Fighting Back (Harrow #2)

by Scarlett Finn

  When Trudi tried to kick again, Dax’s powerful leg swept around, taking the hooker’s feet from under her and sending her to her knees. Dax went down with her to maintain his grip on Trudi’s arms; one of his shins clamped Trudi’s calves to the floor. There was nowhere for Trudi to go, no way for her to fight for herself.

  The women could have finished their fight, and Ivy was confident that she would’ve come out on top. But Dax had intervened either because he hadn’t wanted to see his wife get hurt, or because watching such a pathetic excuse for a fight irked him.

  While still holding Trudi, he looked up at Ivy, wearing his cool, aloof expression. One of the rules of Dax’s fighting circuit was that he couldn’t hit a man while he was down. Ivy understood that it was not sportsman-like. So as much as she might like to knock a few more lumps out of Trudi for betraying her, she got down to business.

  ‘Do you know Darryl?’ she asked Trudi.

  ‘What? Darryl? No, who is he?’ Trudi asked, giving up her squirming.

  ‘You only dealt with Carlos?’ Ivy asked. ‘Did Carlos ever mention anyone else?’

  ‘No, I didn’t ask questions. You don’t question Carlos, you follow his orders, and that’s it. Girls who question him don’t last very long.’

  ‘So how did you get away? You’re not working for him anymore,’ Ivy said.

  ‘He sold me off to his cousin when they started this venture. Carlos still gets a cut because he ponied up a heap of cash to get it moving.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ivy said, bending to get into Trudi’s face. ‘Money he got for setting me up.’

  ‘Seemed to work out pretty well for you from where I’m standing.’

  Except it could have so easily gone the other way. Making eye contact with Dax, she was reminded of how lucky she was to have him. If it hadn’t been for his love, then she would be living in the Stark mansion right now, married to Trystan and living her version of hell.

  ‘You’re useless to me,’ Ivy said, backing off. ‘This is quite the life you have for yourself, Trud. Did you ever think about having a bit of self-respect?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, ‘cause it’s just so easy,’ Trudi said. ‘You always thought that you were better than the other girls on our block. Always saying you wouldn’t make a living on your back.’

  ‘Like you said, it worked out for me, didn’t it?’

  Trudi’s eyes slid in their sockets in Dax’s direction. ‘Looks to me like that’s exactly what you’re doing. How many times did you open your legs for him before he gave you access to his bank accounts?’

  Dax’s grip shifted so that one of his arms came around Trudi’s throat, he yanked her head back to whisper in her ear. ‘Ivy’s my jackpot, a cheap ‘ho like you doesn’t measure up.’

  Funny that Ivy had once thought about Dax being her jackpot, and now he was making the same comparison about her. She went to the door and unlocked it, then opened it an inch.

  ‘You can get out of here now. If your little buddy downstairs wants to discuss any issues, Dax will be happy to talk to him in private.’

  Ivy opened the door fully, and Dax stood up to lug Trudi across the room, then he threw her out into the hall. Trudi rubbed her throat and carried on down the corridor without looking back. She didn’t run, but her quickstep wasn’t far from a jog.

  Slamming the door, Ivy exhaled, Trudi didn’t have the information that she wanted, which meant that she would have to approach Carlos, and doing that was her nightmare come to life.

  ‘I make ten grand in the ring on a poor night,’ Dax said. ‘You’ve got me beating on women in hotel rooms.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ivy said, going to sit on the bed. Doubling over, she retrieved her purse from the bedside unit. ‘You could’ve stayed in the bathroom, you didn’t have to come out and—‘

  ‘The couple who threatens together, stays together, I guess,’ he said.

  Pulling a black diary from her purse, she began to flick through the pages. Dax came over, grabbed the book, tossed it onto the bed, then he hauled her onto her feet.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  Planning her next step would have to wait. ‘I just… I was going to take care of all of this myself. I meant to take off for a couple of days and be back before you noticed that I was gone.’

  ‘I noticed,’ he said. ‘And I came here to take you back.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Please, we still have time before Mauri’s party. If you want to go back and work with Serg, I understand, but… I have to do this. I don’t know if I’ll get the time to do it again.’

  ‘Like fuck I’ll leave you here alone, you’ve got exes sniffing around and gangsters waiting in the lobby.’

  ‘I don’t think Trudi really had a minder here. She just said that to scare us.’

  ‘You think?’ he said. ‘You were planning to face that girl alone, and she could have come armed.’

  Storming across the room, he pulled her luggage out of the closet and opened drawers to stuff her clothes into it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ivy beseeched, running over to try and wrench the bag from him.

  ‘You’re not staying here alone,’ Dax said. Unmoved by her actions, he carried on around the room throwing in the rest of her things before he went into the bathroom.

  ‘You can’t just issue a command and expect me to follow it! I am not going back to California, not yet.’ Being with a man whose boiling point was as low as Dax’s led to dynamite sex and regular outbursts. ‘This is not about us! I am not leaving you. You can go back to LA, and I’ll follow when I’m done in Vegas. I will always come to you!’

  ‘What did I say about division?’ Dax asked. Coming out of the bathroom, he zipped up the bag and tossed it onto the bed. ‘We should not be divided, not now, with everything that’s going on.’

  Traversing the room, he hovered in front of her. His superior bulk blocked out the light from the window, he’d managed to manoeuvre her around so that her back was to the bed.

  ‘I have something that I need to take care of,’ she said, fingering the hem of his tee-shirt. ‘It should only take two days, three tops.’

  ‘You think I’m going to leave you alone here for three days? I don’t think so, Minx. What do you need to take care of?’

  The trouble with asking for complete honesty was that you had to give it back. So with a deep breath she prepared to tell the truth. ‘It’s something I can only do here.’

  ‘Tell me what you need so badly. What’s here?’

  ‘My life before Dax Harrow,’ she said. ‘I left everything here and I have some… ends I need to tie up.’

  ‘I’d wager it’s nothing too important because you didn’t come back here after you left my apartment and went on your seven-week adventure without me.’

  ‘Because I knew that Vegas would be the first place that the Starks would look for me. It’s no big deal, I… we have time, don’t we? Mauri doesn’t need us at the mansion until the party. I’ll be back in time for that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling her hand away from his abs. ‘You will be.’

  He went to the bed and snatched up her black diary, but instead of reading it, he stuffed it into her purse. Gathering up both her purse and the sports bag he’d filled with her possessions, he came back over to her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, seizing her wrist he began to pull her toward the door, but she dropped her weight down, trying to pull herself out of his grip.

  ‘Please, Dax, no, I don’t want to leave. We can’t leave Nevada until—‘

  He stopped yanking and turned, but he didn’t release her. ‘I have a room upstairs, a better one,’ he said, glancing around at her budget room. ‘Trudi and your buddy Saul know where we are now. I’m not getting naked with you until we’re sure no one is going to show up and start causing shit.’

  ‘Are you worried about fighting?’ He raised an eyebrow, so she smiled. ‘I can do this alone.
You can go back to the Starks. I didn’t want you involved in any of this. It’s not your mess.’

  ‘If there’s a mess, I’m going to fix it,’ he said. ‘You can fill me in upstairs.’

  Letting him take her up to the room that he’d reserved would give her time to think about how to approach telling Dax her story. He loved her and would accept any skeletons that she might have in her closet, except Ivy hadn’t done any terrible thing that could shock him. Showing him weakness was what she feared.

  Having him think that she was weak or sentimental embarrassed her. She could stand up to any bully and had enough integrity to fill a football stadium. But showing her husband a softer, some would say weaker, side of herself had the potential to bring her out in hives.

  Chapter Eight

  When they were settled in Dax’s suite, she washed her face and changed her clothes, then Dax took her hand and led her to the sumptuous couch in the living room.

  ‘You’re going to give me the scoop, after that we’ll eat, then we’ll fuck.’

  She had once accused Dax of not being much of a planner. Tonight he proved otherwise, he knew just what he wanted and when. ‘We didn’t have a room this big for our wedding night,’ she said, in an effort to delay her confession.

  ‘We took what they had available,’ he said. ‘All we needed was a bed, and I provided that, didn’t I?’

  ‘You always provide,’ she said, linking her fingers on her lap. ‘You’ve got money and influence enough to look after yourself and me too. I don’t have that. I’m not… I mean, I don’t have a skill that I can use to support myself like you do.’

  ‘You’ve got mad skills, babygirl,’ he said with enough teasing in his tone to make her smile since she’d said something similar to him once. He took her hand out of her lap and into his. ‘If you don’t start talking, I’m going to assume the worst, and you know that doesn’t end well for any of us.’

  ‘My job at the GoldSpring is about as good as my life got,’ she said. ‘And the live-in job at that Vegas house that I was setup for, so the Starks could lure me…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Trudi, my ex-roommate, the hooker downstairs, she was the one who recommended the job to me. Her pimp took a payoff to get the information to me and I walked right into it.’

  ‘Carlos?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, sagging back into the couch.

  ‘You were supposed to believe it,’ Dax said. ‘It has to be made to look good, believable, so that the victim will walk in and accept the setup without suspecting anything’s off.’

  ‘How many people did you set up?’

  ‘Whoever Mauri told me to,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I’ve taken part in gigs like that before. I won’t lie to you about my past.’

  ‘I had to come back to Vegas,’ she said. ‘Everything I own is here. I need to… it’s time to consolidate my old life with my new one.’

  ‘No better way to do that than to keep the new life at your side.’ He took her hand to his mouth and kissed it, but when he tried to let her go, she captured his forearm.

  ‘You can stay with me, here, in this room,’ she said. ‘But I need time alone to take care of… some things.’

  ‘Why? What are you so desperate to keep me away from?’

  With half a shrug, she admitted the truth. ‘My ex-boyfriend.’

  Dax tensed and twisted their joined hands to bring her body flush into his. ‘That loser I met downstairs? You’ll stay at my side. Why the fuck would you need to go near some loser that you used to bang? I’m here. I’ll take care of—‘

  ‘I’m not going there for sex. Saul and I didn’t have that kind of relationship anyway.’

  ‘You didn’t fuck him?’

  ‘I did. I meant it wasn’t just sex. He did care about me,’ she said, avoiding eye contact.

  Saul had seemed like a good guy when they started going out and for a time he was besotted with her. But he always wanted to share in the next big thing and Ivy wasn’t interested in being a part of any scene. So their relationship was doomed to never work out, they wanted different things.

  ‘Is that meant to make me feel good? You were in love with the guy?’

  ‘Not like I’m in love with you,’ she said. ‘If you want to meet him again, you can. What you can’t do is invite him into the ring with you. You have to be nice to him, no threatening and intimidating him, he did me a favour when he didn’t have to.’

  ‘What favour?’

  ‘Nothing naked,’ she said, stroking the hairs on his arm. ‘I needed someone who could mobilise and disarm people, there’s no one better at that than Saul. He knows tonnes of people, and he’s so friendly, he can… he just knows how to work people I guess.’

  ‘So? Why did you need him to do that?’

  ‘The night I left here, our wedding night—‘

  ‘You went to your fucking ex-boyfriend on our wedding night?’ he shouted and shot to his feet.

  ‘No! No, I called him. I went to my old place, Trudi was working, I knew she would be, I packed up the rest of my stuff there and then went… to the house where I had the live-in job. But, there were new owners, the previous tenant was gone, and they didn’t know where he was.

  ‘So I was stuck there without cab money and no phone. I went to a friend’s place that was within walking distance and used her phone to call Saul, and we made an arrangement.’

  ‘An arrangement?’

  ‘He agreed to store my things for me, the stuff I’d picked up from Trudi’s. I hadn’t taken all of my possessions to the live-in job yet, I only took one bag. I didn’t know if it would work out, and I’d paid rent to Trudi for the month. I wanted to make sure that she was looked after. Funny, isn’t it? I was worried about her because I thought I’d landed on my feet with my new job. I was going to pick up the rest of my stuff from Trudi’s later, then you know, everything happened. So when we were back in Vegas to get married, I took the chance and went over to Trudi’s to pack everything up.’

  ‘Why did you go to the other house?’

  ‘I left something there,’ she said. ‘I wanted to get it back.’

  ‘Something, what?’

  ‘You won’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘You’re angry,’ she said. ‘I can tell when you bark at me like that.’

  ‘You went to an ex when we were together.’

  ‘I didn’t see Saul on our wedding night. I left my bags from Trudi’s at my friend’s place, and he picked them up the next day. I came back here to you.’

  ‘But you didn’t get that one bag? The things you took to your live-in job?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, picking at her cuticle. ‘I was an idiot for going over there. I thought that… that Darryl Kay was a real person. He was probably made up. But I… I’m not ready to give up yet. If Trudi doesn’t know him, then there’s a chance that Carlos will. He’ll be able to tell me who his contact was.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ Dax said, dashing her hopes. ‘We don’t leave contact details and transactions like that happen in the shadows, chances are Carlos never saw a face.’

  ‘How can you—‘

  ‘Because I’ve been that guy, the guy offering a payoff to someone for carrying out a simple task. You said Trudi gave you the info?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Someone went to Carlos with an envelope full of money and the details. He was told to give the information to Trudi and to make her pass it on to you. Carlos got his money and a piece of paper to be delivered to you, that’s it. He probably never saw the person before or since.’

  ‘Probably,’ she said, bouncing to her feet. ‘I have to take the chance. He might know. Trudi said she got the job details from a client. Maybe the person offering Carlos the payoff was a client, maybe he knew—‘

  ‘No,’ Dax said. ‘Being discreet is part of the job. Even if they were our guys, they wouldn’t have approached a hooker they used or her pimp. They might make a recommendation on how
to get to you, but someone else would make the drop.’

  ‘Great, way to break the news gently, Dax.’

  Seating herself on the couch again, she tried to think of other ways to get to Darryl Kay. But Trudi had been her ace, Ivy didn’t have any other link to that job.

  ‘Did you think about coming to me?’ Dax asked.

  ‘You?’ she asked. ‘You weren’t there. I would have remembered it if you were.’

  ‘Mauri kept me out of it because you and me interacted. But I have contacts of my own, I can find out how it went down.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he shrugged. ‘Pinning down the exact guy who made contact with Carlos will be tough, we’re trained not to talk. But if he wasn’t a top guy, he might be sloppy. If he’s mouthed off to someone about working for Mauri, then I can find that out… though the chances are if Mauri’s heard that the guy has opened his mouth, then the guy won’t be around anymore, if you get me.’

  ‘I don’t need to speak to that guy,’ she said, springing to her feet and rushing over to her husband. ‘I need to find out what happened to my things.’

  ‘The bag you never retrieved?’

  She nodded. ‘Everything that’s important to me is in it.’

  ‘Would Mauri have gotten rid of it?’

  ‘Probably, if you were any other mark,’ he said. ‘But your role was supposed to be at Trystan’s side, they might have sent your things to the California mansion.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘Damn? I thought that would make you happy, why does that disappoint you?’

  ‘Because if Trystan has my possessions then I’ll have to ask him for access to them. He’s never going to be nice and just hand them over. You know how he likes to play with people. He’ll want to question me or make me beg.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Dax said, taking her hands to bring them to his shoulders. ‘If there’s anything that belongs to you in Trystan’s suite, I can get it.’

  ‘How?’ She wouldn’t ask Dax to beg for her, and she didn’t want either of them owing Trystan any favours; he was a sick, twisted man, who could not be trusted.