Chapter 25 #2
The stage is hard beneath my knees. It’s cold in here, or maybe that’s my shock now that I’ve plummeted out of subspace. I have to swallow a few times to bring spit into my dry mouth.
Cole shudders as I cup his bollocks in my hand. Looking down at me, his face is a mask of emotions I can’t name. “Hurt me,” I mouth, and then I take his cock between my lips.
He doesn’t want this, but I know how to make him respond. The swirl of my tongue… The edge of my teeth… The way I suck extra hard at the tip…
He grimaces, but he’s hard in no time. Grabbing my chin to stop me from finishing the job, he pushes me onto all fours. Leaning close to my ear, he whispers, “Your safeword always works.”
I believe him. I always have. He’ll honor my safeword, even if it costs him his life. Even if it costs me mine. I nod, because there’s nothing left to say.
He follows Tarasov’s command.
At first, I bite back my cries because I don’t want to give that Russian cunt the satisfaction of hearing my pain. But one slap—the flat of Cole’s hand across the cane’s marks—takes me by complete surprise, and I wail without meaning to.
The sound unlocks something inside me, opening up a reservoir of power I didn’t know I held. After that, I scream. I weep. I beg.
But I never, ever say red.
Near the end, Cole is close to coming. I hear it in his breathing. I feel it in his fingers, excavating my hips. I’m sobbing, exhausted, barely able to support myself on elbows and knees.
As Cole empties inside me, he reaches around and pinches my clit.
I’m not supposed to do this. I shouldn’t be able to come—not with the agony he’s extracted from every nerve in my body. But his familiar pinch does it, along with his ferocious roar. He’s aching, and I’m spent, but his touch carries me over the edge.
This isn’t the blinding orgasm of the first time he tied me up in a hotel room in Boston. It isn’t the overwhelming symphony he’s played on me in our dungeon at home. It isn’t the fierce redemption he gave me after he watched me execute the monster who haunted my childhood.
This orgasm is tiny. It pulls me into the deepest parts of my brain. It spins me tighter and tighter, into a place no other man has taken me, into a sanctuary where no other man will ever, ever be. It’s the most beautiful gift Cole could ever give me.
I’m stunned when he pulls out. Immediately, I ache in places I didn’t know had nerves. I’m bleeding and I’m burned and I’m frozen. I’m shivering so hard my teeth feel like they’re shattering inside my head.
But Cole is whispering in my ear. He’s saying that he has me, that no one can hurt us, that we’re safe.
I don’t have to move.
I don’t have to speak.
I don’t have to think.
Cole will take care of everything.
Someone is moaning, the same sound rising and falling, over and over like a siren blocks away.
“Hush,” Cole says.
His arms fold around me. He smells like soap and shampoo and toothpaste.
“Take this,” he says. “It will help with the pain.”
He puts something on the back of my tongue. Before I can gag, he brings a cool, hard edge to my mouth. I purse my lips like a greedy little bird, and I swallow.
“Go back to sleep,” he says.
I do.
Cole holds me in a shower. After, he wraps my hair in a towel and my body in a robe. He walks me back to a bed, and he helps me curl up on my side. He pulls a blanket up to my ear.
“Don’t go,” I say.
“I’m here.”
“Hold me,” I say.
He climbs into bed beside me. I reach for his arm and pull it close to my side.
“Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Say that again.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Again.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere.”
I wake, and it’s dark. Faint gray light creeps in at the curtains. I can hear horns honking, but they sound far away. I struggle to sit, pushing myself up with my elbows.
“Go back to sleep,” Cole says. I squint and see him in a chair by the window.
“What time is it?”
“Almost nine o’clock.”
“Day or night?”
“Night.”
“What day?”
“Thursday.”
I’ve lost two days.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“The Plaza. In New York.”
I want that to be enough questions and answers. I wish I could go back to sleep forever and never need to think about anything ever again. But I have to know.
“What happened?”
Sighing, he comes to sit on the edge of the bed. He tells me all of it, the things that I remember, and more I didn’t see.
Tarasov took the phone from Jonathan, sending himself the recording.
Federov’s men closed around both pakhans, getting them out of the club.
Cole took me to the room where we met Fournier. He held me until a doctor came, someone Gage keeps on call for when things get out of hand. After a thorough exam, I got a tetanus booster and antibiotics.
Jacobson’s men met us at the door to the club. Drew Cameron, my bodyguard, is stationed outside this suite right now. Two more Sawgrass soldiers are on duty in the lobby. Collins is back in Washington, under lock and key.
I’m bruised and exhausted and every muscle in my body feels like it’s been pounded with a mallet. But I didn’t need stitches, even where Antonov shoved his chair leg between my thighs. I haven’t had a pain pill since last night. I have no internal injuries.
“Almost like you knew what you were doing,” I say.
Cole doesn’t match my forced smile.
“And the money?” I ask.
“What money?”
“Tarasov’s hundred grand.”
Cole puffs air through his lips. “This was never about money.”
“But we got it?”
“Yes,” he says. “Rider handed it over without taking his share.”
I reach for Cole’s hand. “You did what you had to do,” I say. “We both did.”
“I’ll kill him.” He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t sound angry or vindictive. He’s simply stating a fact, as if he were giving a stranger his address or telling an interviewer his net worth.
“Killing’s too good for him.” I say. “I want him to suffer. I want him to lose every single thing he holds dear. His house. His men. His reputation. I want him to wake up with nothing, and to know you and I are the ones who took it all.”
“Nothing…” Cole echoes, and he gets very still.
“What?” I finally ask.
“Shannon.”
“What about her?”
“There’s one con she always wanted to run but never got the chance. It takes money to stage, a lot of it. And people. And time. She could never pull everything together in one place.”
“What is it?”
“The Big Store. You build out a space and put in people like they’re running a real business. A gambling parlor. A bank. An investment firm. It all looks legit. And after a month or a year or whenever, you shut things down and walk off with everything you took in from the marks.”
“What sort of business would Tarasov fall for?”
He’s quiet for so long I think I’ll have to repeat my question. But finally he says, “The Mid-Atlantic Joint Task Force for the Interception and Interdiction of Organized Crime. MAJAT.”
I grew up in the Canton Crew. I can name every law enforcement agency in the country, from beat cops to the director of the FBI, all the yokes with their hands out. “There isn’t any MAJAT.”
“Not yet. But there will be—a joint effort from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. We just have to build it.
My head hurts. “Let’s say we find a way to pick him up. Even find a way to keep him for a while. Eventually we’ll have to let him go.”
“Exactly.”
“You aren’t making sense.”
“MAJAT will record every second Tarasov is in custody. And they’ll accidentally-on-purpose post it to the internet.
When he slips—and he will—the entire bratva will see him betray the brotherhood.
Not just Baltimore—every Russian mobster in the country.
Once MAJAT lets Tarasov go, he’ll have a deep red target on his back. His own people will take care of him.”
“What makes you so sure Tarasov will slip?”
“His son did.”
Pyotr Tarasov broke when the FBI dragged him in for questioning about diddling kids. We know that because of Cole’s computer program, Viktor, because of searches Pyotr ran before I killed him.
“And you’re sure you can make Nikolai squeal?”
“I don’t have to,” Cole says. “You will. You’ll be guiding the interrogation the entire time. Everything that motherfucker has ever done to you, to the Canton Crew, to the entire city of Baltimore—you’ll use it. And you will make him pay.”
Turning Tarasov’s own men against him… It’s terrible. It’s cruel. And I can’t imagine a more fitting fate for a shitehawk like Nikolai Pavlovich Tarasov.
Lying here in the dark, talking about murder as if we’ll invite the pakhan in for Sunday Roast, I can’t imagine how I’ll break him down.
But the thought of doing so heals me more than anything else Cole has done for me in this luxury hotel room.
“Tell me more,” I finally say. “How do we set up MAJAT?”