Chapter 4: Chapter 4

Vadik

How in the fuck did my uncle make such a mess of the club? The one my father slaved over for so many years?

The one Papa never should have left to his ne’er-do-well brother Misha. Or Mikey. Who couldn’t run away from his Russian roots fast enough.

That should have been ample warning. The man didn’t give a shit about his family, or any of our businesses.

It’s been two years since the house fire, the one my parents died in. Murdered, I prefer to say, although it’s never been proven. And it’s taken Mikey exactly two years to drive my father’s beloved, very profitable club straight into the ground.

And now I have to fix it. Not because Mikey wants me to. Not because he’s even asked me for help, which I offered on more than one occasion. I should have just wrestled the company from his slimy hands, but out of some inexplicable loyalty to my father and the family as a whole, I stood back. Respected my father’s last wishes to give his party boy younger brother a profession. Something he could be proud of.

And what did the fucker do?

Spent every last cent the club had on exotic cars for his lazy ass and tacky fur coats for his child-bride wife.

I am not even kidding.

He dragged her over from Russia when she was fourteen years old—something about a business transaction between her father and him—and popped her cherry seconds after she turned eighteen. How do I know this? He fucking bragged about it.

I guess I should at least give him credit for not being a child molester.

And now the fucker has fled the country, wanted by the Feds on tax evasion charges. Of course, he tried to clean out the coffers before he left, moving money to a variety of offshore accounts he could easily access from wherever he landed.

But on this, I got the last word. I was able to move some funds into an account he had no knowledge of, just before he left. I knew he was up to no good. He’s never been smart enough to hide his real intentions.

So, with Mikey out of the way, my brothers and I are left with two choices. Either clean up the mess left behind or close the club’s doors.

I suppose it would be easier to walk away. Tell all our employees to get new jobs somewhere else.

Including Dominika, our high-handed club manager. Who I’d like out of our lives anyway.

But fuck it, we decided. Papa would roll over in his grave if he knew the shape the club was in only two years after his death. My brothers and I will do right by him and breathe life back into the place if it’s the last thing we do.

The multitude of other businesses we run are doing fine. They will prop up this venture for as long as needed. The only downside is that for now, I have to deal with the fucking migraine headache of a mess my dumbass uncle left me.

But I have ideas. Lots of ideas. The kind that can be very profitable. And they start with chasing down all the fuckers who owe us money.

We run card games. That’s not all the club is about, but it’s a true cash cow. And Uncle was very lenient about letting players borrow from the house. In fact, he let a lot of players borrow a lot from the house.

Mikey was too much of a pussy to ever cut anyone off.

Even Papa wasn’t much for collecting the debts owed him. As long as operations ran smoothly, he didn’t sweat things.

But now, the bills are due, so to speak.

Some of our players owe us piddling amounts. We’re not bothering with them. But anyone who owes us ten-thousand dollars or more, we’re going after.

That includes Gil Gates, local pawn shop owner. Gambling addict. And father to the beautiful Charleigh.

Who I’ve not been able to stop thinking about since we left her father’s shitty little shop.

Vadik

Gates is not the worst of our debtors, not by a landslide. And in fact, in some ways he’s a lucky man. Many who are indebted to us are lonely old losers. Card games are their only social outlet, the only time they get out of the house, aside from grocery shopping and cashing their social security checks.

But Gates, he has that daughter. The stunner with the long brown hair and legs for miles, who cares enough about him to actually try to stand up to my brothers and me.

I have to admit, her false bravado nearly made me laugh a couple times. But I tamped that shit down. If she wants to stick up for her father, more power to her. And she was cute as fuck while she did it.

In fact, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit when she narrowed her eyes at me and clenched her fists by her side, I didn’t feel that familiar twitch in my balls. The one that reminds me it’s been too long since I’ve had a pretty girl suck me off, and even longer since it was one who put on a tough-guy act.

God, I love that. Badass-acting women who are anything but.

While I doubt he appreciates it, Gates is a lucky bastard that he has someone to care about him. Actually, I hear he has three daughters, although I know nothing about the other two, except that one lives in New York and the other is a high school kid.

The way his daughter Charleigh—weird name for a girl, if you ask me—ran to his side when she saw him gushing blood was so very… touching. Of course, the bastard is lucky he didn’t get himself into a mess like this back in the old country—Papa’s old country, I should say— where warnings were much more severe than getting hit aside the head with the butt of a gun. No, the stories Papa used to share were much more gruesome, involving severed fingers and even limbs—shit like that—for offenses far less serious than Gates’s.

But that was his old life. America is more ‘civilized.’

Actually, civilized is not the right word. America is just not as lawless as Russia was back in the former Soviet days. For one, our Pakhan keeps the worst of the violence under control. Says he doesn’t want to attract any more attention than absolutely necessary. We do our best to fly under the radar, leaving little or no trace of our activities, whenever we can.

That means Gates is lucky we didn’t break any of his fingers. I know how painful it is—it’s been done to me. But such drastic measures require trips to emergency rooms and the like—although I had to suffer through mine with no medical care—which draws attention like nothing else.

Our roughing him up was perfunctory, really, and nothing more. The poor bastard will never be able to pay up. We took a cursory look at his books and he barely makes ends meet with his shop, which is probably why he got into card games to begin with. Thought he could make a little extra cake, pay off some bills, maybe take his daughters out for a nice meal.

Look how that turned out.

He’s as bad a business manager as my fucking uncle, only difference is that Mikey had the brains to flee the country, and Gates let himself be a sitting duck.

Seriously. How fucking hard is it to run a successful business? My brothers and me, with our hands in all sorts of entities not limited to moving weapons, providing security services, and hosting illegal gambling, manage to keep our books in the black. That doesn’t mean what we do is easy. Hell, it’s dangerous as fuck and we are on constant alert. But these men who drive their businesses into the ground mystify me.

I close the office door because I don’t need anyone knowing my state of mind, take a seat at Papa’s old desk, and drop my head into my hands, a migraine circling my head like a starving vulture. I have a fuck load on my mind right now and I need to keep my head on straight.

And for some godforsaken reason, I can’t get that girl, Charleigh, off my mind. The way she took up for her father, all brave and shit. She didn’t fool me, though. She didn’t fool anyone, much less herself. But I give her major kudos for trying.

This makes me happy. Very happy. Because our dealings with Charleigh are far from over and I look forward to her company.

*****

Vadik

I plan to get to know our pretty, long-legged friend. Because as much as she wants to help her old man, she can’t touch his debt. Hell, from the looks of it, she can’t even afford to replace her tattered Converse Chucks. Though it was sweet she offered to try and bail out her father. She’s the kind of daughter any dad would be proud to have.

She smells so damn good, as I knew she would, like pure heaven, if you could bottle that shit. Not perfume-y at all, just clean and fresh and sweet like the most subtle fucking flower you ever smelled. Too bad she hangs out in that crappy little pawn shop.

The way she pulled her shoulders back when trying to stand up to us, thrusting her small breasts out as if they were her freaking armor or something, was about the most guileless thing I think I’ve ever seen.

I know her type. Not well, but I know it. Girls like Charleigh don’t hang out with guys like my brothers and me. In fact, our paths seldom cross. We usually end up with the bad girls, the dirty girls, who don’t care that we make our living doing illegal shit. They just want our money and the security that offers. They want to be with the guy with the most power so they can lord it over other women, their friends included. In return, they’ll fuck us day and night—even our friends, if we ask them to—and put up with the boatload of shit women in our world are required to. As long as the money keeps flowing, they don’t give a damn what they have to do.

But someone like Charleigh, she doesn’t know what to do about a guy like me—an admittedly dangerous and scary prick. Given the choice, she’d run in the opposite direction, were she to confront me in a dark alley. I represent everything she’s not. Everything that’s dark and forbidding and treacherous about the world.

Everything existing in a man who would hurt her father.

And God bless the man. Or damn him to hell, depending on your perspective. Just as my brothers and I were leaving his dump of a shop, he called after us, offering her. Yeah, he fucking offered us his daughter. Maybe not in the way we might have liked. But he put it out there when he suggested that maybe we have some work for her. Something that pays better than her little job at the shop.

Seems the man might be smarter than I give him credit for. Or at least more resourceful

I’m sure he had in mind having her serve cocktails or some such in the game room. I’m not sure he knows much about what we do in the rest of the club. But he knows enough. And yet he still dangled her out there in front of us, like a piece of meat to a hungry pride of lions. He’s seen enough beautiful women come and go in the club, for a variety of reasons, to know that his Charleigh would fit in just fine here.

Whether she wants to or not.

That fact, he does not give a shit about.

Given the work I do, I hang out with some scumbags. Hell, sometimes I’m a scumbag myself. But this man, Gil Gates, has taken that shit to a new low.

Offering his daughter.I have to say, even I am a little offended by that.

But not too offended.

“Hey.”

I yank my head out of my hands and look up to see my brother Kir at the door.

“Got another migraine?” he asks, gesturing in my direction with a toss of his chin.

I run a hand over my smooth head, shaved bald by my barber that morning, as if that would relieve the tightening belt around my brain. “I’m fine. What’s up, Kir?”

I lean back in Papa’s chair—even if it had been Mikey’s for two years, I’ll never call any of this his—and crack my knuckles.

My brother makes himself at home opposite my desk. “How are the numbers looking?” he asks. “Mikey’s numbers?”

I shake my head. It’s not worth being angry anymore. Waste of my energy. It’s time to look forward.

“Well,” I start, “I met with the accountant, and he confirmed that Mikey pretty much used the place as his personal ATM machine.”

Kir scoffs. “Tell me something I don’t already know. I swear, if I could get my hands around that fucker’s neck—”

But I wave him off. I’m tired of the ‘ifs.’ It’s time to deal with the situation. Not dwell in the past no matter how infuriating it is.

“We can get out of this, Kir. We can pull cash from the other businesses as long as we need to. We’ll collect what we’re owed, pay off the debts Mikey racked up, and have the place back to Papa’s standards in no time.”

“What about the girl?”

Charleigh.

Fuck. I knew he was going to bring her up.

I choose my words carefully. My brother doesn’t need to know I’ve spent the better part of a day thinking about the lovely lady.

“She… she can help us. She will help us.”

A shit-eating grin makes its way across my brother’s face.

Am I conflicted? Am I ever conflicted? For fuck’s sake, am I pussy-whipped by a woman I don’t even know? Who I saw from a distance at my father’s funeral two years ago, and who I just saw for fifteen minutes as I gave her father a warning beat-down?

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Kir shrugs. “I saw how you looked at her. Better keep it together, my brother.”

Bastard. That’s the problem working with family. They know you too well. They can anticipate your next move. Your next words. Your next thoughts.

Push your buttons and all that shit.

I ignore my brother. Hell, I saw him checking her out, too. But I’m not saying anything. Not yet. “What does her father know about the club? Aside from the card rooms?” I ask.

“Vadik, he knows everything. How do you think he got his lame ass into so much debt? By sitting in the back of the room like a good little boy? He’s up to his eyeballs in this place. Paying the strippers for lap dances, hiring out the hookers for a good time. The man ain’t no saint.”

That makes it all the more sordid, his willingness to pimp out his daughter.

Not that that changes anything. But as much as I’ve been around, I can still be shocked by the decisions people make from time to time.

Blows my motherfucking mind, this one does.

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