Page 62 of Tainted Princess
“I asked you a question,” I growled, watching as his nostrils flared in anger. Scraping the knife up his skin, the flat of the blade dragging against the short blonde stubble of his square jaw, I slid the tip under the cloth tied around his face, pulling hard and watching as it fell to the floor.
Immediately a barrage of rapid-fire Russian started spilling from his mouth, halting only when I held the blade up again.
“Who sent you to my club?” I questioned slowly. He glared at me with hate filled eyes but said nothing.
Suddenly, Francesca was there, pressed close to him, and I jolted. Releasing his hair, I reached for her, the sudden rise of emotion in my chest at her being so near him was instinctive. I grasped her arm, but she tugged it away, backing up with his wallet in her hand.
“Ivan Sorokin, age twenty-seven,” she announced, reading from his driver’s license. “Lists a Detroit address, though.” Flicking her golden eyes to Ivan, she glared. “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you, Ivan?”
More angry Russian words followed, and Francesca threw her head back and laughed, the sound low and throaty.
It was the second time I had heard her laugh, and something foreign churned in my chest, slithering in the dark recesses of my soul like a serpent.
“You and what army, Ivan?” she responded darkly.
“Well, shit,” Rock’s voice surprised me. I had been so focused on Francesca I hadn’t heard him approach. That pissed me off; I couldn’t afford to be distracted like that. “Is she doin’ what I think she’s doin’?”
I grunted in response. The truth was, I didn’t know what she was doing. But I watched her, enraptured as she stood over Ivan, not an ounce of fear as she spoke back and forth with him in Russian. This woman was so much more than I could have ever imagined.
And that scared the shit out of me.
Rock and I stood as silent sentries as Francesca drew the baggies out of her pocket, inspecting the contents of one before switching back to English for our benefit.
“These aren’t Oxy, Ivan,” she stated, holding the bags up and showing him the round white pills inside. “They don’t look like Percs or Addys either.” Ivan said nothing, but Francesca wasn’t deterred. “In fact, these don’t look like anything I’ve seen before.” In the back of my mind, I wondered what in the hell she was doing in New York to become so familiar with street drugs, but I filed that question away for another time. “So why don’t you tell me whose mark this is, and then we can let you run on back to Anton, hey?”
Rock’s head snapped to me, but I didn’t acknowledge him. Francesca only knew who Anton was because of the phone call she had overheard in my car. It wasn’t like I was telling her our business. Fuck, I had barely even spent any time with her this week.
I tried to ignore the part of me that felt regret at that realization and instead moved forward to take the bag from Francesca’s fingers.
Looking closely, I could see there was a mark on the pills as well as the bag they came in, but it was nothing I was familiar with. In the center was a stylized letter W with a small number on each side, a seven on the left and a four on the right.
Not much to go on, but it was something.
My attention was drawn back to Ivan when he started laughing, a low sound that rattled in his chest.
“Something funny, you fuck?” Rock barked, always the diplomat.
“Yes,” Ivan replied, the first English words I had heard from him tonight coming out distorted around his swollen lips. “You. You are what’s funny.”
Passing the bag to Rock, I stalked back across the basement, moving past Francesca to land a solid punch directly into Ivan’s face. His head snapped back so hard the front legs of the chair came off the ground. When he sat upright again, his already broken nose was an even bigger mess, smashed and flattened in a way that I just knew prevented him from breathing through it.
But the stupid bastard just kept on laughing.
Francesca started speaking, her husky voice sounding enticingly exotic as she trilled out a sting of Russian words that had Ivan staring at her with wide eyes. He looked to me, then back at her and shook his head, responding to whatever it was she said quickly.
“There now,” she said sweetly, gently placing her palm against his cheek. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I hated her touching him; hated that she smiled at him, even if it was a lie.
Moving close again, I positioned myself between Ivan and Francesca, and I didn’t miss the annoyed look she shot me.
“I’m only gonna ask you one more time; why did Anton send you into my club?”
Eyes full of hatred, Ivan spat a wad of blood on the floor between my feet before he answered.
“The fact that you think it was Anton at all just shows how fucking stupid you really are.”
I glanced at Rock, but he was just as confused as I was. Anton was the only Russian in town with any clout and he had a tight leash on the drug trade; nothing was sold in Las Vegas without his say so. If there was a new player in the game, especially a Russian one, things were going to get messy.
