Chapter 9
The number of cars and the lines of people standing before Club Cage made me regret I hadn’t brought earplugs. The elite, meaning rich boys and girls, came here with their parents’ money and left forgetting how much of it went up their noses or down their mouths in the form of a pill.
Once, I’d asked Mikhail if he’d consider leaving the street biz and moving in with me completely into money laundering and manipulating the stock market, but he was more old school than I.
The pounding inside my head started immediately as I entered the place. Strobe lights, loud music, sweating youth bouncing everywhere as Mikhail’s men escorted us through the narrow dark hallway that ran along the dance floor, behind the bar and to the stairs.
Seeing Lana’s eyes were everywhere except in front of her made me take her hand before she started climbing to the VIP room. She’d ascended the steps like a blind woman climbed her husband’s dick. She knew where she was going and needed no guidance.
Yeah, during the weekends, the girl lived in this place.
A dark mood overcame me as if a black sack had dropped over my head.
What had happened up here with her and Mikhail’s men?
Mikhail couldn’t have guarded her virginity, though she was a virgin when she came to me.
Which just meant she’d done all the other things.
A while back, Neven had told me, virgins didn’t take the dick, but they knew how to get around a man’s body.
The lineup of Russians greeting her made my palm itch.
I fisted my hand so I didn’t take out my Sig and go on a murderous rampage.
Lana pulled me toward the VIP bar, and I let her, while counting all Mikhail’s men and then the civilians, particularly girls with barely any clothes on.
Beautiful girls in the company of beautiful boys.
Some, I was certain, came from homes with influential parents, precisely why I’d picked the club as the meeting place.
With this many people, and with the club fronting drug sales, Mikhail would have to be stupid to start shit here and get this place locked down.
Lana sat at the bar, and I leaned my elbow against it. She passed me a shooter, and I sniffed out vodka. We clicked our glasses together and poured it down our throats.
“Don’t have too many,” I said.
She winked at me.
I rolled my eyes. “I mean it.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
I shook my head but smiled anyway. “Where is he?”
“Probably behind the screens in the security room, watching us.”
I ordered a whiskey on the rocks and found a camera eye to which I lifted my glass. A minute later, a man I hadn’t met before showed up. “The boss will see you. This way.”
Lana and I rose, but the man shook his head. “The girl stays.”
I grabbed her hand and pushed past him, but he materialized in front of me and blocked my way.
Turning my back to the civilians, I whispered at his ear, “I’m leaving this place with her. Feel me?”
“You’ll leave in a bag.”
“Cops will swarm this motherfucker, and Mikhail knows it. Don’t be the idiot who provokes me. The girl goes where I go.”
Lana tugged at my shirt. “I’ll sit with Ivana.”
Before I could say anything, she walked away and climbed into the chair next to my cousin, who sipped coffee, scanning the people in the room. Okay, my nerves would survive our separation. I would survive it and would not kill everyone. That settled, I nodded at the Russian.
The man led me thorough the back of the VIP room’s hallway, where we shouldered past the people waiting outside for the bathroom to reach the door on the right at the end of the hall. The man remained standing by it while I entered without knocking and closed the door behind me.
Mikhail sat behind a worn-out brown desk he’d had ever since I’d known him, which was about twenty-five years. Dim light illuminated his still figure. I couldn’t see his hands. Not good. Not good at all.
I approached anyway and sat across from him, my palms on my thighs, fingers spread and ready.
To see my hands, he’d have to lean in, showing me his face.
I couldn’t read a man in the shadow other than getting the sense of menace that came with how he’d greeted me, but that wasn’t much of a surprise at all.
I’d banged his niece and hadn’t asked for permission.
For a while, we sat in silence, but I knew he’d speak first since I was the more patient of the two of us.
“You sent my man to the hospital,” he said.
“He touched what was mine.”
Mikhail leaned in, showing me his scarred face.
Seven years ago, his brother had turned and sent men after him.
Mikhail survived and hid in one of my safe houses while he reshuffled his ranks.
To make it look like he’d not done the deed, I agreed to send Ludi after his brother.
To say Mikhail and I had a history was an understatement.
“She is not yours,” he said.
“She is now.”
Lips pinched, he gritted his teeth. I saw the moment he couldn’t suppress his anger anymore, and we stood at the same time, pulling out our pieces aimed at each other’s heads. Who would fire first? Who would be faster?
“You should’ve come to me first.”
“I didn’t know she was your niece.”
“You should’ve known!” he shouted.
In the movies, I’d heard lines like “take it easy,” but if I said that, he’d shoot me for sure, and frankly, when I was pissed, if he said to me to take it easy, I’d have shot him.
“Are you mad I took her before you could sell her to the Italians, or are you worried about what I’m gonna do with your niece? Because those aren’t the same thing.”
My shoulder twitched, a warning against holding my hand out for too long.
“You can’t say I didn’t warn you, brother,” he said.
Brother. He was jabbing me, saying without saying it that I’d betrayed him.
I hadn’t. If anything, Lana and I would solidify the alliance between his family and mine.
There was something else at play here. There had to be, or he wouldn’t trade his niece in a deal with the new Italians and go after the old ones I’d dealt with.
His hand started twitching.
Endurance was a matter of pride. When lions fought, only one came out an alpha, but Mikhail and I weren’t fighting for leadership of the same pride.
We each had our own pride to worry about.
Wait a second. That was it. Something was wrong with his pride.
Before he shot me and I shot him, I flipped my gun around and dangled it on my fingertip.
Blue eyes the same color and shape as Lana’s glanced at my gesture.
I sat back down, Sig on his desk.
He stayed standing, barrel pointing at me. Mikhail was a proud male. He’d never admit something terrible had happened within his organization under his leadership. But something had. Desperate measures. He’d taken desperate measures to fix it. What? Money. Something had happened with the money.
“You know you can trust me,” I said. “We’ve bled together, made it through the best of times and through the worst of times. What’s going on?”
“The Feds are on me like flies on honey.”
“They’ve always been on you.”
He sat down, gun on the table, still pointing at me. “This is different. I woke up last week with frozen bank accounts, had to go digging for cash to pay people.” We buried money we couldn’t launder. Old school had that right. “They froze everything. I put my house up for sale.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“You need the Italian deal for the cash flow,” I concluded. “I’ll give you thirty percent.”
“Not enough.”
“The South Africans are wanting to chat. We’ll go at them together. Fifty-fifty.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“So fucking borrow the money.”
He pressed his lips together.
I continued, “Pride will bury you, Mikhail. Just ask for money.”
“I want the Italian deal.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.” He picked up the phone. “I have men on standby. What’s it gonna be?”
“You realize the cartels will move in if we don’t hold together.”
“Let them try.”
“Sixty-forty,” I said.
“In my favor,” he countered.
I stood and headed for the door. He wasn’t gonna shoot me anymore. He might have at the start, but we passed that point. This was good.
“Forty-five,” he said.
“Forty is all I can do.”
“Fine. Forty and my niece back.”
“No fucking way,” I bit out and immediately regretted it. I walked back to the desk, sat down again, gritted my teeth. He sensed how I felt about Lana, and I knew it, and I couldn’t hide it, take it back.
“You like her.” He laughed. “You really fucking like her.”
“Eat me.”
Mikhail stood to grab shooters and poured us whiskey, then pushed the shooter toward me. We didn’t have a deal, so I didn’t drink. He held up his glass while I didn’t touch mine. He dialed and issued a retreat order. We toasted and drank.
“An eye for an eye and we call it even,” he said.
Not having a niece, I frowned.
“I want Ivana.”
If he’d said he wanted orange pompoms and a little dress so he could go cheer for the Chicago Bears, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. My shock must’ve showed on my face, because Mikhail continued, “You heard me right.”
I cleared my throat, felt like wetting a rag and slapping his face, because what he asked for was…like adding gasoline to fire. “What do you mean you want Ivana?”
“I want her. Period.”
“To work for you? Because she doesn’t need my approval to close a deal for you or to find you things other people can’t find, though working for you is a big request.”
“I want her in my family.”
This bitch had lost his shit. “Are you crazy?”
“Only about bringing her in.” He shrugged. “I could kidnap her, but I’d rather not have to.”
“Do you even have a money problem?”
“Yes. I think it’s a snitch, and Ivana can help me. She can also help me with…some aspects of the business I don’t want to deal with anymore. Besides having babies inside my family. So she’s good for me all around.”
“Which aspects?”
“The snitch is someone high up in my ranks. Ivana can find him and replace him at the same time.”
“If you put her on your payroll, she would agree, and I wouldn’t interfere. One year. She would work for you for one year.”
“No can do. She has to cross and show loyalty, and she's gonna be most loyal to a dick that fills her.”
“Don’t fucking talk about her like that.”
He snorted. “How do you think I feel about you and my niece?”
“Do you understand what you’re asking for?”
“You are her boss, no?”
“She will kill you in your sleep.” Or out in the open.
Mikhail smiled.
I was dealing with a lunatic here. “You also understand that if you put a baby inside her and she hates you, she will bide her time and that boy is gonna hit you when you least expect it.”
“You think I'll have a boy?”
Groaning, I stood. “I worry about you.” I crossed the room, rolling my shoulders, preparing for what was to come outside.
“Do we have a deal?” he asked.
“I’ll let you know.”
“No Ivana, no Lana. Oh look, that rhymes.”
Rolling my eyes, I left his office.