TAKING OVER TROFIM (Dominion of Brothers series Book 4) (28 page)

Shay nodded solemnly. “The dealer where I traded my Mercedes called, he said they got a visit from my dad and his goons. It turned out my car had a Lojack system on it.”

Trenton shook his head not getting the relevance, “Not uncommon for a car like yours to come with a security system.”

“I bought the car myself ten years ago. I didn’t buy the Lojack system.”

The air went silent around them and Trenton wiped at his face casually as he walked a small circle in place, seeming to be deep in thought but it was clear to see his gaze was out there. Scanning for anyone already watching, but you wouldn’t note the tension or his scrutiny from a distance. Even up close, Trenton seemed at ease, only his intense eyes gave him away.

Shay turned to Trofim taking him by the shoulders, “He may have been tracking me all along. That’s why he called that day we went out to the beach.” Shay added the obvious.

Trenton brought his attention back to Shay, “Where’s the car now?” Trenton asked.

“Still with the dealers, A&A’s Big Apple Auto Shop.”

“And you’re certain your phone was bugged?”

“I don’t know. I just wasn’t going to take any chance keeping it with me. So I trashed it.”

Trenton glanced at Trofim, “Hand him your phone.” Then he looked at Shay, “Call the dealer up, tell him you have a friend coming over to take the car off his hands and to name his price.” Trenton suggested as Trofim passed his own phone over to Shay. Trenton was instantly making a call on his, “Marcus, Deez around? Yeah, tell him I need to talk with him when he’s done. Meantime, I need you to do me a favor. Go over to A&A’s Big Apple Auto Shop. There’s a—” Trenton glanced at Shay questioningly.

“’04, Mercedes E Class, black.” Shay gave the make and model of his car.

“2004 Black Mercedes E Class. Let the owner name his price and pay it with cash. Right, and just tell Diesel I need him to get one of his buddies down at the precinct to stash the car away for us for a while.” He paused a moment listening to the man on the other side of the line, “No, not off the books. I want the car impounded. I’ll explain later. Have Diesel get up with me when he can.” Trenton hung up and dropped his phone in his jacket pocket. “In the meantime, let’s put you two where no one would think to look.” He glanced at the worried faces of Trofim and Shay.

“Where’s that at?” Shay was first to ask.

“In a pricey hotel.”

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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Trenton made a stop by Trofim’s apartment, having one of his guys meet up with them there to patrol while Trofim and Shay grabbed enough personals to last them at least a week for now. If Shay’s father had truly been tracking him, then he’d either started slipping or had yet to fully engage on the whereabouts of his son.

But the apartment checked clear and so far no one seemed to be scoping the place out.

Now they sat in a far corner of the restaurant at the hotel where he would stash them away for now. “So when do you think your father might have been able to tap your car?” Trenton began his questioning as he sipped his coffee.

Shay scratched his ear and pulled Trofim closer to him in the booth, then shook his head in disbelief. “There could have been a number of times.”

“Why do you think your father is tracking you?” Trenton already knew the answer, but per Trofim’s request he wasn’t supposed to, having Shay come right out and say it, eliminated any under the table conversations. Something that was no longer safe to maintain.

Trenton watched Shay’s body language as much as anything else. He knew most of the story, at least what Trofim had known, and what Harper had found far more, but no one knew as much as Shay did.

Shay seemed hesitant. He glanced way, his thoughts far reaching beyond the walls of the restaurant. Even further out the windows and into the morning bustle outside. Perhaps further still.

“Tell him.” Trofim pleaded under his breath, bringing Shay’s attention to snap back around to look at him. Their eyes talking silently before Shay took a deep breath and finally relented. But he didn’t look up and meet Trenton’s eyes, he stared down at the table. He dropped a hand down and picked at the napkin beneath his coffee spoon.

“My father is Benjamin Wilks. Former Senate representative of New York. He was still in office when he discovered me and Trofim were in a relationship together and he’d gone through considerable lengths to tear us apart. For two year we dodged him, sneaking around, meeting up whenever we could. Five years ago after I graduated from pre-med, I booked us a weekend at a hotel out at Montauk for the weekend—” he paused and scratched at some invisible speck on the table for a long moment just saying nothing, the pain all too real on his face, unable to hide it. He sniffed then still without ever looking up, he continued, “I guess he’d been watching my credit card transactions—” he shook his head again, “I’m not sure really, but he found out about the trip and had his goons pick me up just when I was leaving the school.” Shay glanced away, his gaze going back out into the world and tears glistened in his eyes, “I didn’t know how many days he’d kept me locked up.” His head drifted side to side. It was faint but the emotion so much more than what he revealed hovering just under the skin like a brooding storm threatening to belch out mayhem and disaster. “Turned out to be eight days. He threw a suit on me and dragged my ass off to a court house where I was forced to stand like a whipped pony before a judge in his chambers. He recited off some crazy charges for drug trafficking and theft of pharmaceuticals from the hospital. My whole life flashed before my eyes. All those years in medical school about to be ruined before I even stepped out the door with my degree.”

“Were you actually charged?” Trenton asked.

Shay shook his head, it was a shiver of movement, “Said if I agreed to probation, they would sign me over as a ward to the state, my father would be guardian of my assets and care and that if I complied, they’d drop the charges.”

“And that’s what you did?”

“Not at first. They gave me a day to think it over. First thing I did was go to make sure Trofim was okay. Instead I found Darko’s apartment, where Trofim had been staying, burnt to the ground. I went to Pavle right way demanding to know where Trofim was and he told me to never ask again or he’d remove me from the hospital.”

That was when Shay’s tears finally fell. Streaming down like he’d never tried to hold them back. “Losing Trofim was what killed me. So I gave in and I signed the papers.”

Trofim practically threw himself around Shay, his long arms wrapping around Shay to shield him from his own pain and dropped his head on Shay’s shoulder. Shay responded as he always did, turning to tend to Trofim. He reached across and touched Trofim’s face and turned his head to kiss him before starting up again. “I did find out eventually Trofim had moved to the UK and started modeling. I tried buying a plane ticket to go after him, but my father found out about that too and once more I found myself getting a reminder of just how serious he was that I wouldn’t be going anywhere.”

“When you say
reminder
, what do you mean?” Trenton asked. It was the part even Trofim had not been able to answer though from what Harper had seen, Trenton suspected what it was. Still it needed to be said.

“My father is rather fond of the bullwhip and his latest toy is electrocution.”

Trenton narrowed his eyes, “He electrocuted you?”

Shay was reluctant at first, but finally nodded as his gaze went back out the window.

“Why didn’t you just up and leave? Why stay where he could continue?” It was a horrible question, Trenton knew that. Walking away was never as simple as saying it. But he needed to know where Shay was, and there was just no tactful way to get to it.

Shay’s face snapped around and for the first time their eyes met. Clouded grey eyes glared at him. “Did you miss the part about me being in medical school? One doesn’t just walk away from all that. I had four years in already. And then what? Flee like a fugitive until they sent the police after me and hauled me off to jail for something I never did?” Shay’s face grew strained with pain and anger as he belted out the mental torment he endured daily without ever having raised his voice where others could hear. “What kind of life would that be for Trofim, huh? I wanted Trofim back and I wasn’t going to stop waiting and searching for him. But I’d be damned if he was going to be married to a convicted felon with no future and no way to provide for him. I stayed to finish my schooling. The only choice I had was endure it until I got to the other side. Just a little longer and I could walk away be free.”

“What your father and that judge did to you, Shay, isn’t even legal. You could have—”

“
Legal
doesn’t even exist.” Shay cut Trenton off. “When you have friends in high places, you do whatever you want as long as you’ve got the money. And my father had mine.”

They all fell silent as the waitress making her rounds stopped to refresh their coffees, Shay cupping his hand over his indicating that he’d had enough. He would need to sleep soon.

“You two should go ahead and go up and get some sleep. I’ll give you a call later once we have the car impounded.”

“No.” Shay came out of his thoughts and turned to look at Trofim who was holding him, “Trofim has practice.”

“I can skip practice.”

“No, you won’t. Your brothers will fillet me alive if I am the cause of you missing anymore practices.” Shay redirected his attention to Trenton, “Can you get him to the boathouse?”

“You can just take me to pick up the bike.”

Trenton nodded to both, “We’ll go get your bike, then I’ll follow you just to be sure no one is already following you around.”

They both nodded solemnly.

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Shay finally went up to their room. Already he felt like a fugitive from his own life and he hated how it felt. Hated how it overshadowed the weekend he’d just shared with the man he’d just kissed and sent off into his day.

It filled him with an immeasurable amount of an anxiety that as he started to unpack their things to transform the room into some semblance of normalcy rather than a hotel room, he nearly broke down.

He gave up, turned the lights out and just sat in the dark, letting too many thoughts in his head all at once, and they all carried him back downstairs where Trenton was readying to leave. Shay had grabbed Trofim and pulled him in a tight hug and simply held onto him in the lobby. He had felt his own body trembling, but Trofim wrapped around him, being his and his alone, and that did give a measure of relief.

~~“I love you so much. I would have endured far worse if only to keep you safe.” He’d whispered to Trofim.

Trofim wriggled loose enough in their embrace to lean back and look at him with a deep furrow on his brow, “But I don’t want you to do that.”

Shay brushed his fingertips down the side of Trofim’s face tenderly, “I know. But I couldn’t go on thinking I would never have you with me again. That was a conviction I couldn’t live with. So I did what I had to.”~~

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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Harper pulled up in front of the Albany home of Benjamin and Eloise Wilks and parked the off-white utility van right in front and in plain sight. He’d already stopped at the top of the neighborhood at the cable junction and managed to put out the line to the house, and maybe a few others in the process. Now he just had to weasel his way inside. Harper shifted the rearview mirror, glanced at his reflection and threw the company C-Tech logo hat on for one last added touch, grabbed his tool bag and hopped out.

“Hey! Hey you!” A woman sounding rather frantic came waddling up the driveway after him just as he’d knocked on the Wilks’ front door. She rested a hand delicately on the baby bump well in show under her floral smock top. “Our internet just went out. You know anything about it?

“Can I help you?” Another woman asked, this time from just inside the front door. Harper nodded then turned back to the woman in the drive way. “That’s what I’ve been sent out to check up on.” He politely told her, taking advantage of the neighborly dilemma before his target.

“Oh good. Well, you think you could get my house next?” She pointed to the large designer home across the street with a manicured fingernail, “Because those kids will drive me up the wall in no time if they don’t have their wifi.”

Harper nodded then turned back to the woman still waiting at the door.

“I’ve been called out because several homes have reported an outage in their internet. Would you just take a moment to check yours?”

The woman at the door let out a frustrated sigh, “It’s out. But I really don’t have time for this right now.” She let out another sigh.

“Very well.” Harper pulled out a pen and business card, acting as if he were about to jot something down, “You can just call this number and speak to a representative. You want to go through the options and ask for technical support. Then have them transfer you to Tech site repairs and request a repair ticket. It usually only takes—”

The woman was instantly holding her hand out to stop his talking, the twitch in her eyes said she wanted nothing to do with customer service, and she stepped back to wave him inside.

“If you can point me in the direction of your modem?”

“It’s down the hall in office on the left.” She pointed across the living room to the hallway.

The home was one of the contemporary design with the angled high vaulted ceilings. The living room contained a large picture window facing out towards the street then a fire place on the far wall, then just at the hall a door on his right most likely led to the basement. He went past it and disappeared into the office and sat down at the desk. The computer was already on which seemed odd, then again
Ms. I’m Busy
had already been aware the net was when she answered.