When I reached the pit, I found Jenna waiting patiently by the door to the interrogation room. She leaned against the wall with her hands crossed beneath the swell of her breasts. I walked up to her, deciding I wanted to keep her around a little longer. I decided not to give her another chance to talk to Dima right away, on the off-chance that he might have actually given her some information, bringing our work arrangement to an end. I couldn’t risk letting her walk out of here before I had the chance to work on her myself.
“I don’t think you’re ready to talk to him again,” I told her, watching the disappointment weigh down her features. It was obvious she’d been thinking about the possibility of getting information from him and getting out of here. And it felt good to see that hope stolen from her.
“But I thought that was what you wanted,” she argued.
“Not yet. Get back upstairs. I want to talk to you before you talk to him again. I want to know some specific information.” I figured if I let her in on what she was trying to get out of him, I would have a better chance of getting through to her.
She tilted her head. “I don’t get you. One minute you’re telling me to get down here to talk to him, and the next you’re telling me it’s not time, that you need to basically brief me on what you want me to ask.”
“Just go upstairs and wait for me,” I ordered her in my best patient voice.
“Yes, sir,” Jenna snapped, pushing herself off the wall and walking toward the stairs.
“Oh, and, Jenna,” I called after her.
“What, Garrett?” She turned and spit the words out at me. My God, she was mesmerizing.
“Don’t go anywhere. If you leave, I know how to find you, and I will find you,” I threatened her. “And when I find you, you’ll regret it.”
She didn’t say anything else. She simply turned and finished crossing the pit. I watched her take the stairs back up to the garage before turning around fishing out my keys.
When I entered the interrogation room, Dima looked at me with questions in his eyes. He was obviously wondering where his little friend, the professor, had gone. I smiled at him. It was a humorless smile. There wasn’t anything kind or funny about my visit. The smile on my face came from malice. I wanted nothing more than to go ahead and hurt this man.
I knew the only thing causing him pain would accomplish was my own sick pleasure. I knew I wouldn’t get any information out of him. He didn’t speak a lick of English. But maybe pain would be a good teacher.
“You thought you were going to get to talk to your little friend again, didn’t you?” I taunted him.
He just stared at me, deaf to every word I said. He said something to me in Russian, but, of course, I understood him about as well as he understood me. And I had the upper hand here, not him. His eyes tracked me closely as I walked over to the chair I’d knocked over earlier and picked it back up. It didn’t take a Russian scholar to know what he was thinking behind those expressive eyes.
“You’re wondering why I came back in here alone, aren’t you?”
He just stared and blinked.
I walked around to his side of the table and wrapped a hand around one of his wrists, pulling out my pocket knife and holding it where he could see it. “Well, I’m here to get more information from you, of course. You know what I need to know, but if you continue to refuse to talk, I’m going to have to hurt you. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to have to cut off your fingers.”
I held the small, sharp blade over his knuckles.
“Where is Igor?” I asked slowly and loudly, speaking as clearly as I could.
Dima just looked at my blade over his fingers and moved frantically in the chair, as if he were trying to scoot back and away from me. He panted something over and over, begging me not to do it. In Russian, of course, but I could still understand the sentiment in his tone.
I shook my head and laughed in his face. “I can’t understand you, you sorry sack of shit. You’re going to have to try harder.”
I pressed the blade against the middle finger on his right hand and slowly drew it across his skin, slicing open the knuckle. Dima strained against the straps and ropes holding him in the chair and groaned against the pain, letting out a string of expletives, all in Russian.
I knew it was pointless to try to talk to him or get anything out of him. I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand what he was telling me, no matter what it was. But it felt good to see him writhe in pain, especially since he was just as unable to express himself to me as I was to understand it.
“You know, Dima, I’m starting to like our little arrangement,” I told him. “You can’t understand me. I can’t understand you. You can say whatever you want, and it doesn’t make a difference, and I can just treat you the way you deserve to be treated without feeling bad. For all I know, you could literally be begging me to do it again.”
But no matter what I did, I wasn’t really getting anywhere with him, and that was frustrating. He had the info I needed, but Jenna was my only hope of getting any of it out of him.
Dima worked for Igor, the most powerful and ruthless mob boss in the city. We’d been gunning for each other since day one. Igor had the whole Russian mob thing going for him. He had connections back home supplying him with funds and muscle whenever he needed it. There were even rumors that he was involved in human trafficking, bringing Russian women over with the promise of a better life only to sell them off to American men like pieces of property.
Dima was his right hand man. If there was anything to know about Igor, Dima knew it, but the language barrier made him invaluable. He was like a walking safe. The information he protected was only accessible for a select few. The rest of us who didn’t speak Russian were out of luck.
Dima had been sent by Igor to assassinate me. One of my brothers had intercepted the information on the street and alerted me to the threat posed by Dima. When he made his attempt on my life, we were waiting for him.
“I haven’t forgotten how you tried to kill me,” I taunted him, leaning down so that I spoke directly into his ear. Though he couldn’t understand what I was saying, I hoped my voice was still unnerving.
We’d gone out for a ride to draw him out and force his hand. What he hadn’t realized, of course, was that when he’d set up shop in one of the old abandoned buildings nearby, he’d been spotted by a couple of my guys. By the time we hit the road, we had people in place to take him down and bring him in.
Jose and Carson barged in on him as he was aiming his sniper rifle at me. They’d claimed he hadn’t put up a fight, but the bruises he came in with told a different story. The boys had roughed him up a little before bringing him to me, and I couldn’t blame them for that. He’d earned it.
We had expected some sort of retaliation from Igor. We’d just undercut him on a drug deal, effectively stealing one of his long-term clients, a local bigshot dealer we’d been trying to score a deal with for the last couple of years. He’d dealt exclusively with Igor for as long as he’d been on the street, but we knew we had a better deal for him, so we made it happen. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset with us. After all, it was just business. Just like killing Dima after getting what we needed out of him was going to be business.
It was satisfying to have Igor’s top man and number one assassin tied down to a chair in the MC’s basement, even if I couldn’t understand a single word he said. I got endless hours of enjoyment out of going downstairs and taunting him with things he couldn’t understand either, as ridiculous as I knew it was.
I leaned back down to his ear. “If you don’t start talking, I’m going to have to kill you,” I said calmly, giving myself a little chuckle.
I looked at the big strong Russian tied to his chair, helpless, clueless, completely at my mercy. I patted him on his massive shoulder and laughed.
“I guess I’ll send your friend back down here,” I told him. “I might also know a couple of guys who’ll enjoy coming down and getting to play with you a little bit. I might send them down after Jenna comes back.”
He tilted his head back to scowl at me, as if to remind me that he couldn’t understand me.
I laughed and patted his shoulder again before walking out of the room. Now that I had someone who could actually talk to him, it wasn’t as fun to mess with him. I realized I was wasting time that Jenna could have been using to try to break him down.
Oh well. He still deserved it for thinking he could get one over on us. I glanced at him one last time before closing the door and locking it behind me.
I wondered how a conversation between us would have gone if we had been able to understand each other. It certainly wouldn’t have been friendly. I knew that much for sure.
I shut the door and locked it, turning away to walk upstairs and get Jenna. It was her turn to talk to Dima and see if she couldn’t get him to come around.
Besides, I had another job to do. I had to figure out how to use this situation with Dima to my advantage with Jenna. I had to figure out how I was going to seduce her. She wasn’t like any other woman I’d been with before. Jenna seemed more sophisticated than my usual taste in women.
On my way upstairs to get her, I decided it was time to sit her down and talk to her about what I needed and why I needed it. I didn’t want to be too open and run her off, but I wanted her to have at least a little understanding of why she was asking what she was asking when she went back in there alone. I figured maybe that would give her a better opportunity to break through his wall.
Plus, letting her in on what we were doing here with Dima would help me break down her walls as well. She seemed to appreciate being in the loop, and whenever we talked, I could sense that she wanted more information out of me than just the basic, “say this,” or “say that,” that I was giving her so far.
When I walked into the clubhouse, I spotted her sitting at our table with another glass of wine. My heart skipped a beat. I couldn’t explain what she was doing to me, but when I looked at her, I felt a strange, deep desire for her. I had to figure out what not to tell her before I made it to the table.