as he descended down to the basement. There were five men, unmasked and on their knees with their heads bowed while his men held them captive. His eyes made one quick sweep around the sizeable basement, picking up the images of stacks upon stacks of cocaine, guns and ammunition, then landed back on the men.