Alpha Boss (Wolf Kings #2)

Chapter 1

Natalia Kotova

Fuck. My head hurt.

I don’t know what they’d injected us with to keep us compliant, but the fallout from it was rough.

It felt like someone was hammering right in between my eyeballs and trying to force their way out from inside my brain.

I groaned and lolled my head forward, but that only seemed to make the throbbing worse.

For a while, I just breathed through the pain and listened. I didn’t open my eyes yet, wanting to get a handle on my surroundings before I did anything rash.

A soft, shaky breath next to me caught my attention and I turned my head so that I could hear better.

A soft distinctly feminine moan of anguish followed, and I knew that I wasn’t the only woman caught here alone.

After a few more moments, I could count at least three women here in the room with me.

Off in the distance, there were hushed voices.

There was no question in my mind that those were definitely male.

I pushed aside the pounding in my head and focused on making sure I was alright. I was sitting in a hard straight-backed chair. I slid my legs against it slightly. It was made of wood or something cheap. There was no metal that I could feel, which was good.

My wrists were bound behind my back with rope. I tested the knot and it seemed loose enough. Slowly, I began twisting my hands back and forth, gradually loosening my bonds in silence. I smiled a little at my success.

I opened my eyes finally.

My light blonde hair had fallen in front of my face. It would be a mess to comb through later. It was dirty and my scalp itched. I would bet money that the traffickers hadn’t bathed any of us since they’d stolen us off the streets of Belarus.

Well, they’d stolen the other girls. Not me. My presence here in Las Vegas wasn’t a mistake or a coincidence.

I’d gotten myself taken on purpose.

I glanced toward the floor. The tile was old, probably something from the seventies or eighties.

It was dull orange and cracked in a number of places.

There weren’t any windows, which probably meant we were somewhere underground.

There was little that distinguished the room from anything else, but upon closer inspection, I started seeing small clues here and there as to where in the city I’d been moved to.

There weren’t any men in the room. Not even a guard.

There weren’t cameras on the walls or anything indicating that we were being watched from afar either.

This honestly surprised me because they’d spent so much effort in transporting us all the way here and had seemingly just left us here on our own.

Overconfident pricks.

Their arrogance would be their downfall. When they had enough money and power to get whatever they wanted, they sometimes forgot about one very important thing about people they’d hurt in the process.

Desperation made people reckless.

It also made them angry.

I licked my lips, surveying the room a bit more.

There was a stack of old chairs likely identical to the one I was strapped to against the wall.

The cheap incandescent light overhead flickered several times before steadying once again.

There was a big pile of cardboard boxes against the wall.

Most of them were blank, but there were a few with labels or some indication of what the original contents were.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out the small text.

The first letter was definitely a ‘T’ and the ones following looked like ‘rop.’ My mind raced, and my grin widened a bit more with a sense of victory. I knew where I was.

They’d taken me to the Tropicana.

In preparation for this day, I’d memorized the layouts of multiple hotels and casinos so that I could do what I do best. According to the Tropicana’s blueprints, I was somewhere beneath the casino floor or the theater. I wasn’t sure which yet though.

The other women hadn’t appeared to have woken up yet.

They still seemed to be out of it. I worked my wrists a bit faster, hastening the loosening of the rope until it fell on the floor behind me.

With a soft sigh, I brought my arms forward and rolled out the soreness in my shoulders from their disuse.

With the utmost care, I stood up and listened more closely to the hushed male voices I could only just make out not far away.

“I’ve circulated the images of the women. We are lucky in that a few are virgins. They will fetch a very high price on the market,” a man said.

“Our profit margins need to be higher. The transport cost was more expensive this time around. Jonny kept referencing inflation and the like, but I think he’s getting greedy. We may need to deal with him at some point,” another muttered.

“Or just replace them. I know a guy.”

“You know guys everywhere, Vinny,” another answered, but he sounded amused.

“I can’t help it,” Vinny chuckled. “It’s just useful having a guy when you need one.”

I moved closer to the door, glancing at the vent down by the floor. The voices were coming from there and I dipped a bit closer, trying to overhear whatever I could before I went off to search for what I’d really come for.

It was no accident that I was down here in the slum basement of an old hotel in Vegas.

It was all part of a perfectly engineered plan to force my way into the inner workings of the human trafficking route that went between Belarus and Las Vegas.

I knew that the city was mainly run by several high-powered mafia families here in Sin City.

Most people thought that the mob had vanished there after the nineteen sixties, but in reality, they’d just gotten smarter.

They’d gone underground, hidden themselves beneath corporate CEOs and fancy offices in the penthouse suites of the biggest casinos in the city.

They’d opened offshore accounts, laundered money in ways only a tech genius could figure out, and sold drugs through a complicated system of henchmen that powered the Vegas nightlife scene.

But… that wasn’t all.

They also sold women. Very pretty women from Eastern Europe. Exotic and slender Japanese women. Some from India. Korean. Chinese. Russian. You name it. They sold them all. All you had to do was pay them enough money.

At some of their hotels, it was a special add-on to the penthouse suite. At others, a special delivery service if you knew the right words to say to the right people.

These people had taken my sister. Her name was Irina Kotova.

They’d stolen her right off the streets of Minsk on her way to her very first class at the Belarusian State University.

It had taken every single one of my father’s KGB connections to ferret out the details of her capture.

She’d stopped for a cup of coffee and had disappeared out the back of the shop.

We’d followed every piece of evidence that we’d been able to find, and it had led us here.

Now I just needed to find her and rescue her from the mob that threatened to tear my family apart.

I had my father’s full backing, including a storage container nearby that had been filled with whatever weapons I would need.

My mind raced through the route from the Tropicana to that container. It would be no more than a fifteen-minute walk from this section of the strip.

Perfect.

One of the girls groaned behind me and I turned back.

To my right, someone had stupidly left a box cutter on top of one of the pieces of cardboard and I slowly walked over to it.

I closed my right hand around it and clicked it open.

I couldn’t spend the time waiting for these women to wake up.

They might panic and give away my position.

That was too big of a risk for me to take, but I could at least make sure to give them a fighting chance to escape.

Carefully, I cut each of their ties so that their wrists were no longer bound. When I was finished, I bowed my head. If I could, I would come back for them, but right now I needed to focus on finding the kingpin who had stolen my sister. I needed to know where they had taken her.

I moved cautiously back to the door, listening carefully for sounds of anyone beyond it. I couldn’t hear anything. Not a peep from a single person other than the women here in the room with me. When I reached for the doorknob, I found it unlocked.

Idiots. It was lost on me how they’d survived this long.

I turned it and slipped out into the dark hall.

Eventually I started hearing the sounds of men talking again.

I made my way toward those voices, taking note that they were still jabbering on about how pretty the new stock of women were, which of them would take a turn fucking a virgin pussy, and which of them would enjoy the assholes after their friends were finished.

I’d like to say I was surprised by it, but it was nothing I hadn’t heard before.

In my line of work, it wasn’t all pretty dresses and roses. Sometimes it took me below ground into the sewers and sometimes I had to deal with the vilest drivel of humanity.

Like these stupid, arrogant cocksuckers.

I was one of the best assassins in the world and I was paid very well for it.

Since my father’s departure from the KGB, he had taken to dealing weapons instead.

He made millions off the arms race, running guns and ammo and whatever else governments needed to fund wars and conflicts around the world and I was the eldest daughter in a family with no sons.

That meant that I had a responsibility to my family.

From a young age, I’d been trained to handle guns, knives, you name it. If you could kill someone with it, I’d learned how to use it. In many circles, it didn’t take much more than my name to send people running, which only made the chase more fun.