Page 16 of King of the Bronx

“Walking you to the door.”

“I think I can manage,” she said as she stepped out of the car. I got out behind her.

“Are you sure? Because last time, you only took a few steps away from the underground before you were held at gun point.”

She flipped me the bird, and I laughed as I walked behind her up the steps to the front door.

The door flung open just as Raven reached for the handle. A girl that looked to be maybe nineteen with dark, wild hair stood in the foyer. Her face was red and her eyebrows drew together.

“He got handsy…he’s upstairs with Erica. I tried—” the girl gushed. Before she got the whole story out, Raven brushed past the girl and grabbed a metal baseball bat that was leaning next to the entrance. I followed behind her as she ran up the wooden stairs to the top floor. There had be at least seven rooms up here, all of them right next to each other.

“What the fuck did I say?!” a male voice yelled from the end of hall. I grabbed the Desert Eagle that I always kept in the waistband of my jeans and held it out in front of me, pointed at the floor.

“Get the fuck off of me, you piece of shit,” a women’s voice replied to the man. Raven pulled back the curtain to one of the rooms. A man about six feet tall with a big beer belly held a woman against the wall. One of his hands clenched around her throat while the other one was under her skirt.

“She said, get off of her,” Raven barked. The man turned to look at Raven with a sick smile on his face.

“Come on, Princess, don’t—”

Bang!

The man fell to the floor with a thud. The women screamed. Her half-naked body and face were covered in blood

Raven turned on me as I tucked the gun back into my waistband.

“You fucking killed him!” she shouted. To my surprise, she didn’t seem overly sickened by the sight of a man dying right in front of her. Instead, she balled her hands into fist as if I was the one attacking one of her girls.

“Someone was going to have to. It’s good to set an example,” I replied.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” the woman repeated over and over again as her body shook. “I’m going to be sick.”

“Holy shit,” I heard from behind me. Five other women were standing in the doorway, their eyes on the dead body. Raven walked further inside the bedroom and grabbed the blood-covered woman. Raven led her across the hall to what I assumed was a bathroom.

“Stay here,” she seethed at me before shutting the bathroom door.

I bent down to the man’s body and checked his pulse, just to be sure. He was dead alright. I’d shot him straight through the head. The sound of feet shuffling across the hardwood floor echoed against the walls as the women retreated.

How often did shit like this happen? Prostitution wasn’t an easy industry, and to think that Raven had been running this by herself put a knot in my stomach. She needed someone to protect these girls; she couldn’t do it by herself with a metal baseball bat. I pulled out my phone and called Charles.

“Boss,” Charles answered.

“I need a clean-up crew at the brothel off of Moorside Path.”

“I’m on it.” He hung up the phone.

I stood up from my crouched position and took a look around the room. It wasn’t very big, just a full-sized bed, a dresser, and a couple of bookshelves that didn’t hold any actual books. Instead, it was filled with small containers for storage. I didn’t have much experience with brothels, but from my understanding, they were usually in much worse condition. The women usually didn’t even have the bare necessities, let alone a nice room to themselves.

The curtain was pulled back, and Raven stepped through into the bedroom again. She looked just as pissed off as she was before she left with the woman. I had to admit, angry Raven was hot. Her cheeks matched that bright red hair of hers, and her lips were curled into a snarl. My dick twitched at the sight.

“You fucking killed one of my customers!” she snapped.

“What was I supposed to do?”

“I had it handled.”

“What? With a baseball bat? What if he had a gun on him? You need someone here to watch over the girls—”

“I watch over the girls, and I don’t need the mafia stepping in,” she said.

Ah, so she did know the underground was run by Cosa Nostra. I stared at her, amazed by her stubbornness. I didn’t want to think about what could have happened if I hadn’t been here.

“Can you just go?”

“My guys will be here to clean everything up. Just leave the body where it is,” I said before walking past her and out to my car.

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