by Hazel Parker
“I know,” he said. “Alright, let’s go.”
He handed me my helmet, which he again buckled himself, before giving me one more kiss. He got on the bike and then let me straddle him. Just before turning on the engine, he paused and turned to me.
“By the way,” he said. “I’ll make sure to hit the potholes, so you enjoy this ride as much the last one.”
I didn’t think I’d ever turned red so hard in my life as he laughed, ignited the engine, and began the journey that once again had me coming from all the vibrations and shaking.
Chapter 11: Richard
Going to our weekly meeting should have felt like a victory.
As far as everything with Natasha went, it sure as hell did. She couldn’t wait another night; she was going to come in after our poker guest left and I was going to take her back to my private room. We both stopped pretending we could hold out any longer; it was a miracle I was able to drop her off at the Red Rock Casino without fucking her already.
With the Sinners, however, it felt like a little bit of a different story. Our attack on them had not prompted any counterattacks yet, but it seemed like a given. Mario had only reported that the police had officially declared the incident the result of gang violence, but he advised that not all of the Sinners had perished. By his best guess, the club had about five dozen members to start with, and we’d managed to off fourteen. That left at least forty, maybe more members we had to worry about.
To pretend that there would be no retaliation was stupid and foolhardy. But I didn’t know what more we could do without taking proper steps.
The weekly meeting felt like a good place to handle it, and as we walked in, I could tell Mama and Barber felt the same way. Pork and Dom, however, seemed giddy and almost too easy to handle.
“Gentlemen,” I said as they took their seats. “Please do tell what the good news is.”
“Well, I don’t know if you noticed since you are busy getting tied down to only one girl,” Dom said. “But Pork porked a real broad last night! We found her videos online!”
“That’s a delight,” I said with an eye roll.
My eye roll was typically made to mock the club for being so ridiculous and so over the top, but today, I noticed that I really was a bit… not disturbed, but I definitely realized that lifestyle wasn’t for me anymore. Either I was seriously head over heels for Natasha like no one else, or I just had slowly matured into the guy who preferred the company of great women over one hot porn star.
“How’s the chlamydia?” Mama asked.
“How’s the chain-smoking?” Dom shot back.
“Better than that ugly ass smirk,” Mama said.
“Please, don’t be jealous cuz you got smoke breath.”
“Oh, kiss my ass.”
“OK, let’s get to business, shall we?” I said with a sigh. “I need to address something that I consider a sort of elephant in the room. Do we have any idea what the Degenerate Sinners are going to do for what we did on Tuesday?”
An awkward silence fell over the room. Even Dom’s usual trademark smirk died down. If he and Pork hadn’t understood the consequences of Tuesday before, they sure did now.
“We have a problem,” I said. “And that is that we don’t have the manpower to continue launching attacks like this. Keeping this group small works, so long as you don’t have someone with more men who wants to destroy you. Unfortunately, we don’t really have that luxury anymore. The Sinners are going to retaliate, that’s not a question. What is a question is when.”
“Are we that certain of it?” Dom said.
“You’ve said a lot of dumb shit, boy, but that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Mama said.
“I’m serious!” Dom interjected, actually looking very somber. “How do we not know that the Sinners thought they could get away with some shit, saw what happened, and decided to go back to dealing with eastside hood rats?”
I shook my head.
“We don’t know that,” I said. “We can’t know that. And it’s for that exact reason that we have to plan as if they are going to do something else. We’re going to have to deal with this as it comes, but I’d rather be more prepared to handle it than not.”
“We could get more guns,” Barber said. “Not sure what good that’s going to do, though. Our issue isn’t guns. It’s hands to fire those guns.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
It was a real fucking pickle, and not a tasty one at that. Sacrifice the group’s integrity and squash an enemy? Or keep the group intact, but risk having the group fall apart?
If the threat was real and death seemed imminent, then the answer was obvious. But to this point, the only casualty was a civilian who had only come to a few Red Door events. None of our men had suffered anything worse than a grazing bullet wound, and most of them looked as fresh as the day they stepped out of the tattoo parlor.
The answer, therefore, wasn’t as easy as it might have seemed to an outsider.
“Is there any way that we could get more help but not bring in more members?” Dom said. “Maybe we can hire out another MC. Act as sort of mercenaries for us.”
“Who?” I said.
Even before I said it, though, everyone knew the answer. The Savage Saints in Green Hills.
But that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to face them. No, no, no. No way.
“That’s what I thought,” I said quickly, cutting off the potential for anyone to interject with an idea. “We have to figure out how to handle this on our own.”
Mama looked like she was about to speak, but for perhaps the fifth time in the entire time that I knew her, she shut her mouth and held her tongue. It was so surprising that I, too, opened my mouth, wanting to encourage her to speak, but I also didn’t say anything. Dom, Pork, and Barber looked between the two of us, rightfully expecting someone to speak, but no one said a word.
“Other than that, let’s just get through our club business so Dom can call in our poker guest.”
We flew through the remaining business with ease. The most notable thing was Mama saying that one of the better girls was threatening to quit if she didn’t get a raise of a grand per month. I told her to allow it so long as she remained tight-lipped on the pay and didn’t ask for anything more for at least a year; otherwise, we’d fire her ass. Mama seemed very pleased with the decision.
“Alright, Dom,” I said as I brought the evening to a close. “Bring the guest over.”
“Will do,” he said, that good old smirk coming back. “I think it’s someone you’ll like. It’s a repeat customer of ours: a fish.”
“Ohhhh,” Pork and Mama said in unison. “Come to give some donations to the club?”
“Exactly.”
I, however, had a bad feeling about it.
It was a bad feeling that was almost prescient because when Dom walked through the door with his guest, I wanted to smack him. But, because of who it was, I just put on a nice smile and extended my hand.
“Igor Sokolov,” I said, my grip firm on his. “So nice of you to come back to us.”
Dom was right; he was a fish. But he was a fish that was a giant pain in my ass, and a fish that had motives we hadn’t figured out yet. I just wish Dom had given this more thought beyond the green that’ll be in his pocket.
Except he lost last time, so he probably wants revenge. Oh, goddamnit, Dom.
“So nice of you to have me back,” he said in his usual impossible-to-decipher tone. “I have brought much money here to entice some action. I hope that you are ready for some Omaha.”
“Of course,” I said with a smile.
I bit my lip as we all sat down. Mama pulled out the deck of cards and the chips, giving everyone the proper amount. As she did this, I decided to check my phone, normally a faux pas in a club meeting and a poker game, but one that I generally allowed in moments like these, where the game had not yet begun but people were getting set up. Wouldn’t you know it, Natasha had beg
un to text me.
And she was not subtle about her words.
“Hey, handsome, I’m going to be in the area, whenever you’re ready… and just like yesterday… I don’t have on any panties.”
I couldn’t lie: the thought to tell her that her father was the poker guest had definitely crossed my mind. If not for the fact that we hadn’t actually slept together yet, I probably would have told her already just for the laughs.
OK, well, that, and I was really pissed at Dom for bringing Igor in. And Igor hadn’t rushed anything the last time he came over; I’d had to kick him out by closing the burlesque club before he left.
“I must say, this is among my favorite places to play poker,” Igor said.
“Oh yeah?” I said with a smile as Mama dealt the first hand, having won the dealer position again to start. “I don’t know; I feel like you can get a better game at the Bellagio. This is great for friends, but—”
“Exactly, my friend,” Igor said dryly. “It is precisely because of the intimate setting that I am so intrigued by the location. I do not have to worry about unruly guests or stakes that bore me; nor do I have to worry about playing professional players who would all but rob me of my last billion dollars. I can instead play a game at a comfortable level to challenge myself while also engaging in some conversation.”
I shrugged and nodded as I glanced at my cards. They were all different suits, and only one of them a face card. I discarded them.
“I can only imagine the kind of people who have sat in this chair I find myself in,” Igor said. “Who, if I may ask, is the most famous person to have sat here?”
“George—”
I cut Dom off.
“Sorry, we keep that confidential,” I said, glaring at Dom.
Was he that desperate to make nice with the Russian billionaire?
“One of the most important aspects of The Red Door is its privacy and the covert nature of the place,” I said. “Even you. You will never be known to have come here, at least from our lips. If you wish to tell your friends, of course, that is up to you, but as long as you don’t post on social media, that’s not something you have to worry about.”
“Oh, heavens,” Igor said, the closest he came to showing emotion. “I have no desire to be on any social media. That is something that my daughter is much more interested in. I do not pretend to understand her generation any more than she pretends to understand mine.”
Speaking of. I took a glance at my phone, this time really violating unwritten club laws, as the other five players remained in the hand. I had to fight the urge to let my eyes go wide when I saw what Natasha had written.
“I’m going to slide these pants off and slide onto you, Richard. I want to feel your thick fat cock inside of me. I can barely contain myself… hurry up with the poker game :-)”
She added a kiss emoji at the end. That was the first time either of us had spoken so explicitly in conversation, and it had me rock hard with the snap of a finger. Oh, fuck, there was no way that I was going to be able to hold back right now.
“And first pot of the night goes to Dom,” Igor observed, snapping me out of my mental fog. “I would say that is my payment to you for letting me return. All other pots shall now go my way.”
“Never,” Dom said with a smile. “I look forward to playing you heads up from here on out.”
For the next hour or so, nothing happened that struck me as unusual or out of the ordinary. The very fact that Igor was here, of course, felt very out of the norm, but eventually, I just accepted it as a sort of final obstacle to me getting to be with Natasha. If I could endure a few hours with her overbearing father, then I would have truly earned sex for the night.
A few drinks in, Igor seemed to take particular interest in me.
“Tell me, Richard, how long have you owned this club for?”
I shrugged.
“Several years now, I think,” I said, trying to be playful and loose without giving away too much.
“How much longer do you think you’re going to own it? Surely a man like you must eventually crave a chance to step away from the madness of it all, no?”
I immediately froze up. I was pretty sure I gulped too. I’d gotten offers before to have The Red Door purchased, but I was certain none of them had come from the father of a woman that I was seeing at the time.
“I’m going to hang on to it for the foreseeable future. No real rush to sell it. I enjoy having it.”
“Interesting for you to say that,” Igor said, nodding slowly. “I would think that a place like this would provide the perfect opportunity for you to sell at an enormous profit. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that this place might be worth tens of millions of dollars.”
“Uh huh,” I said, but inside, my heart skipped about half a dozen beats at that figure.
Most people who wanted to buy the club would either try and low-ball me, thinking that I couldn’t possibly know, as someone who was a biker, or would only offer a couple of million dollars—by no means inconsequential, but not the kind of thing that I could just ride off into the sunset with, especially if my growing desire to have a wife and kids would someday come true.
But tens of millions of dollars? That would set both Mama and I up, and any offspring we had, for life. That could not be ignored.
But that also could be debated, and in the time I had to think about it, I realized how The Red Door just wasn’t something I was going to sell. It was as much a part of me as the Savage Saints; really, the two were indistinguishable for me.
“If you ever do decide to sell it, do please let me know first,” Igor said. “I can assure you, Richard, that I will give you a price that will beat whatever anyone else offers. That is, if you do not negotiate with others.”
“OK, well, fortunately for both of us, that’s not a conversation we have to worry about right now, because it’s not for sale,” I said. “But thank you, Igor.”
“Of course.”
Mama kept shooting me glares that seemed to say, “I told you so.” Pork and Barber were trying to pretend they hadn’t just heard the bombshell numbers. Dom, as usual, had his smirk on, and for once, I was thankful that he always did; it made it fair to say that he wasn’t just expressing his interest in the large number any longer.
The game went on for what felt like far too long. I was getting hornier and hornier by the second, finding myself checking my phone every few minutes—hell, more often than that, whenever I dropped out of a hand—to see what more Natasha had messaged me. My pants were practically ready to rip at the seams, and the only thing standing in my way was a father who seemed intent on buying my business.
But why, though? If Igor had his parties, it wasn’t like he needed The Red Door to host anything. Perhaps there was someone on our guest list that was not on Igor’s list that he really wanted to meet. Perhaps he just liked the idea of controlling the hot spots in Las Vegas. Maybe it was just as simple as he saw it as an easy way to make more money.
I’ll admit, some crazy ideas involving Russian crime and mafias came to mind, but those just seemed grounded more in James Bond movies than anything else. I hadn’t seen anything from Igor to suggest he was a criminal mastermind. Of course, you’re not going to get much out of Russia most likely.
It was midnight, and we were still playing. Igor showed no signs of slowing down; he ordered a double vodka, and I struggled to keep up the appearance of continuing to drink. I was on the verge of faking an emergency so I could run out, meet with Natasha, drive us to some hotel on the Strip, and just get the fucking out of my system. I could barely look straight, and more than once, one of the other officers had to snap me back into focus.
Then, just minutes later, the most amazing thing happened.
“My daughter has reminded me that we have an eight-a.m. call with Russia tomorrow,” Igor announced suddenly, and with such a relaxed demeanor that it was like he had planned for it to be this way all along. “I must get going then.”<
br />
“Aww, already?”
I was about ready to stab Dom in both of his eyes. Granted, he had made a couple of grand tonight, but I’d pay him off my winnings, a few hundred dollars, if it got him to shut up. Only Mama had lost money amongst our group, and even she had only lost about six or seven hundred dollars. Igor had burned through at least six grand.
But money was the least of my concerns right now.
“Yes, I must be going.”
“Alright, well, allow me to make preparations outside,” I said, quickly moving outside.
As soon as I was out of sight of everyone, I texted Natasha, “Your dad’s leaving. Come here in ten. I’ll text you in ten if anything happens.”
I hurried back inside, advised the place was clear, and escorted Igor out myself. Though he was surprised by the gesture, thinking Dom would do it, I advised him that I was trying to take on a more active role as the club president. I had no idea if Igor bought it.
He got inside of his limo, drove off, and I stood watching.
Twelve minutes later, I got the text I’d been waiting for all night.
“I’m here.”
Chapter 12: Natasha
Waiting for Richard felt like karma’s final test for me.
First, I had to wait for a second date to continue the momentum we’d had from our first date. Then, when I thought he was calling me over for a second date of physical intimacy, I had to wait for us to have an actual third date. And now, finally, I had to wait for my father to leave so that I could have that third date.
Wait. Wait. Wait. It felt interesting how I would use that word so often with my father in the context of me finding someone, but now that I had found someone I wanted, I did a terrible job of following it. Left up to my own devices, what was about to happen tonight would have happened after our first date. I supposed that I had a little bit of the Sokolov impatience in me after all.
As soon as Richard gave me the OK, though, I hailed an Uber from a nearby bar and headed straight over. If the Uber had to wait a few minutes, I didn’t mind. The major waiting was done—anything here after was just going to be a few minutes. I hoped.
