Chapter 21 Cassius
CASSIUS
Icouldn’t believe I was fucking admitting this to myself—and I certainly was not going to fucking admit it to anyone else.
I was nervous.
I wasn’t palms sweaty, forehead damp, constantly swallowing like a pussy nervous.
I wasn’t the fucking teenager who had finally worked up the courage to ask out the hot girl; I’d never needed courage to do that.
I wasn’t even the businessman trying to wear a poker face as I tried to secure a multi-billion-dollar real estate deal.
No, simply put, I was nervous because I was about to visit men who had killed other men and who were well capable of doing so again.
Funny how it worked, I thought, as my driver took us to the clubhouse—although I was told it wasn’t really a clubhouse, not compared to the true clubhouses of the Black Reapers, but I did not care.
I had judged them from afar as too brusque and blunt for their own good.
You might see me from afar and know that I was wealthy and confident, but you would never know just how wealthy and just how confident I was until you came too close to do anything about it.
I had always assumed with the Reapers, because their tattoos, their jackets, and their club affiliation were always so obvious, it diminished their capabilities.
Boy, I was fucking wrong.
If anything, it made them more powerful than I’d presumed.
You could see all those things about them, you could pick them out going eighty miles per hour on the highway, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about them.
Dante—who sat in the back of my car with me, my muscle in case things went sideways—had tried for years to get them just to talk, never mind to my side, and they had never budged.
It was pretty fucking telling that in all my years of work, the only group that had never surrendered an inch in negotiations or stood down in a competition was the Black Reapers.
Granted, they didn’t try to “win” much with us, they just said no to our entreaties, but still.
And now here we were, going to meet them on their turf to ask for their help.
No wonder I was nervous.
Now, that didn’t mean I was going to wire a billion dollars out of desperation. That didn’t mean I thought I was going to die. Tough as shit as these guys were, even they knew the mysterious death of two billionaires would bring the house down on them.
But…
Well, rare was the situation where I did not feel like I had the upper hand. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it hadn’t happened in over a decade.
“Whatever you do,” Dante said, “do not make this about money. You won’t get them to budge a fucking inch, and they’ll shut you out otherwise.”
“I get what you are saying, Dante, but everyone who lives in this country needs money. I’ll hold off on it. But if they start making suggestions, then I’m going to use the tools we have at our disposal.”
Dante grumbled something incoherent.
“What?”
“The debt people owe motorcycle clubs can rarely be paid off with money.”
I glared at him, but he didn’t offer anything more. Probably because there wasn’t anything more to say.
Finally, the driver stopped at what looked like an abandoned car garage. There was a single motorcycle out front, along with a very tall, very bald man with his arms folded. The man was fucking huge; he made all of my security guards look like boys.
“I don’t know who the fuck that is,” Dante said. “That’s not Crush nor Prince.”
“One of their security guards?”
Dante laughed. It was a nervous laugh, but a loud one.
“Black Reapers don’t have fucking security guards,” he said. “They are their own security guards. Come on. Let me do the talking, you can interject as needed.”
I sighed. So be it. I may have made the request for the meeting, but Dante was right. I wouldn’t have requested a meeting with businessmen from Sweden and then expected I could speak fluent Swedish.
We got out of the car, and the big burly man only unfolded his arms. God, he was a fucking sight.
Probably six and a half feet tall? Two hundred and fifty pounds of rock solid muscle?
And his facial expression never changed.
Even when a breeze brushed by and I grimaced a bit, this man gave no reaction.
“Looking for Crush and Prince,” Dante said. “We came to them. Where are they?”
The man said nothing at first. He looked both of us in the eyes. I never backed down from anyone, and I would not start today. But fuck, this mountain of a man was damn good.
“We’re Cassius and Dante Vale,” Dante continued. “I know you are not Crush and you are not Prince. Who are you? Where are they?”
“They’re inside.”
It was not the big burly man who had spoken.
Rather, just to the side, it was someone with floppy black hair, tattoos on practically every part of his body, and a mean, haunted scowl.
This man was not as large as the big one—I doubted he was my height, even—but there was a scrappy presence to him that suggested he’d go toe to toe with anyone, the mountain man included.
“And are we welcome inside?” Dante said. “My brother here requested the meeting.”
“Then your brother can go inside,” the man said. “You stay out here.”
“The fuck?” Dante said. “We are brothers, we—”
“I’ll be fine, Dante,” I said.
A power move on their part. Not the first time I’d seen something like this. Probably the first time I’d been in a spot like this where my life felt in danger, but that was a matter of degree, not type.
“Did you ask for the two of us to be present?”
“No, I said I’d come. I didn’t think of it.”
A mistake on my part. I was so used to “meetings with an investor” or “meetings with a CEO” that actually entailed meetings with a half-dozen people that I hadn’t thought to make that distinction here. Oh, well. I trusted that my public status and reputation would keep me alive.
“Fucking idiot,” Dante muttered under his breath. I ignored him and walked forward. Mountain man did not move. Scrappy man only nodded to the doorway in the shadows, so shrouded that I had not seen it when we parked.
I turned around and gave a short nod to Dante. He did not look happy in the slightest. I could live with that as long as we both lived.
I stepped inside and saw a dim light hanging over a desk.
I almost laughed—it looked like something out of a torture scene from James Bond.
Everything here had clearly been set up to make me feel uncomfortable; I knew the game well.
I played it when we had other businessmen and politicians meet us. It was just a little more subtle.
But I had to admit, there was an undeniable tension I could not let go of so easily. It was one thing to see the game being played; it was another to know the opposing party had no limits to how they’d play the game.
“Crush?” I said into the darkness. “Prince?”
Suddenly, a blinding light appeared. I had to raise my hands to block the obnoxious light and let my eyes adjust.
“That’s quite the introduction,” I growled. “Are you trying to disorient me to make it easier to negotiate with me?”
“Negotiate?” a voice said, very much in the room. I had no idea whether it was Prince or Crush. “There will not be any negotiation.”
I waited for the follow-up explanation, but there was none.
“Can we talk?”
“That’s exactly what we’re doing now,” the same voice said.
Gradually, my eyes adjusted, and I caught the tail end of who was speaking.
It was a man with blonde, wavy, shoulder-length hair.
He had a certain powerful but weary presence to him, as if coming out of a years-long coma, trying to regain his sense of the world.
To his left, a taller, broad-shouldered man with brown-red hair and a thick beard stood with his arms crossed.
Both of them wore biker jackets; both of them had the Reapers insignia on them that I knew well.
“Prince, I take it,” I said to the one who had just spoken.
“You take it well,” Prince said. “As you can guess, this is Crush. You will forgive the presence of Connor and Butch outside. I had to take steps to make sure that we were on equal footing here.”
“I’m not sure what part of four on two makes this equal footing.”
“You had said you wanted to meet alone. Not you and your brother. Does that not give us the need to stack the table a bit?”
I bit my tongue to keep from doing so much as growling, let alone cursing them out.
In a business meeting, I would have made threats, warned I would not engage in business, and so forth.
But here, I had no leverage. More money meant nothing to them, and a lack of business would be met with a simple shrug.
“Let’s get to the point, shall we?” I said.
“I have… someone I care greatly about. She is being targeted by a rival casino family for… something. I truly do not know what, but I do not care to find out. This family, the Morrils. They are dirty, unethical, and not to be trusted. I come to you asking for protection for this person, to ensure nothing comes of her.”
“And how would you have that be done?” Prince said.
“By whatever means necessary.”
Prince and Crush looked at her. He looked back at me.
And then he started laughing. So did Crush. I swore outside, Connor started laughing, but that could easily have been the echo inside.
“Who the fuck do you think we are?” Prince finally said. “We’re an MC. We don’t take shit from anybody. But if you think we’re security for hire or assassins for hire, you’re out of your fucking mind.”
“We protect the ones we care about, and if someone is truly in the wrong—say, if they harm animals or women—we will fuck them up,” Crush said. “But we are not going to be your Judge Judy.”
I felt my fingers curl, doing my best to keep them unwound.
“And why did you never tell this to my brother?” I said. “Why did you not tell him this to prevent him from wasting his time?”
“Do you not think we did?” Prince said. “There is nothing secretive about us, Cassius.”