Blade

 

The night passed with no leads on Axel and no sleep for me. I was up all night worrying about Maggie. I knew she was safe, but I felt personally responsible for her safety, and it was killing me not to be able to keep an eye on her. On top of that, I had constructed a very complicated lie surrounding the situation I found myself in. I felt guilty for dumping her off at the safehouse and for lying to my prez about what was going on, but I had to handle it on my own. After all, it seemed like I was the one being targeted.

 

Morning turned into afternoon. I had reached out to my eyes and ears on the street to see if anyone had spotted Axel, but he was keeping a low profile. Rightfully so. By bringing the auction into his little scheme, he probably had a few guys under Vlad looking for him, too. He wasn’t in a good position.

 

As the afternoon wore on, I got a call from Vlad. My heart stopped when his name came up on my phone. My breath caught in my throat, and my lungs squeezed in the vacuum left behind in my chest.

 

“Blade, hey, I have a job for you.” He was talking as soon as I answered.

 

“What’s up, Vlad?” I asked, my voice choked by my clenched throat.

 

“We are holding a special auction, and I need you to work it for me.” He spoke like there was no option of declining.

 

“When is it?” I asked. I failed to mention that I was reluctant to accept his job because I was still cleaning up from the last auction.

 

“It will be soon. Alexander will get you all the details, as he usually does. But we have a very special guest who will be in attendance,” he said, baiting me with partial information.

 

I waited a moment, just to see if he was planning on telling me who the special guest was without my having to ask. But he didn’t offer up anything else.

 

“All right, who is it?” I asked with a sigh.

 

He laughed. It struck me as a particularly Russian laugh. “Yuri Ivanov.”

 

“Wait, you mean the Yuri Ivanov? I thought you guys were rivals, Vlad,” I said, bewildered. Yuri was the only person who could even be considered a rival of Vlad’s. He was the powerful head of a gang from upstate. He controlled cities in other states, too.

 

“Well, apparently, he caught wind of our auctions down here, and he wants to take part in them. He wants to buy one of my girls, Blade, so instead of making him wait until the end of January for our next auction, I’ve decided to schedule a special auction just for him,” Vlad explained, taking the time to brag. Hell, he’d earned it.

 

“I’m floored,” I admitted. “I thought Yuri Ivanov was just a legend. You know, a lot of people think he’s just a name his gang invented to give them a more menacing identity, and to give them a way to tie their cities together.”

 

“No, he’s real, and he’s coming. Like I said, Alexander will give you the details when the time comes,” he said. “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me, Blade. You’ve been a real comrade.”

 

“Thank you, Vlad. That means a lot.” I still felt like I owed him so much, so to hear him express any gratitude was pretty fucking huge in my book.

 

“I understand there have been some troubles with the last auction,” he continued.

 

“Yes, sir, but I’m cleaning it up. I’m tracking down the person who caused the trouble. I know who it is, so now I just have to find him. It won’t be long now. I’m on his trail.” I was lying to everyone, it seemed. I did know who Axel Walker was, but I wasn’t hot on his trail. I was basically waiting for a tip.

 

I wondered if Vlad had found out about the trouble from Alexander or if anyone else had reached out to tell him when Titus Bard started calling around about his underage girl. Either way, he knew I was working on cleaning it up. He knew I had it under control. What he probably didn’t know was that I took one of the girls home with me. He also probably didn’t know the underage girl was staying in one of the Marauders’ safehouses. He didn’t need to know the details.

 

“If there is anything I can do to help, you know how to reach me,” he said.

 

“Yes, I know. Thank you.”

 

“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to reach out to you for this job. Nothing can go wrong with this auction, Blade. Security is going to have to be tight. There can be no undocumented girls, no slip-ups with underage girls, none of that, do you understand?” he asked, getting to the real point of his call. It felt like a threat more than a question, as if hidden somewhere in his tone was the message that we couldn’t slip up like we had with the previous auction.

 

“Yes, sir, I understand. There won’t be any other problems with this one. I’ll see to it personally.”

 

“And just to be clear, you’ll take the job?” he asked.

 

“I will. You know I’ll be there,” I explained to him.

 

“Excellent. Thank you, Blade. Expect a call from Alexander soon.”

 

And he hung up.

 

I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time we were on the phone. I set the phone down and stared at the walls a moment longer before checking to see if any new messages had come in during our conversation. There was nothing. No one had spotted Axel yet.

 

To top it off, I had bigger fish to worry about. Yuri Ivanov was coming to town. If my time on the street had taught me anything, it was that there were no coincidences. When significant occurrences happened close together, there was a good chance they were related. By that line of reasoning, Yuri’s visit was going to tie in with Maggie and Anthea. It somehow had something to do with Axel, or else Axel was going to try to cause trouble with it.

 

Normally, fuck-ups like the last auction led to people dying or disappearing. Vlad wasn’t known for his leniency. My loyalty and dedication over the years was being rewarded with my life. It also meant I would be in a position to find out who was helping Axel infiltrate the auctions, if I couldn’t stop him before.

 

Still, it did mean working another sex slave auction and participating in something we were vehemently opposed to in the Marauders. If I could have, I would have saved all the girls from being sold, not just Maggie and underage Anthea, but there was only so much I could do to help.

 

With Maggie, I felt like I was doing more than just helping. I groaned and ran a hand across my face. Frustrated, I tucked my phone in my pocket and got up from the bed, where I’d been sitting most of the day, making phone calls and sending out texts in an effort to locate Axel.

 

I walked downstairs and sat at the bar. A couple of the guys were watching a fight on TV. UFC. They really got into it, because it wasn’t staged like wrestling, and it wasn’t as controlled and restricted as boxing.

 

“What’s going on?” Mac asked from behind the bar as he passed me a Guinness.

 

“Too much. Not enough. Hell, who knows?” I said, raising my bottle to him.

 

“What happened to that girl you had in here yesterday?” he asked.

 

I didn’t realize anyone had even noticed her, much less realized she was gone. “Man, she’s got a lot of shit going on. I took her to one of the safehouses. She needs some distance while I help her clean up her mess,” I told him.

 

“It’s that bad, huh? Or do you think there might be something else to it all?” he asked, staring right at me.

 

Mac was a freak. He did all the tattoos for the MC. He was covered head to toe and wore his hair in a mohawk to show off all the ink he had on his scalp. He had piercings all over, as well, and he often walked around without a shirt on, showing his tattooed bird chest off because of his nipple rings. He was a freak, but he was a loyal brother, and he often offered a different perspective on things, so we didn’t give him a hard time about how off-the-wall he got sometimes.

 

“It’s a little bit of both, I think,” I told him, admitting out loud that there were other reasons for sending her away. She wasn’t the one who needed the space. I did. She was an auction girl, jam packed with drama.

 

“I think you should go for it, brother,” Mac said.

 

“What do you mean, go for it? Go for what?” I tilted my beer back.

 

“You know exactly what I mean, bro. Go for her. You know you’ve thought about it. You should make a move on her, brother.”

 

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you fucking with me? If I wanted her to be mine, she already would be.”

 

“Then, why are you sitting here talking to me instead of going after her?” he asked.

 

“Did you pierce your brain recently? Do you think you’re some kind of mind reader or something, Mac? How do you know how I feel about this girl? Man, she’s just drama. She’s trouble waiting to happen,” I explained to him, going off on my own little tirade about her.

 

“You want to know how I know what you’re thinking? It’s all in the way you’re acting now,” he replied.

 

“Fine. I’ll go see her,” I said. “But not because you told me to. And not because I want to make her mine. I’m going to go check on her, make sure she’s all right.”

 

Mac laughed as I finished off my Guinness and hopped up from the barstool. “Good luck, Blade,” he said.

 

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” I told him. “I’m not trying to win her over or anything like that. I’m just going to check on her, brother.”

 

“Yeah, sure. Tell me all about it when you get back,” Mac said as I walked away.

 

“Always got something to say,” I muttered under my breath as I walked outside toward my car.

 

I had gone downstairs to get a drink so I could feel better about what I was about to do for Vlad. Instead, I felt worse about what I wasn’t doing for Maggie. I wasn’t protecting her by keeping her at a safehouse. All I was doing was keeping her at arm’s length so I could work. I was keeping my distance so I didn’t have to admit she was already getting in my head.

 

As I pulled away from the clubhouse, I decided not to go over there empty-handed. I didn’t want to show up at random like some kind of stalker. I needed to bring something with me, so I decided to stop and pick up some Chinese takeout. It was good for just about every occasion, and it gave me a semi-legitimate reason to be over there.

 

All I could think about on the way over there was the horror of yet another auction. Images of girls bound to those upright tables haunted me. Once they were in the trade, they were gone. And I was helping to facilitate that. I knew that soon, I was going to be helping with a big auction, and I couldn’t digest that notion. Especially not after rescuing Maggie and pulling Anthea out of some pervert’s room.

 

At least with Maggie, I was trying to do the right thing. I hoped it was the right thing. I was going to continue to protect her now that she was away from the auction block.