Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
A fter dropping Illayana, Lukyan and Adrian off at the airstrip, I headed back towards the house. Dayton was still in the backseat, quiet as a mouse. He hadn’t said a word since they left. I wasn’t sure if he was afraid to talk or if he just didn’t want to talk to me .
It didn’t bother me either way. I was fine with silence.
We cruised down the highway at a comfortable speed, the world flying past us outside. Music played lightly in the car, so low I was able to hear the rumble from Dayton’s stomach.
The kid was hungry.
“You want something to eat?” I asked, my hands gliding over the steering wheel as I took a turn.
Dayton grumbled a barely audible, “No.”
I felt like rolling my eyes. If he wanted to act like a pouty child, fine. I wasn’t going to baby him.
My phone rang, Nik’s name flashing on the display screen on the dashboard.
I answered the call.
“I’ve got a hit on Rayna,” Nik’s voice blasted through the car before I could even get a word in.
“Where?” I growled, adrenaline surging through my body.
Yes. This was exactly what I needed, an outlet to focus all my anger and frustration on.
“A small café in North Las Vegas. My facial recognition program picked her up about an hour ago coming out of Crave Café.”
“Send me the address.”
“Already done.”
My phone pinged with an incoming text. I picked it up and put the address Nik sent into the GPS. Once it calculated the route, I sped towards it like a man on a mission.
* * *
I parked the car in an alley behind Crave Café, my excitement reaching new heights.
There were two different types of hunts I loved indulging in.
One was with a woman. When she ran from me and I chased her down (all consensual, of course).
The sounds of their feet pounding along the ground, the way their breath quickened as I got closer and closer. It was a hunt I thoroughly enjoyed.
Then there was when I hunted down an enemy.
There was nothing sexual about it. It was filled with blood, death and violence—three of my most favourite things.
It was all about the strategy. The intricacies of tracking them down.
The anticipation of knowing that with each step, I got closer and closer to my mark.
I stepped out of the car, tucking my Beretta behind my back. I had another two in a holster strapped to my chest, concealed by my black suit jacket.
When Dayton didn’t get out of the car, I tapped on the window. “Come on, let’s go.”
He begrudgingly got out, a sour look on his face. “Where are we? What are we doing here?”
I led the way out of the alley and towards Crave Café. “Business,” was all I replied with.
A small bell dinged overhead when we opened the door and walked into the café.
Chatter and laughter swirled around the air.
The smell of coffee and freshly cooked pastries filled my nostrils.
People sat at tables and stood in clusters, totally immersed in whatever they were doing and who they were with.
I took a thorough look around. Rayna was nowhere to be seen—not that I was expecting her to still be here.
A line of people led up to the wooden counter, where a young teen stood serving them.
He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else but here, a bored expression on his face as he took people’s orders.
We joined the line. After a few minutes we reached the front.
“What’ll you have?” The name badge pinned to his shirt read ‘Matt’.
I slipped into another persona, one completely different from my own. I changed the sound of my voice, making it lighter, more pleasant, and spoke with a smile.
It felt completely foreign to me, but it was a necessary role I had to play to get the answers I needed.
“Hello, my name is Doug. I’m looking for someone. A young woman. Brown hair. Blue eyes. About 5’8. She would have come in about an hour ago?”
Dayton’s jaw dropped open at the change in me, staring at me like he had no idea who he was looking at.
Matt chewed slowly on the piece of gum in his mouth, studying me closely. There was a flare of recognition on his face while I described Rayna, so I was confident he knew who she was. At the very least, he had seen her before.
“Why, you lookin’ for her?” he asked.
“I’m a bounty hunter. There’s a warrant out on her arrest. If you help me out, I’ll cut you in.”
Matt’s eyes widened at the prospect of money. At a job like this, I bet he was earning minimum wage. Maybe less. “How much?”
“A thousand dollars.” I pulled out the roll of $100 notes I travelled with to show him I was serious.
His eyes widened further. “The chick you’re looking for comes in once or twice a week.
Always on different days. She orders a half-cap, no foam caramel macchiato with a chocolate chip cookie.
She always sits at that booth over there and waits for a guy who joins her.
They sit, eat, chat and then leave a half an hour later. ”
I was impressed with the amount of detail he gave. “The guy, what does he look like?”
“I dunno. Tall. Dark hair. I wasn’t looking at him. I was lookin’ at her. She’s hot.”
Could be Dominik, I thought.
I pulled out a plain white card from my pocket with nothing but the number to a disposable cell phone on it.
I handed it to Matt. “The next time she comes in here, you call me. Try to keep her here as long as you can. Screw up her drink order. Chat her up. Do whatever you have to do to keep here as long as you can.”
Matt nodded. “I gotchu man. I’m your guy.”
I took one of the $100 bills from the roll and held it out to him. He hesitated for only a second before snatching it up.
“Thank you, Matt,” I said, putting on my best non-threatening smile. “I look forward to hearing from you.” I turned and left the café, Dayton hot on my heels.
“What the fuck was that?” Dayton shrieked once we were outside.
“What was what?” My voice slipped back to its natural tone, my Russian accent coating my words.
“That! The whole alter ego thing. It was like you were a completely different person. In there you were almost…nice. I’ve only known you for half a day, but I know you’re not fucking nice. You’re rotten to the core. Just like my dad.”
“Mikhail’s not rotten.”
“I know what he does. He sells people, like one of those human traffickers you always hear about on the TV. He’s vile.”
I stopped him on the sidewalk. The bend in the alley where the car was parked was just up ahead. “You clearly don’t know him well enough, because you’re wrong.”
There was a certain persona Mikhail liked to portray. He wanted others to think he was this evil, terrible guy, that he did horrible, unspeakable things. But it wasn’t true. Yes, he was involved in the skin trade, but it wasn’t in the way most people thought.
“Mikhail doesn’t sell people. Anybody who’s there is there by choice.”
Dayton scoffed, not believing me. “I’m not an idiot. I saw their faces. They didn’t want to be there, being tossed from person to person like some worn out sex doll.”
“They might not have wanted it, but they chose it. Mikhail is a businessman more than anything else. And as a businessman, he knows what sells the most: sex and violence. He grants small loans to people. If they can’t pay it back he gives them two choices.
They earn it back by working for him, either in the sex den or the fight pit, or he takes the amount they owe him as pounds of flesh.
He doesn’t kidnap people and sell them to others like actual human traffickers. ”
Though he liked others to believe he did. A man in Mikhail’s position had to always be weary of others trying to challenge him, to remove him from the game. Enabling the rumours that circled around the streets about him helped deter those who thought they could take him on.
Case in point: when we interrogated Miguel after Illayana’s first kidnapping attempt. We used all those horror stories about Mikhail to scare Miguel into answering our questions.
It worked perfectly.
“It’s not much of a choice though, is it?” Dayton said, shaking his head. “Either they do it or they get hurt. It’s an ultimatum, one where each option is just as bad as the other.”
I shrugged, continuing on. Dayton followed. “Regardless, it’s their choice. They don’t have to borrow the money to start with. They’re warned of the consequences if they can’t pay it back in time, and they still choose to go through with it.”
When I turned the corner into the alley, the first thing I noticed was the motorbikes. Three of them. One parked in front of my car, one at the side and one behind, essentially boxing it in.
Lounging on my SUV were the three riders, smoking cigarettes and laughing amongst themselves. They were loud, boisterous, like a group of rowdy teenagers hanging around trying to intimidate anyone who walked past.
I didn’t slow down as I made my way towards them. Dayton faltered behind me when he noticed the bikers.
“Stay behind me and don’t say a word,” I whispered over my shoulder. I took a second to glance at him. He looked nervous.
“This your car?” one of the bikers asked as I came to a stop a small distance away.
The name on his motorcycle vest read The Dirty Vultures . The word PROSPECT was stamped across the front. He had peroxide bleach-blonde hair and a slim but athletic build. He stayed exactly where he was, ass on the hood of my car, leaning back against the windshield like he owned it.
The other two bikers were on the roof, the one with the bald head sitting cross-legged and the young tweener-looking one standing behind him. Arrogant, smug smiles were plastered across their faces. They assumed because they outnumbered us, they held the upper hand.
They didn’t.
“Hey, Gorilla! You hear me? I said, ‘Is this your car?”
My eyes snapped to him at the ear-piercing scrape that followed. Peroxide dragged the tip of a knife along the hood, keying my car.
Oh, you’re going to pay for that.