“Fuck. How old is she now?”
“She turned eight.”
“Eight?” I say in disbelief. “Blyat’。 Feels like just yesterday she was born.”
He sighs and passes a hand over his face. “Sometimes, I think that Miranda is right. I’m not around as much as I should be.”
“So change it.”
He fidgets in his seat. “I don’t know how to talk to her.”
“You’re her father. Just be there.”
Demyan looks at me with haunted eyes. “I can’t let her take my kid, Aleks.”
“Then don’t let her.”
“She’ll hate me.”
“She does already.”
He snorts darkly. “Fuck, ain’t that the truth? To this day, that’s the part that floors me the most.”
“People change.”
“That’s the thing: I didn’t change,” he says. “I told her who I was from the beginning. She told me she loved me and she would deal with the rest. But it doesn’t matter how many promises are made. When it comes to living this lifestyle, it gets to be too much. We’re better off being lone wolves. We need to fuck faceless women and leave when we’re done.”
“I get the point, Demyan,” I say.
He smiles and holds his hands up in surrender. “Lecture over, then. You think that FBI bastard will back off now that you have his sister?”
“He has no choice,” I say. “The Bureau would have dropped the investigation a long time ago if it weren’t for his irritating persistence.”
“Still hung up on his missing woman, eh?”
“Precisely.”
“See?” Demyan says. “No good can come of loving a woman. Look what kind of hot water it’s gotten that poor son of a bitch into.”
I finish off the last of my beer. Demyan does the same and gets to his feet. “Come on,” he says, “we should celebrate the successful conclusion of our mission.”
I know what’s coming before he makes the suggestion. He’s set things up perfectly. If I say no, he’s going to assume it’s because my interests lie elsewhere. So with a grimace, I stand up and nod.
“Fine. Roxy’s it is.”
With a self-satisfied grin, he leads me out into the courtyard where several of my vehicles are waiting for me to choose from. I select the midnight blue Aston Martin.
Demyan hops into the passenger seat and I take the wheel. The car purrs to life beneath us, lethal and gorgeous.
As I peel out with squealing tires, I can’t help but glance up towards the upstairs windows. She’s been locked inside for a few hours now, but there hasn’t been so much as a single peep from her room.
Not my concern, I tell myself as the gates close behind us. She is only a means to an end.
For the most part, I even believe it.
*
Roxy’s is only a fifteen-minute drive away. It’s the mecca of strip clubs. A fucking cornucopia of ass and tits. It runs a cool grand to get you into the main area, with two dozen girls at any given time swinging from the poles and rafters and another fifteen or twenty wandering the floor in search of a client. For a normal man, it’s heaven on earth.
We walk straight past it.
Because the second part of the club is hidden away behind black gilded doors. If you have to ask the entry fee, you can’t afford it.
Demyan and I glide towards the entrance. Two bouncers open them without so much as a single question as we approach, their heads bowed in reverence.
It’s quieter in here, classier, although certainly not short on women. They’ve mostly dispensed with clothes altogether in this section. The red lights pirouette throughout the darkness, highlighting curves and temptations everywhere you look.
Demyan and I slide into one of the leather booths. We’ve barely taken a breath before a gaggle of girls descends on us like vultures.
My lieutenant spreads his legs and lets one of his favorite girls plop down not-so-accidentally on his crotch. “Evening, Jemma,” he greets, cupping her ass. “You look delicious tonight.”
“I taste delicious, too,” she says with a demure giggle. She’s wearing a tiny pink bikini top that covers only her nipples and a matching pink skirt that barely covers her ass. It’s a fairly chaste ensemble, compared to the rest of her colleagues.
“Tell me more,” he rumbles.
“Hm, I think I’d rather show you.”
Jemma’s hands disappear inside Demyan’s pants. I turn my attention to the two women who’ve been running their hands all over me and murmuring in my ear.
Weirdly, it’s doing nothing for me. Surrounded by the sexiest women the human race has ever made, offering me any kind of pleasure I can name, and my dick doesn’t even stiffen.
“Shoo, ladies,” a confident feminine voice says. “This man needs a real woman.”
I glance up to see Allaynah strutting towards me. She’s a flawless silhouette emerging from the shadows in sky-high heels and nothing else. Her nipples point upwards from perky tits and the tiny, manicured strip of hair between her legs promises much more.
“We’ve got this, Ally,” one of the girls says with a pout.
“Did I ask if you had it?” she snaps harshly. “Get the fuck off him, both of you.”
They both look up at me pitifully, hoping for mercy. “You heard her,” I say with a laughing shrug. “Fuck off.”
The moment I speak, both girls are off me. Allaynah moves forward with a satisfied smile and sits down next to me.
She’s confidence incarnate. Her blonde hair hangs down her left shoulder in soft waves. With a practiced little sigh, she reaches forward and runs her fingers over my arm. “You look like you need a little cheering up, handsome.”
“We’re actually here to celebrate,” I say.
She glances towards Demyan and Jemma. They’ve now sprawled across the black leather sofa. Demyan is sucking on one of her nipples while he finger-fucks her.
“Well, he certainly is. I’m not sure about you, though,” she remarks. “Why don’t I fix that?”
I try to pay attention as she talks. Allaynah usually does a good job of distracting me. She isn’t like the other girls; she can actually hold a conversation. And she pours shots of tequila like it’s going out of style.
But for some reason, it’s not working for me today. Not for lack of her trying, though.
“Why don’t we find ourselves a private room?” she asks, extending a hand to me.
I consider it. On one hand, it would be easy to say no. I’m not in the mood in the slightest, and even Allaynah’s perfect ass isn’t changing that.
But on the other hand, if I stay on that couch and brood, my thoughts will drift to a scared woman locked up in a room in my house.
And that way lies danger.
I take Allaynah’s hand. She leads me to a studded red leather door at the rear of the room. We step inside to the soft thump of hip-hop. More red leather gleams in here—the walls, a couch, a trunk that I know from experience contains a variety of fun toys.
Allaynah prances to the pole in the center of the room and twirls around it slowly. She expects me to follow her, to touch the way I always do.
Instead, I brush right past her and drop onto the couch. It’s soft and comfortable, making me aware that I’d rather sleep right now than fuck. Allaynah frowns, abandons the pole, and sashays over to straddle my lap.