Chasing Sergei: Dark Romance

by Aubrey Collins

  Dante bit down on his bottom lip and looked away. She began sobbing and wrapped her arms around him. He squeezed her tightly and rested his head on her shoulder.

  Chapter 19

  Before leaving the hotel room, Dante assured Taylor that he would be right back. He wasn’t going to do anything stupid. He wouldn’t be going more than a few blocks away. He left his gun with her. He gave her a quick lesson. He showed her how to hold it. How to release the safety. And how to fire.

  One day soon, once they got out of the damn city, he looked forward to taking her shooting out in the country. He yearned for the open the roads, the mountains, the wilderness. There was no way in hell that he wanted to go back to Sacramento. Returning to the life of the Brotherhood, the partying, drinking, drugging, sleeping around, abusing women and then getting rid of them once they had been completely used up, no longer seemed possible to him.

  He realized that without the Brotherhood, he might have ended up in even more dire straits. Instead of trying to figure out how to escape the guillotine that seemed to be swinging above their heads, he might have been rotting away in prison cell, trying to find meaning as part of some degenerate prison gang. Or he might have been dead.

  Those were things to be thankful. Dante knew that. But he couldn’t help feeling that the price had been too high. He couldn’t help feeling that he would have turned out differently if he had a more stable structure around him. He hated when his mind began to wander in the direction. There was no telling where he would end up.

  When he stepped out of the hotel and back onto the street, Dante looked up to the Heavens. The sun shined brightly. The sky sparkled blue. He would have much preferred for a violent thunderstorm to begin raging. That sort of weather would have matched his spirit. Looking at that bright sun and beautiful sky made him feel as if the universe, fate, God, whatever it was, was taunting him.

  It had been a long time since he had been inside a church. When he was sixteen, he had a large crucifix tattooed on his shoulder. But that was just because he’d seen other people doing it. At large gatherings, the Brotherhood’s chaplain would always say a prayer. And while the long haired bespectacled man spoke, no one dared interrupt him let alone make any sort of joke, as the guys so loved to do.

  Outside of those ritual group prayers, there was no mention of religion. That was fine with him. Being in the Brotherhood kept life very simple for him. He didn’t have to do a whole lot of thinking. As long as he carried out the deliveries and didn’t around too much with anyone else’s women life would be one long pleasure ride for him. At times he had allowed himself to think that he had outwitted the world. He had been a screw up from a broken home who just happened to stumble his way into exactly the sort of life that he wanted.

  Chapter 20

  Gus wasn't dead. Not quite. He was just hanging on. He’d taken two shots. Close range. Shoulder and thigh. Apparently, they weren't trying to kill him. They’d thrown him into the back of a dark van and strapped him to a gurney. There was a surgeon inside the vehicle. He had stopped the bleeding and given Gus enough pain meds to at least momentarily quell the desperate, unrelenting agony.

  He had been on that gurney for hours. The dark van finally came to a stop. His eyes were covered with a blindfold. The doors opened and he was pushed out.

  When they took the blindfold off, he was an office room with bare walls and raggedy couch, which they threw him onto. For the last two hours as he struggled to keep his eyes open, he had listened to the excruciating screams of Big Momma and Baby Girl. He had never heard either of them scream like that. The sound made him sick. He’d already puked twice. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  He would have preferred to be dead. One day he would see these bastards in hell.

  We’ll let you go, one of them had said. We just need you to give us the passcode to your laptop and external hard drive.

  If he gave up that information, he would be signing the death certificate of all of the Brotherhood’s members—hundreds of people and everyone connected to them. There was no way that he could do that. He would endure whatever torture, whatever humiliation. But he wasn’t sure that he would be able to listen to the piercing screams of Big Momma and Baby Girl. He had always prided himself on being their protector. He had always been willing to put his life on the line for them. He wouldn’t betray them. Nor would he betray the Brotherhood, which was the only family he’d ever known so many of the members.

  “AWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!”

  Gus writhed in pain. He fell off the couch and onto the concrete floor. He was panting and crying. He had never felt more helpless in all his life. He had never felt more humiliated or pathetic. This was it. This was how it was going to end…bleeding death while listening to the two women he loved crying out in agony as they were tortured.

  Goddamn! Life could be so cruel. For so long he had worried about getting this or that disease, dying a slow, painful, lonely death.

  He heard a key turning in the lock. His eyes opened wide. The door opened.

  Chapter 21

  Dante felt a new energy spreading throughout his body, flooding through his soul. For so long he had acted out the role of the warrior. He spent most of his time with other men. And he couldn’t imagine his life being any other way. Women were just playthings. Women were there to help take the edge off. To help you bust a nut, release some steam. Or maybe you wanted to drink with them a little, smoke some dope. That’s all they were good for. They weren’t to be taken seriously.

  The time he had spent with Taylor, and the way in which she stared at him and listened while he spoke of his troubled childhood, had really moved him. No woman had ever stared at him like that before. She didn’t just want his hot body or his big cock. She seemed to be genuinely interested in something much deeper and profound.

  She made him experience the caring energy of the Lover. Suddenly he felt more connected to everything around. As he walked around the vibrant and colorful Bronx neighborhood, he couldn't help feeling compassion for the working class folk there, who were forced to toil at the bottom of the economic ladder. These people might have spoken a different language or spoken English with a very different accent. They might have had a different skin tone but he felt like he had a lot in common with them.

  When you grow up in a trailer park, no matter the color of your skin or eyes, society told you that you weren’t shit. The people in your family weren't shit people. You were dirt. Or even less than dirt. At least things could grow and be produced in dirt. You were worth nothing. Forgotten people. Invisible people. Everyone around you constantly reminded you, and the society at large as well, that you had no chance of making it out. Drugs, alcohol, abuse, poverty, prison. That was the cycle. It was passed from one generation to the next.

  Dante was a bit surprised by the turn that his thoughts had taken. He never really liked to think about his connections with other people, especially with people that didn't come from his world. Anyone who wasn't part of the brotherhood, was an outsider, an enemy. They weren’t to be taken seriously unless they were the law, and in that case, they were to be treated with both caution and contempt. That’s what he had been taught. That’s what he believed.

  But suddenly, he could feel his soul opening up into the world.Was he maturing? He hoped so. Was he finally becoming a man, who would eventually be fit to become a father? He hoped so. He stopped walking. Brown skinned kids played with an open hydrant, splashing themselves. Old women sat on steps, speaking a strange tongue. Teenage boys congregated on the corners. A father bounced his daughter up and down in his arms. A woman came up from behind him and kissed his neck.

  Dante bit his lip. Fatherhood? Would he ever be capable of it? Would he ever be mature enough, stable enough, to be able to handle the responsibility of running a family? Or would he end up being a terrible father, like his own dad? He was terrified by the possibility that he might end up being the kind of man that put his family through hell.

  But wa
sn’t that exactly what often happened? Didn’t people who were abused, either emotionally or physically in their childhood, end up repeating those patterns?

  Dante put his hand to his chest. He could feel it tightening. His heart thumped. He state of calm had been ruined. Sweat broke out on his skin. Suddenly the sun’s heat on his flesh bothered him. Suddenly the sounds, that strange language, the splashing and screaming of the children, made his head ache.

  “Fuck,” he said out loud, squeezing his temples. He had to stay calm. He needed to get back to the hotel room. Taylor would start worrying if he didn’t return soon. The last thing he wanted was for her to become even more fearful.

  He heard the sound of a door jangling. A scraggly man came out of a store with a brown bag under his arm. Dante looked up at the awning. LIQOUR. The shop window glass looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Dante shrugged his shoulders. He had vowed to mourn Gus’s while getting silly drunk on a bottle of Jack. After this night he promised himself that he was going to stay away from the booze for a bit. But he needed that bottle of Jack in order to steady his nerves.

  Tomorrow would be the beginning of a new chapter in his life.

  Chelsea. Tomorrow Chelsea Piers 9 PM. Weren’t they going to try and kill him? He wasn’t sure. And of course, he was afraid. But that wasn’t going to stop him from performing one last warrior act for the Brotherhood. It would have broken Gus’s heart to know that Big Momma and Baby Girl were being tortured.

  Chapter 22

  Taylor stood with her arms crossed against her chest and her eyes fixed on the black gun. It looked so powerful. She swallowed hard. What the hell was going on in her life? Being in the Bronx was strange enough, but being in the Bronx, on the run, alone in a hotel room, was unlike anything she could have ever imagined. She found it both thrilling and terrifying.

  She couldn't help wondering what would've happened, if a few days ago, her friend Jenny had met her at the bar as planned, instead of canceling at the last minute.

  If Katie had come to the bar, then Taylor probably wouldn't have had a chance to begin flirting with Dante. She would have only been able to ogle at him from afar, lusting, fantasizing. But that hadn’t happened. Was it fate, or some other strange force in the universe that had brought them together? She couldn’t help wondering.

  And now that they were together, now that they had survived a near death predicament, she didn't want to leave his side. She would go wherever he went. Yet she wasn’t sure how to express that sense of devotion. She didn't want to scare him. She could tell by the way he talked about the Brotherhood that they didn't do a very good job of treating women with dignity and respect. But she didn't want to judge him. His upbringing had been so rough. He hadn't had many choices. But he had made it out. His life wasn’t the cleanest or most honest. And that fact was what had gotten them both into this mess.

  When he told her about his upbringing, she had stared intensely into his eyes. She would have sworn that she could hear a desire to better himself, to get out of the Brotherhood in his voice. He wanted to make more out of his life than his father had.

  She couldn't help wondering, fearing, trembling at the thought that when he did finally escape it would be without her.

  She slowly walked towards the gun. Its power terrified her. That wasn’t going to be good enough. She needed to keep her cool. Clearheaded. That’s what Dante needed from her. Even though it wasn’t in her nature, she vowed that she would fight right alongside him. As she reached towards the black metal, her hand began to tremble. Her chest heaved. As she touched it, she closed her eyes and sighed.

  Her fingers rubbed the cold metal, gently, up and down the shaft. Dante’s image flashed in her mind. A low moan escaped her lips. She picked up the deadly weapon and walked over to the hotel room bed. She placed the gun on top of the covers, then she began slowly stripping out of her clothes, pulling her T-shirt over her head, unbuttoning her jeans and stepping out of them.

  After dimming the lights, she lay back on the bed, wearing nothing but her pink bra and panties. She wrapped her fingers around the shaft of the gun. Light from outside streamed into the room. Her window was directly across from a large tenement building across the street. She didn't care.

  With one hand she squeezed her breasts, while with the other hand, she rubbed the shaft of the gun on the insides of her thighs, brushing it, brushing it up and down slowly, alternating legs.

  She was sweating, breathing deeply. She could feel her pussy beginning to drip. Her hand gripped the shelf. So hard!

  She rubbed the shaft against her wet labia. She moved it back and forth, up and down, and across. Then she pushed the head of the gun inside of her. She pulled it out.

  It was wet with her juices. She slipped two fingers inside of her dripping pussy and rubbed her clit with her thumb. She wanted to feel Dante inside of her! Wanted to feel his strong arms wrapping around her. This might be the last night or at least one of the last nights that they ever spent together. It could also just be a prelude to a life that they would begin building together.

  The proximity to death quickened her pulse. It heightened her senses. However many days they had left, she wanted to spend them with Dante, their limbs intertwined, love juices sloshing back and forth. They would fuck and suck, lick and nibble and scream and cum and howl at the moon like wild animals, wounded hunted animals. The hounds were at their heels. There was no one to help them. All they had was each other.

  She brought the gun up to her mouth. She rubbed it around her lips. Death surrounded her. If it got too close, she could always take things into her own hands. End her life before the hunters had a chance to.

  If she couldn’t live with Dante, then life wouldn’t be worth living. If he was just going to leave her, maybe it would be better for her to end things with the intense memories of the last few days.

  She licked around the head of the gun, tasting her juices. She pushed the black metal in and out of her mouth, swirling her tongue around it, as she pushed it deeper and deeper into her mouth. Sweat covered her skin. She moved her finger towards the trigger, gently massaging it while keeping the gun deep in her mouth…

  Chapter 23

  Dante left the liquor store with a bottle of Jack. On the way back to the hotel room, he realized that he really wasn’t in the mood for drinking. It was a strange feeling, one that he wasn’t used to feeling. If he was around his Brothers, he wouldn’t have thought twice about drinking himself into oblivion. When they all got together that was one of the things that they did best. Drinking a bottle of Jack solo was considered an acceptable way to honor a fallen comrade. Gus would have appreciated the gesture—at least under most circumstances, he would have. But intros instance things were a bit different. Gus might have been dead but the two most important women in his life—Big Momma and Baby Girl—were still alive. From their screams, they probably wouldn’t be alive much longer. Whatever the case Dante suddenly felt guilty about getting drunk when two of the Brotherhood’s women were apparently being tortured. No, this wasn’t the time for drunkenness.

  He looked at the brown bag in his hand. He frowned. He needed to get rid of it. It was time for him to grow up and finally become a man. If he were going to do that, then he had to break with the Brotherhood’s violent, excessive, boyish ways. He would never become a man if he continued to live by their rules. He needed to create his own structure and being a life for himself that would be well beyond anything that the Brotherhood would have offered him.

  And then there was the question of Taylor…There was no way that he wanted her to see him in a drunken rowdy state. He feared how he would act towards her once the liquor really began to flow. He feared what he would say. For so long, he had repressed so many emotions—the hurt and pain of his childhood and now the pain and emptiness left in his life by Gus’s death.

  He had really been looking forward to seeing Gus pull his RV into New York City. He couldn’t wait to introduce him to Taylor. The momen
t Gus saw them together, he would be able to tell Dante whether or not she was a keeper. Dante felt certain that Gus would nod in approval after he spent a little time around her. It would have been the first time that Dante had introduced Gus to a woman that really meant something to him.

  On more than one occasion, he had introduced Gus to one of his hook-ups but those encounters and introductions hadn’t meant anything to him.

  Dante turned down an alley. He pulled the bottle of Jack out of the bag and stared at it. Jack Daniels. It would make the pain go away. It would cauterize the wound. All he had to do was twist off the cap, raised the bottle, lean his head back, and let the liquid roll down his throat.

  “This is for you, Gus.”

  He twisted off the top and began pouring it out.

  “You beautiful bastard.”

  The liquor splashed against the concrete. Tears welled up in Dante’s eyes.

  Chapter 24

  Taylor lay on the bed, her arms and legs spread wide. She could feel the way stickiness under her ass. She never had such an intense orgasm. Playing with Dante’s gun had pushed her over the orgasmic edge. Her skin glowed with satisfaction. The only thing she needed at that moment was to feel Dante's arms wrapped around her. She hungered to feel his muscular, tattooed body on top of her, his hard muscles enveloping her, his stiff, full cock pushing into her deeper and deeper.

  If these days were going to be the last of her life, then she was determined to live them intensely and fearlessly. With every bit of food, every drink, every kiss, every touch, she would feel that near-death intensity, that adrenaline inducing, blood-pumping intensity.