Blaze: Kings of Hell MC (9 page)

“You’re telling me,” I said with a laugh.

Julia

When I stepped into the room where Dimitri was being held, something felt off immediately. The large Russian was slumped over in his chair, and his breathing seemed heavier and more labored than usual. The room also seemed darker, but I chalked that up to being in well-lit rooms since the last time I saw him. I figured my eyes would adjust to the dark room eventually.

I sat down across from him in my jeans and tank top, realizing I didn’t look the most professional but not caring. We weren’t exactly in the most professional setting. Besides, I thought that a little skin might make him talk. I was starting to realize that the men around me operated with a different set of expectations than the men I normally had to work with.

I needed Dimitri to talk. I could sense that Gage’s patience was beginning to wear thin with his adversary, and I suspected it was wearing thin with me as well. I sat and waited for him to acknowledge me before getting started. I wanted to be sure he hadn’t just passed out in the chair.

“Dimitri, are you okay?” I asked him.

He didn’t lift his face, but I could see his eyes looking up at me. Something wasn’t right. Maybe he was losing his patience with this whole situation as well. He spat something on the floor. “I’m sorry, Dr. Danvers,” he started. “I don’t feel much like talking today.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I need you to talk. You and I are both depending on your willingness to talk right now,” I told him. I crossed my legs and sat back, trying to regain my professional composure.

“Why do you say that?” he asked me. He hacked something up and spit on the floor again. This time I heard the wet smack of whatever it was he’d expelled from his body.

I looked up at the dim light glowing above us. It didn’t offer enough illumination to see what he was spitting up on the floor across from me, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was something I wouldn’t have wanted to see anyway.

“Gage isn’t going to tolerate not getting any answers out of either of us for much longer,” I explained. “I think I’m going to be replaced, and I wouldn’t count on the next person being quite as friendly. I also worry about what he’s going to do to you if you don’t start talking.”

He laughed, hacking up more fluid and spitting. “Don’t worry about me, Dr. Danvers,” he said, sitting up and leaning back from the light.

“Seriously, Dimitri, are you okay?” I insisted. He really didn’t sound okay today. He sounded sick.

“I’m fine,” he said confidently, finding his solid, stern voice again and clearing his throat.

“Well, look, I want to ensure that you stay that way,” I told him, “so give me something to work with here.”

He sat quietly for a moment. I couldn’t even hear him breathing anymore. All I could see of him were his arms tied to the chair. The rest of him faded into the darkness beyond the light.

I started to ask if he was alright again, but I heard him shift in his chair underneath his restraints. He was still with me. He took a slow, deep breath.

“Ivan has a pretty big drug deal coming up soon,” his disembodied voice said flatly from just beyond the reach of the light hanging down just above us.

“That’s news,” I said. Encouraged by this small revelation, I leaned forward, trying to keep my voice even and contain my excitement at the information that had just spilled out in front of me. “Can you tell me when and where?”

“I don’t know anything else,” he said. “It may have already happened while I’ve been in here.”

I narrowed my eyes at him—at the darkness where he should have been—displeased with his reluctance to provide more information. “This is not much to take to Gage, Dimitri. I really need more.”

He coughed. “I don’t have anything else.”

“You know, this is probably just enough to piss him off even more. Do you really expect me to believe that Ivan’s right hand man doesn’t know the details about a big drug deal he’s got planned?” I mocked him.

He took a deep, heavy breath.

“Why is he keeping you out of the loop, Dimitri?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, growing irate. “I
am
the loop, Dr. Danvers. Do you understand? He doesn’t do anything that I don’t know about. Don’t ever think for a second that I don’t know what Ivan is doing. Who do you think arranges it?”

“Okay, what else do you know?” I asked him calmly. I had him right where I wanted him, ready to prove to me that he hadn’t been forgotten, that even in his isolation, he was still relevant to Ivan’s operations.

He paused. I wasn’t prepared to wait. I expected him to be more forthcoming with information now that I’d pissed him off. I could almost hear him thinking about which details he felt comfortable letting me know. I stared at his arms with the ropes strapping them down to the arms of the chair. I couldn’t help but wonder if he would have been more willing to talk if I could give him a little room to move around.

Then, I noticed he seemed dirty. I wondered how he would have gotten dirty sitting in this room. It was fairly clean, if a little dusty.

“All I know is there will be some shady government officials and members of law enforcement there,” he said reluctantly. He obviously wanted me to know he knew what he was talking about without having to provide any real information.

“I’m sorry, what? What government officials?” My eyes were bulging out of my head. This was not at all what I expected to hear from him.

He laughed slowly, dryly. “How do you think Ivan gets away with what he does without ever getting caught?” he asked me. “He pays off government officials and law enforcement so he gets to stay in business. You really are new to this, aren’t you?” he mocked me.

“I told you I am. Now, tell me who’s going to be there.” I couldn’t contain my excitement or my revulsion at his news.

He didn’t answer. I couldn’t see his face, but I could feel him smiling in the dark.

“Dammit, Dimitri.” I smacked the table. “Who is going to be there?” I stood up, leaning over the table towards him.

He laughed at me, a slow, menacing laugh. He was mocking my insistence. I felt foolish for pressuring a man I couldn’t even see. I needed to see him. I reached up for the light, but the fixture was too hot to touch, threatening to scorch my fingers from just the lightest touch. I hit it, knocking it side to side, shifting the light with it so I could see the Russian tied in front of me.

And what I saw sickened and enraged me. I finally saw why he wasn’t talking. I saw why he was so amused at my attempts to “help” him by getting information from him. I saw why he coughed and spit up when he tried to talk to me.

And, most importantly, I saw why Gage had tried to stall me for as long as he did.

As the light swayed back and forth between us, it revealed too many details to take in at once. What was happening to this man was nothing short of torture.

Dimitri’s left eye was swollen shut, and he had bruises already forming all over his face.

The light moved away from his face, shining towards me now and shrouding him in the darkness beyond its reach. When it swayed back, I could see that blood was dripping from his mouth, where his lips were split swollen, but I couldn’t tell if he was missing any teeth or anything like that.

The light swayed between us again, shrouding him and giving me a moment to recover from the sight of Dimitri’s face. When it returned to him, I saw his bloodied nose and the tired, humorless eyes of a defeated man. He wasn’t broken, though. If anything, he seemed amused by Gage’s attempt to torture him. I was certain he would prove to be able to take much more damage than his body had already sustained.

Then, the light moved again. When it moved back to him, I saw the blood stains on his shirt and on his arms. From where I stood, I could even see the blood he’d spat onto the floor.

The light continued to sway between us like a slow strobe partially revealing the horrible violence inflicted upon the man sitting in front of me. I grew angrier and angrier each time the light forced me to see what had been done to him.

“Who did this to you?” I asked, though it didn’t matter. I knew who had given the order, no matter who had actually carried it out.

“Two big guys,” Dimitri answered. “I don’t know their names, but they came in here with Gage. I’m guessing he ordered them to beat me before he left the room.”

I thought back to my meeting with him earlier. The only two
big guys
I’d seen come in upstairs were Juarez and Chase. In fact, it wasn’t until after they’d come up that Gage finally stopped fighting to keep me upstairs. They must have been the ones who had come down with him to
check on
Dimitri.

“I can’t believe that bastard.” I spat the words out of my mouth. “Dimitri, I am so sorry this happened to you. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Are you going to be okay?”

He gave me a bloody smile. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve been through much worse than what those guys did to me.”

“Something told me you’d say that.” I turned and started to walk away from the table.

“Hold on, where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to take care of some business with Gage,” I told him. “This is not okay, and he knows I’m not okay with this kind of behavior. He was not supposed to treat you this way. He’s supposed to let me talk to you and get answers from you humanely.” It wasn’t lost on me, though, that he had finally talked only after being beaten by Gage’s men, but I wasn’t about to admit there was any possibility he could have been right.

“Are you coming back?” he asked.

I stared at him. I didn’t know Dimitri well enough to risk coming back down here again. “I’m probably not coming back, Dimitri. I’m done. And I’m sorry, but you’re part of all this. I don’t need to get mixed up with you while I’m trying to get out of here.”

The truth was I didn’t know if I could even make myself leave. Things had become surprisingly complicated. The only thing I did know for sure was that I couldn’t be connected to what they were doing to Dimitri. Not any longer. I shouldn’t have agreed to help Gage in the first place. I’d seen how he looked when he walked through that door. He had that outlaw biker look, rough and tough, not like the pretty boys out pretending to be in motorcycle gangs.

I had a career to think about, and what was happening in the basement of the Kings of Hell HQ was enough to destroy that career. I couldn’t allow that.

He sighed, and the sound reminded me I was still in the basement with him. “I get it. Well, at least you see what kind of man you’re working for now,” he told me.

“I know.” I sighed. “I know.” And to make things harder, I’d just had sex with him the night before.

I walked out of the interrogation room and closed the door, leaning my head against it once it was closed.

“What were you thinking?” I asked myself. I didn’t know anything about either one, Gage or Dimitri. Yet I was willing to sleep with Gage, and I was willing to trust Dimitri.

“Dammit, Julia,” I cursed to myself. The amazing sex we’d had made it hard for me to just run up the stairs and tell Gage I was done. It was nearly impossible to imagine leaving now.

Gage

I knew it was coming. I knew Julia would storm upstairs to find me still sitting at the same table, sipping another cup of coffee, once she saw what the guys had done to Dimitri. I sent the guys off to collect some money owed to us by a local dealer, getting them out of the way of her wrath. It wasn’t that I was afraid of her, I just didn’t want them to have to deal with her. She was going to be mad at me; it was my job to deal with it.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I could hear her from across the room, shouting before she was even fully up the stairs.

I set my cup down on the table and turned around to see her petite body angrily coming my way. Her anger was apparent in her face, scowling at me like she believed her eyes could burn holes through my skin. Her fists were clenched at her sides. Her feet stomped on the floor as her legs pumped her across the space between us. Her perky breasts bounced in her tank top, threatening to come out of her bra.

“You lied to me,” she accused me. “You said he wasn’t going to be harmed while I talked to him.”

A few of the girls hanging out with some of the members of the MC got up and left quickly, keeping their eyes on her as they backed away, trying to avoid whatever drama was unfolding in the clubhouse. It was a regrettable occurrence, that was for sure. I simply watched as she approached me. She wasn’t the first angry woman who had attacked me at HQ, accusing me of lying and a multitude of other offenses.

“Well, what do you have to say for yourself? Anything?” She stood in front of me with her fists clenched, seething with anger.

I stood up calmly, realizing for the first time just how much taller I was than Julia. “You need to keep your voice down in here,” I told her quietly as I took her arm in my hand and started to walk her up to the third floor, where we had private rooms for members who needed a place to crash for the night.

She tried to jerk her arm away, but my grip was too tight. “What are you doing?”

“We’re going somewhere to talk in private. Now, act like you’ve got some sense and come with me,” I urged her in a low tone.

She fumed but walked with me to the stairs leading up to the third floor. Old wooden doors lined the hallway. Some of them were open, some closed as the rooms were probably occupied. The floor was quiet, with just a hint of noise drifting up from the second floor and some outside sounds spilling in through open windows. I led her to the closed door at the end of the hallway, my own private room.

I fished out my keys and opened the door. The room was dark except for a couple of lamps standing in the corners, spilling their golden glow throughout the room, giving it a warm, cozy light. The world outside was held at bay by thick black curtains designed to keep out the sun and, most importantly, prying eyes. The room had a simple king-size bed situated against the far wall with a nightstand next to it that held a small digital alarm clock. In the top drawer was a copy of the Bible and a handgun, just in case.

The Presidential Suite, as we called it, wasn’t anything special. It existed in case the acting president of the MC had to stay the night, or in case he had
other
business to tend to, like teaching his old lady her place. Julia was hardly my old lady, but we needed a private space so she could air out whatever it was that was bothering her.

“What’s bothering you?” I asked as I closed and locked the door behind us.

“What’s
bothering
me? Are you seriously going to ask me that question?” She turned on me, staring up at me with fierce anger in her green eyes.

She turned and walked away, sitting down on the bed. “You know what’s bothering me,” she said in an almost pouty tone.

“I want you to tell me. I want to hear you say it,” I urged her, still standing by the door.

“Dimitri.” Those eyes locked on me again. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

After a pause, she continued. “You said he was going to be okay as long as I was talking to him.”

“But you haven’t been, at least on your account,” I told her. “You keep telling me hasn’t said anything to you other than to try to get you to help him escape or trying to convince you that you’re in danger here. So, if he’s talking and you aren’t telling me what he’s saying, I’m going to have to assume that you’re working
with
him.” I closed the distance between us as I talked.

Having her petite figure sitting on my bed and looking up at me with passion filling her eyes turned me on. I couldn’t explain it, but I couldn’t deny it either. The angrier she got, the more I wanted her. Again.

“You really don’t trust me, do you?” she asked, obviously insulted. “How dare you accuse me of lying to you. You! Of all people!”

“How do I know you’re not lying?” I snapped back. “How do I know you haven’t let him fill your head with lies about me? You won’t tell me what he says, so you’re obviously hiding
something
,” I accused her, throwing her reluctance to talk about him in her face. “In fact, the
only
time you ever tell me anything at all is when you’re trying to convince me to let him go. Do you really think he won’t try to get out of here the moment any of those restraints are loosened? Do you really think he won’t try to hurt you or anyone else in his way so that he can run?” My voice boomed, filling the room.

Julia didn’t cower from my anger. She stared up at me defiantly, as if my words had no effect on her. “But you’re torturing him,” she said flatly. “I never agreed to be part of that.”

“This is war, Julia Danvers. Don’t you get it? We’ve got the advantage here, and we’ve got to use that advantage. We can’t let this opportunity slip through your fingers.”

“You’ll have to do it on your own, then,” she said, reaching up to push me out of the way as she went to get off the bed.

I grabbed her hand. “You’re staying. I hired you to do a job, and you’re not leaving until it’s done.”

She jerked her hand away from me. “What are you going to do, Gage? Are you going to lock me up downstairs and have someone beat me? Or are you just keeping me around so you can fuck me whenever you want?”

I grabbed both of her arms and stood her up in front of me. I had figured out what it was about her that turned me on so much. She wasn’t afraid of me. She wasn’t afraid to stand up to me and to fight with me. She’d been trying to put me in my place since she got to HQ.

“I don’t remember hearing you complain,” I told her.

“That’s because I wasn’t complaining,” she snapped back.

I kissed her. She didn’t push away. Instead, our lips melted together, furiously at first, as if our mouths were fighting for us. But then, as our mouths opened and our tongues met again, our kiss slowed down and deepened. She pressed herself against me as I released her from my grip.

My hands slid down her arms and around behind her, grabbing and squeezing her tight, round ass through her jeans and grinding my hips against her. She pulled back from our kiss and moaned. She buried one hand in my hair and held onto me with the other, her thin, girlish fingers spread out across my shoulder.

She tilted her head back and gasped as I kissed her tender neck, my lips gently sucking on her fair skin. She pulled me to her, and we fell back onto the bed.

“Fuck me again,” she begged breathlessly in my ear. “Take me right here, Gage.”

I couldn’t deny her the pleasure we both sought. My hands pushed her tank top up, running along the smooth skin of her stomach, her narrow waist, and then over the lacy curve of her bra. I squeezed her breasts through the fabric hiding them from me as she raised her arms to let me pull her top all the way off.

She worked my vest and shirt off. Then, sliding her hungry, greedy hands down my chest and stomach, she forced my jeans down past my ass, freeing my hardening desire for her as I worked her jeans down from her hips, revealing her black panties and her slender legs. I let her jeans fall to the floor.

I ran my fingers over the fabric guarding her sex. I could feel the damp heat of her desire waiting for me behind the black lace. I wrapped my fingers around the waist of her underwear and pulled it down, revealing her bare skin and delicate pink folds. She was swollen with desire.

I slid a finger over her opening, passing between her wet lips, and she arched her back. She reached back and unclasped her bra while I slid my finger into the core of her desire, running it along her front wall, feeling for her g-spot.

“Oh God, Gage,” she groaned as I found her pleasure center and stroked it with my finger. I felt her muscles tighten, gripping me inside her. She grabbed my wrist with one of her hands and wrapped her fingers as far around my arm as they would go. “Not yet,” she panted, her body starting to jerk under my palm.

I chuckled. “There is no
not yet
, Julia,” I told her with a grin on my face. I grabbed her wrists and held both of her hands above her head. I was going to take her there at least once before I entered her again.

As she writhed and moaned underneath me, I felt my desire for her growing stronger, harder between my legs. I worked inside her with my fingers and rested my thumb on the little ridge at the front of her slit, gently rubbing it back and forth, up and down. She squeezed her legs closed around my hand and almost squealed as she arched her back and pushed her hips down against me.

“Fuck,” she cried out. “Oh my God, Gage.”

As her body relaxed, I let go of her wrists and spread her legs. I slid my fingers out of her and stroked myself with her wet lust, readying myself to enter her. I parted her with my head and pressed myself against her opening.

She looked up at me with something deeper than lust in her eyes—affection—and put her hands against my chest. She parted her legs further as I pushed into her. Her muscles were still clenching from her orgasm as I drove myself deep inside of her, pushing slowly.

I arched my back as her lips gripped my shaft and slid down to my base. A nice long moan escaped from deep in my chest. I reached down and grabbed her breasts for leverage, cupping her perfectly round mounds of flesh in my hands and squeezing them gently, pushing her nipples up between my fingers.

I worked my hips against hers, pressing myself against her thighs and ass as I penetrated deep inside her.

“It feels so good,” she moaned, pressing her fingertips into my chest.

I cupped a hand behind her head. “Does it, baby?” I asked, thrusting faster as my ecstasy grew from deep within and started climbing up my shaft for her.

The sound of her panting and moaning drove me ever closer to orgasm. I forced myself into her harder and harder.

“Yes,” she called out, encouraging me. “Oh God, yes, Gage. Give it to me, baby. Fuck me.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from this mild mannered university researcher, this mousy little woman who lived her life in dusty libraries across the world. She grabbed my waist and held me against her, rocking her hips against me, driving my erection ever deeper inside her.

“I’m going to come again,” she panted, rocking harder and harder, faster and faster, until I could feel her ecstasy erupting all around me. She tilted her head and arched her back as a cry of pleasure ripped itself from her throat.

I grabbed her hips and shoved myself deep inside her a few more times, holding back until the last possible moment, when I pulled out and finished myself off on the hairless mound of flesh above her slit. She looked down, watching as each drop spilled from my head onto her skin.

“Give it all to me, Gage,” she coaxed me breathlessly as I emptied myself just below her soft white belly.

After I finished, I grabbed some tissues from the bathroom attached to my room and wiped my spilled seed off her mound. I tossed the tissue on the wooden floor and lay down next to her, kissing her shoulder and gripping her hand, our fingers intertwining and locking together.

“What were we fighting about?” I asked with a grin on my face.