by Jesse Jordan
My stomach turns again, this isn’t the BDSM that Larissa has been introducing me to, but something darker, more evil, but I go with it. “Perhaps. What about The Circle?”
“Those are the men to talk to,” Kallistos says. “For a small fee I can introduce you. They’re recruiting right now, both customers and bodies. You know their basement cost is two million a fuck, right?”
“And what would I get for that?” I ask. “Anything?”
“Any and everything. You give the Circle a wish list, and anything short of demanding a famous celebrity they’ll get you for as long as you want to do anything you want to them. They’ll even dispose of the husk afterwards, no questions asked,” Kallistos says casually. “For an extra half million they’ll even throw in party favors. Coke, speed, X, whatever you want to make the girl or boy ready for you. And I’ve heard they can do more… for the right price.”
“I heard a rumor, some of my friends in the States, that they can even get you someone famous if you have the money,” I add. “What could I get for say… ten million?”
Kallistos laughs. “Rich, aren’t you? I’m not sure actually, but for that much you could probably get anything short of an A-lister. Fucking Natalie Portman would be off the table, but you could get her spitting image no problem.”
“And they’d clean up afterwards?”
Kallistos nods. “No DNA, no fingerprints, and the husk is dropped where nobody can pin it to you.”
The way he keeps saying ‘husk’ to refer to a body pisses me off. In my mind I can see the pictures of Chastity Hendricks, and what she must have felt in the hell she was in before the monsters who had her finally got tired of her and killed her. My fist clenches, and I glare at the fat man. “Is that what they did with the Hendricks girl?”
Kallistos’ eyes widen in shock, and he says something in Greek, but before his bodyguard can react I grab the hulking man and knee him in the balls before ramming him head first into the side of the building we’re next to. His head bounces off the stones and he drops like a rock, letting me turn to Kallistos, who’s too frightened to run. Instead, two harsh, dark red spots are blooming on his fat, jowly cheeks as he staggers backwards, reaching for something in his jacket. I smack the gun out of his hand and grab his wrist, twisting him down and to the ground, kneeling on his back where he screams. “Ah! My arm!”
“Is that what she said?” I ask softly in his ear. “Do you think that Chastity begged for mercy from the animals that drugged her, raped her and killed her?”
“P... p... please,” Kallistos begs, his voice thick and bubbling with tears. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Oh, I’m sure she said that,” I growl, grabbing two of Kallistos’ fingers and twisting. They snap like brittle twigs in my grip, and his whines turn into a breathless scream of pain before he starts sobbing. “Now, I want a name. A contact name and a location.”
“I don’t know any-” Kallistos starts, his words cutting off when I bend his wrist backwards and twist, shattering the tiny bones inside and tearing ligaments. He screams again, and I twist a little more, a dark, angry part of me enjoying the pain that I’m inflicting on this waste of a man.
“A name and a location, or I go for the elbow and shoulder. You’re already going to have to jack off left handed for a few months, you don’t want to make it a life time,” I growl. “Now who, and where?”
“Pinchot! Arthur Pinchot!” Kallistos rasps.
“Who is he?” I growl, twisting the hand a little bit more. “My patience is wearing thin.”
“He’s the man for this area, I think he’s number two in Europe!” Kallistos whines. “Please, it hurts!”
“Chastity Hendricks hurt too,” I growl. “Now where is this Pinchot?”
“I don’t know where, he moves around a lot, he contacts us… oh please, please don’t hurt my arm any more!”
“Okay,” I say, letting go of his wrist and getting up. Kallistos cradles his destroyed hand to his chest, weeping and cursing while I brush off my pants and look down at him. “Thanks for the info.”
“You won’t get a chance to use it,” Kallistos threatens, his eyes flaring in hatred. “Pinchot hears about this, there’s nobody in the world who can protect you.”
“Then I guess he won’t hear about it,” I reply, soccer kicking Kallistos in the face. The feeling of his nose shattering from the blow excites me even more, and I follow up the kick with a stomp to the head and another, dark blood starting to flow and pool around this bastard’s skull until Larissa pulls me off, her voice soft but harsh in my ear.
“That’s enough!” she rasps, pulling me a little ways back. “You kill him, and the Circle will know something’s up. Leave him alive, and they’ll think it was beef between him and The Network. You sent your message.”
“He deserves to die!” I reply harshly, pushing Larissa away. “He could have stopped it! He’s a goddamn pedo piece of shit!”
“He is, but those girls in the club are over fifteen, which is the law here,” Larissa says softly. “I don’t like it, but I can’t stop it. The Network won’t back me on it, or my other connections. If you want the real evil men, come with me now. He’s going to be in the hospital for months at this point, it’ll buy us enough time.”
I’m panting, staring at the blood pooling under the asshole’s destroyed skull, and nod. “Fine. We get out of here.”
Instead of running off, we walk calmly back to the main road and turn back towards the resort, as if we’re just two people out on a stroll. About halfway back, Larissa chuckles. “He’s going to need a new name.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “I thought his name was Kallistos.”
She shakes her head, giving me a look that helps calm the anger inside me while warming another side of me, but I’m not up for that tonight. “No, Kallistos is a nickname. It means ‘pretty boy’ or ‘angel face.’ We meant it as a joke.”
I think about it, and laugh harshly, letting some of my anger go with every breath. “Well, I couldn’t have made him much uglier.”
Larissa laughs, nodding. “If anything, you probably improved his looks some. Come on, we have a name to track down.”
Larissa
I can’t help it, driving back to Kalamata through the night I’m so horny I twice almost pull over to ask Stephen to fuck me. Watching him destroy Kallistos and his bodyguard without even getting hit once, the power and ruthlessness he showed, the exquisite use of pain and torture on a piece of slime that deserved far more… he was sublime.
But I can see in his eyes as we drive that while the laughter about Kallistos’ nickname might have helped him calm down enough to sit still through the drive back home, he’s not in the right place where sex can help him. He’s too far in his own personal darkness, and trying to seduce him now would only poison what I’ve seen bloom.
Strength.
Power.
A growing sense of what it takes to survive in the real world. It’s still undeveloped, and it’s just instinct, but it’s so strong.
So much potential within him, and it’s finally emerging. I wonder what has kept him from it for so long, held back from being the man that he is so quickly becoming. I don’t know, but maybe it’s time I find out. “Are you okay?”
He looks over at me and nods once. “Yeah. No. I don’t know.”
“Do you regret what you did?” I ask, and Stephen shakes his head. “You shouldn’t.”
“Curb stomping him was maybe over the line, but the rest… no way. I’m just pissed I couldn’t get a location for this Pinchot bastard out of him.”
I pull over into a gas station, shutting off my engine. “Here, use my card to fill up the car while I make a phone call. Maybe we can get somebody on Pinchot faster.”
Stephen nods while I go into the minimart, buying two bottles of sparkling water and dialing. The voice that picks up has an amused tone and a distinct Russian accent. “Hello Larissa. How goes your work with the hitman?”
&nbs
p; “Good evening Nikolai,” I reply. Nikolai ‘The Composer’ Rachmaninoff is the banker for The Network, and his Russian connections run government deep. He is also the most Machiavellian man I know, which is quite a statement all things considered. “I have some progress, but I could use your assistance.”
“For you? My ears are always open,” Nikolai replies. “What’s the issue?”
“I have a name, and I’ll put my own people on it, but I’d like yours as well. Arthur Pinchot.”
“Pinchot. A Frenchman, it sounds like.”
“Possibly. He’s most likely involved in the issue, he might be the number two man in Europe for this group,” I say. “They’re on a recruiting swing, my source says.”
“Is your source still alive?” Nikolai jokes, knowing my hatred for the Circle. I chuckle, looking across the parking lot at Stephen who finishes gassing up the Range Rover and puts the nozzle away.
“Alive, but he’s not leaving the hospital until about Christmas is my guess,” I reply. “Thank you, Nikolai. I owe you.”
“No you do not,” Nikolai says, but I know his mind is already filing away the marker for a rainy day. “This group, they threaten us all. I will be in touch if I hear anything.”
I go back to the car, where Stephen’s waiting behind the driver’s seat. “You want to drive now?”
“Helps me not think about things,” he explains. “Your contact was productive?”
“We’ve got a lot of people on our side,” I reply, going around and getting into the passenger seat. “I’ll reach out to my Network people on the drive back to the townhouse.”
“And MI6?” Stephen asks, and I shake my head. “Why not?”
“Because of a feeling,” I say. “I don’t know why, but honestly the Network will most likely give us faster results anyway. Like the CIA, MI6 tends to focus on governments, not criminal networks unless they go against the government itself.”
Stephen says nothing as we get back on the road, and I send text messages to my own personal group within The Network to get them on the trail of Arthur Pinchot as well. I don’t think I have ever heard the name, but something tickles the back of my mind. It’s the only reason that I told Stephen that I wasn’t calling MI6 on this.
When we get to Kalamata, Stephen brings us to my townhouse, where he parks and sits back, sighing. “Thank you. It was at least a start.”
“And we have something to work with,” I reassure him. “Stephen, I know you and I don’t see eye to eye on things, but I’m on your side.”
He looks over, a grateful half smile on his face. “I know. Thank you, Larissa. I think I’m going to try and catch some sleep. Breakfast in the morning?”
I want to ask him to come to my bedroom, my body wants him badly, but my brain says that this isn’t the time. “Okay. See you in the morning, Stephen.”
“Larissa, I believe I have some information that you would like,” Nikolai says over the phone, his voice warm and chuckling. “Arthur Pinchot?”
“You found him?” I ask, shocked. My own personal group, while much smaller than any of the other capos in The Network, is highly professional, and our whole field of expertise is information gathering. When they haven’t found anything, I’ve been getting worried. Thankfully, Kallistos is still in a coma in the hospital, and the bodyguard doesn’t know enough about us to say anything. “Where?”
“Not far from you,” Nikolai says. “My people are saying he landed in Mykonos yesterday on a flight from Denmark.”
“Mykonos?” I ask, worried. “Nikolai, you know what Mykonos is.”
“I do. Which makes his presence there even more worrisome. If this Pinchot is recruiting in the area, then many agreements are in jeopardy.”
I hum, tugging at my hair. “And if I go in there and raise hell when he’s not, I’m risking those same agreements.”
“You have my support,” Nikolai says. “You and your hitman can take care of business. I will clear it on my end with the people I know. Good luck.”
The line goes dead, and I hang up, putting my phone aside. I go downstairs to the exercise room, where I find Stephen still in the middle of a workout. He’s stripped to just his shorts, his body glistening and gleaming in the bare lights, and my own body reminds me of what it wants.
Too bad that for the past two days, I’ve been reminded so often of the other side of him, the side that wants to do everything by the rules and wants to question every decision I make about how to do things. Not contacting MI6, why I do things the way I do, even why I run my system within The Network. My body wants him, but my brain can’t stand him. Still, I try to be polite. “I got a call.”
“Congratulations,” he grunts, lowering his body down in between the parallel bars before pressing up again. I take a quick glance at something besides his rippling upper body muscles to see that he has fifty kilograms hanging from around his waist, and my body sends a little surge saying it wants to feel that much strength again. “Who from, the Queen?”
And there goes my brain, reminding me why I want to choke him half the time too. “No,” I growl back, my brain and my body currently having a small civil war. “The Composer.”
“Who the fuck is that?” Stephen asks, dipping down again. He completes another movement, holding it at the top before going down and trying one final time, but he’s hit near failure, and he gets stuck halfway up, his face a rictus of effort and pain as his exhausted muscles strain as hard as they can, twitching underneath the surface of his skin as he tries vainly to get that last bit before everything collapses and he drops to the floor, thankfully landing on his feet.
“He’s one of the other capos, based in Russia. His real name is Nikolai Rachmaninoff. No relation to the composer he claims. Moving on though, he says he’s got a lead on Arthur Pinchot, on the island of Mykonos.”
Stephen looks over, a hungry, predator’s smile breaking out on his face. It’s icy, and even though we’ve fucked twice and I’ve felt the strong yet tender side of him, there’s no tenderness in this look This is pure aggression. “When do we leave?”
“It’s not that simple,” I tell him, sitting down on a chair in the corner. “Mykonos is neutral territory.”
“What do you mean, neutral territory?” he asks, unclipping the weights from his waist and hopping back up to do more dips. “Is this some sort of honor among thieves thing?”
“A lot,” I admit. “There are few agreements among the various criminal organizations around the world. At most, you can have a two party agreement. Most of them are over territory, but there’s also a set of those that involve neutral territory. These are areas that nobody is supposed to conduct criminal operations, and at the same time everyone is free to meet, talk, do whatever. Mostly, they exist so that high ranking people can just get a vacation without the constant worry of getting your head blown off. And yes, even in this townhouse there is a threat of me being hit. The Network has a very firm hand on big chunks of Sicily, but… anyway, Mykonos is neutral territory. Network, Mafia, Russians, MI6 or CIA, whoever can go to Mykonos, with the rule being no guns, no product. Nothing but talk can happen on Mykonos.”
“But Pinchot is there,” Stephen says, and I nod. “Is he recruiting?”
I shake my head, shrugging. “We don’t know. Regardless, going to Mykonos armed is not something we can just do lightly. We risk breaking treaties that have existed among the criminal groups for over a generation. The last time someone did that, the gang war that broke out was huge, but thankfully overshadowed by other events.”
“What events?” Stephen asks, and I chuckle.
“Try the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, then the shit storm that was the early nineties in the Mideast and Africa. A lot of the violence that was blamed on that was actually gang wars. It raged for five years, and over ten thousand people died across four continents.”
Stephen stops, considering. “I see. So you’re saying that we could cause more harm than good by going i
n there.”
“There’s a chance. But the call is yours, Stephen. It’s your mission.”
He nods, then wipes at his face. “The CIA rule book would tell me to not go. That it’d be better to go after this guy somewhere else, some other time when the collateral damage is less, when there’s less of a chance of getting a couple thousand people killed and our covers blown. I assume there’s a chance of that?”
“Big chance. We get caught, almost a one hundred percent chance for you, and if you get outed, I’ll probably get outed too,” I tell him, biting my lip nervously. “The Deep Cover playbook says the same thing. Let him go… for now.”
Stephen wipes his hand on his shorts and grabs the bars again. “The playbook says one thing. My gut’s telling me something else.”
He pushes himself up, and I wait with bated breath as he starts doing dips again. I don’t know why, I should be telling him what to do. I should be telling him that there are ten other choices we can make… but I don’t. Instead I watch him do dips, his chest and triceps flexing and his back muscles bunching in hypnotic, erotic ways that has warmth starting to spread between my legs. Finally he stops, holding himself at the top as he looks over. “So when do we go to Mykonos?”
I don’t know why, but I smile, standing up. “I can get my jet prepared within two hours. Do you have a pilot’s license?”
Stephen shakes his head. “No, do you?”
I give him a wink, getting to my feet. “What MI6 agent doesn’t? Pack light, Mykonos is purely resort, no suits required.”
I go to the door to head upstairs when Stephen calls out my name. “Larissa? Thanks. For sticking your neck out some more for me on this.”
I give him a nod and head back upstairs, wondering. Why am I sticking my neck out so much for this CIA agent?
Stephen
If I thought that Kalamata was idyllic, Mykonos is a paradise as Larissa and I get off of the plane, the sun shining brightly but not too hotly as a northern breeze stirs the hair on my brow. “Wow, I can see why people would want to vacation here.”
