Gift From The Bad Boy

My feet made shushing noises in the carpet. I reached the top landing. No movement. No light. My room was at the end of the hall. I relaxed and let out a long, whistling sigh, letting the tension seep out of my shoulders. Taking the five long steps to cross in front of my father’s office to the door of my bedroom, I reached out a hand to grab the knob.

But it opened before I could get there.

My father stood framed in the doorway. He was a massive, glowering hulk. I could almost swear his eyes were shining through the darkness. His arms were crossed in front of his chest and I could see one angry vein thudding in his forehead. When he spoke, his words were brutally short and vicious.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, Carmen.”

Chapter Eight

Ben

Four Months Later

“Ben, my good friend,” said the man in a thick Russian accent. He spread his arms out wide to pull me into a hug. “Welcome, welcome,” he said, patting me on the back. “It is good to see you. It has been very long.”

“Good to see you, too, Ivan,” I said.

“Come, sit, please.” He pointed at the chair across from his desk as he returned behind it and settled in, crossing his hands over his fat belly. Snapping his fingers at the pale young teen standing at attention on the far wall, he barked, “Petrov, go get a drink for my old friend, Ben. Vodka.”

“Little early for vodka, isn’t it?”

“Never too early for vodka.”

“You’re a Russian through and through,” I remarked.

“Ah, what can I do? It is in my blood.” He leaned forward in his seat and eyed me up and down. “You don’t look so well,” he said bluntly.

“Yeah, well, you look like shit, too, you fat old man,” I retorted sarcastically.

Ivan chuckled. The chains looped across his chest bounced as he did, dazzling in the light from overhead. We were sitting in his office in an underground bunker on the far side of town. It looked like an out of business deli from the street level, but anyone who knew anything about the shadier businesses that ran through this city knew more money and power was concentrated in the Bratva’s headquarters than just about anywhere else that wasn’t the Dark Knights clubhouse or that rotting dump the Wild Kings called home.

He patted his stomach and shrugged. “It is true. Perhaps I am a bit heavy these days. But, that is the life we lead, no? I drink the best liquor, eat the best food, fuck the prettiest women. I have no complaints if I must gain a few pounds as a result. Cost of doing business, you might say.”

Nothing he said was surprising. Ivan had always been a man of appetites, to put it nicely. To put it not so nicely, I might have said that he was a fat, greedy pig. But saying such a thing to the man’s face was a quick path to more pain and suffering than I was willing to deal with at the present moment.

I was fucked up enough in the head as it was. It had been, what, four months since the strike on James’s warehouse? Four months since the party? God, I couldn’t believe how quickly that time had gone. It seemed like just yesterday that Slick was dragging huge satchels of cash into my office while we cackled over our good fortune.

Since then, though, it had been a slow unraveling. I knew why, at least in part. I hadn’t said her name out loud since the morning she left, but those eyes stuck with me. They damn near haunted me, showing up every time I managed to grab some shuteye or even just paused to think for a moment. Those grey fucking eyes.

But there were other things bothering me, too, mostly business-related. We hadn’t heard a peep out of the Kings in the days and weeks since their stash got taken. It didn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. Who gave up that much money, over a million in cold, hard cash, without even looking for it? For Christ’s sake, at the very least they could have bothered to put up a fucking “Lost—Please Return” poster. But no, it had been stony silence. All of the gossip channels had fallen dead quiet. I didn’t like that shit at all.

And if I didn’t like something, then Jay was sure as hell brooding over it. I pictured him as he was waiting for me outside, chain-smoking those Camels like the end was nigh. He had a funny way of being nervous. Looking at his face, you’d think he was at a funeral, but I knew damn well that his leg started bouncing frantically whenever he thought no one could see him.

Then again, it was his job to worry. In this case, it was justified. Men with a reputation for bloody retribution—men like James Sanders—didn’t just let things go. They didn’t simply allow their money to walk out the door and say, “Aw, shucks, shouldn’t have let that happen.” No. What they did was strike back with double the strength, inflict double the pain. We’d been braced for it, on the off chance that he had discovered who was responsible for the theft. But the weeks of tension were starting to take their toll on my nerves.