by Hamel, B. B.
It definitely wasn’t the lavish rooms of the mob compound, but it wasn’t so bad. Utilitarian and sparse, but not dirty.
“Where are you staying?” Natalie asked me as Camille climbed the stairs, saying something about finding her room.
“I can’t stay here,” I said, frowning.
“Why not?”
“Because my father is going to be looking for me. I can’t risk leading him to you guys.”
“Lucas,” she said.
I grabbed her and pulled her close against me.
I wasn’t going to let her down.
I wanted to stay with them. I wanted to sleep with Natalie, to hold her, to make her feel safe. But I also knew that I needed to be able to move around the city, and I couldn’t risk getting followed if someone spotted me.
“I have another place,” I said. “Vince will meet me there.”
“Does he know about us?”
“Not yet. He doesn’t know about this place, either.”
“Okay.”
“We can trust him, though.”
She kissed me. “I believe you.”
Camille came stomping back down the stairs. “How long are we here for?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said. “I don’t really know.”
“Of course not,” Camille said, sitting on the couch.
“But we need a few rules. First off, I need you both to give me your phones.”
“No,” Camille said flat out.
“Camille,” I said slowly, “you can give it to me or I can take it. Your call.”
Natalie handed me her phone. Camille got up and reluctantly placed hers on top of Natalie’s.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get you new phones. Just be careful what you do online. Don’t use your social media accounts. Don’t post anything.”
“Seriously?” Camille complained.
“Mom,” Natalie snapped, “we’re in hiding from the mobsters you pissed off, remember?”
Camille sighed but said nothing.
“You both also need to stay inside. You can’t risk getting spotted.”
“You’re telling me,” Camille said slowly, “that we’re stuck in here without real internet for an amount of time you can’t specify? Maybe forever?”
“Not forever,” I said. “I’ll fix this. But for now, you have to sit tight until it all blows over.”
“No,” Camille said, standing. “No, thanks. I’ll go to the police. I’ll hire bodyguards if I have to.”
“Camille,” Natalie said.
“No. I’m not doing this.”
Natalie rounded on her. “Sit your ass down, you self-centered asshole,” she said. “You’re going to stay here and you’re going to shut your fucking mouth the whole time or I’m going to beg Lucas here to duct tape you to a chair in the basement.”
Camille stared at Natalie. “Don’t speak to your mother that way.”
“You’re not my mother. You’re just a problem,” Natalie said.
Camille’s expression was absolutely delightful.
“As fun as this is,” I said, “I have to get going.”
“Stay a little longer,” Natalie said, pressing herself against me. “Please.”
“Sorry, wife,” I said to her. “Got to go.”
We kissed, long and hard. Neither of us cared when Camille cleared her throat.
Eventually we pulled apart. “Come back soon,” she said.
“First thing in the morning. You two need to rest.”
She nodded. Reluctantly, I pulled away from her and left.
I quickly got into the car and began to drive. I needed to ditch it, so I parked it in a handicap spot out front of a government building and walked away. I caught a bus going south and got off two blocks from the safe house that I shared with Vince.
He was already there when I walked inside.
“Big night,” he said, grinning.
I had my hand on my gun. “We good?”
“Still on your side, boss.”
I relaxed. “I got the girls out.”
“Yeah? I thought they’d be here.”
“Sorry, Vince, but I got them in a spot only I know about.”
“Good,” he said. “Safer that way.”
I sat down in a chair. Vince got up and handed me a glass of whisky.
“The fuck were you thinking?” he asked.
“I wasn’t, honestly.”
“Arturo is having a fucking fit. I barely got out of the compound with my head on.”
“Sorry about that. I’ll give you a warning the next time I have to escape with my stepsister and her slutty mom.”
“Okay. Good.”
We drank in silence then for a few minutes. It was close to four in the morning and I was absolutely exhausted. I knew the car would be towed or found soon; I wasn’t sure which, and I didn’t much care.
All I knew was that I had to come up with a plan, and fast.
“They find the kid?” I asked Vince.
“Apparently not,” he said. “Someone must have warned him.”
I laughed, shaking my head. “Camille. She disappeared during our escape. Must have warned him.”
“Crazy bitch.”
“She came tearing across the west lawn like a fucking psycho. I almost didn’t stop.”
We laughed together. I felt like I was beginning to relax, loosen up.
“How dumb can they be?” Vince asked.
“I’m more surprised at the kid. He at least knows my father.”
“Yeah,” Vince said. “He’s lucky Camille is bat shit insane.”
We fell into another silence.
“So,” he asked me finally, “how the fuck do we get out of this one?”
“Not sure yet. Did you contact the other captains?”
“The loyal ones, yeah.”
“And?”
“Same answers. They’ll back your play.”
I nodded. That was the last resort. If I couldn’t reason or bargain with Arturo, I was going to have to go through with my plans for a coup.
And that wasn’t going to be clean. If I tried to take the mob by force, there were going to be bodies in the streets, and lots of them. I didn’t want to kill my own people, but I was willing to do what I had to do to survive this.
Arturo had a choice. He could pardon the girls, maybe in exchange for something useful, or I was going to cut him down at the knees. I was going to take the mob from him and slit his throat if I had to.
My own fucking father. I didn’t want to bring ruin down on him, but I would and I could. He’d been underestimating me for years, and now that may be about to bite him in the ass.
Louisa would back me too; I knew that. She had a lot more power than most people realized.
But this was all hypothetical. I didn’t want any of that to happen. One day I’d take over the mob, but I’d let the old man retire first. I didn’t want to murder my own father to make that happen.
I shot back the rest of my whisky and stood up. “Time to sleep,” I said.
“Night, boss,” Vince replied.
“Thanks for being here,” I said to him. “We’ll fix this shit.”
He grinned. “You know me, always down for a little action.”
I laughed and left, heading upstairs.
Plans were forming, dissolving, reforming, breaking, forming again. I was abuzz with possibility, timing, logistics. Vince was a huge asset, and I was a lucky man that I had a loyal number two like him.
Because I was going to need all the help that I could get in the coming days of violence.
Chapter Thirty-One: Natalie
I stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling, and for a moment I thought I might roll over and find Lucas in bed with me.
Instead, my bed was empty, and so was the room. It was totally sparse, with just one night stand and the bed filling the space.
I slowly got out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom. Camille’s door was still closed,
but that was fine. I wasn’t really interested in any mother-daughter bonding, especially now that I felt like I was finished with her. I’d help her if I could, but I wasn’t letting her drag me down anymore.
I brushed my teeth and rinsed off my face, spending a long moment staring at my face in the mirror. I looked haggard, and for good reason. I had to remind myself that we were on the run from the mob and that scary, violent men wanted us dead.
It wasn’t exactly a reality that I was used to.
“Hello?” I heard a voice call from downstairs.
“Lucas?”
“Hey,” he said, walking up the steps. “Good morning.”
He looked tired, too, but at least he had changed his clothes. I was still wearing the same sweats from the night before.
“I’m really happy to see you,” I said. He made it up the steps and I threw my arms around him, hugging him close.
“Same to you, Nat,” he said. “I can’t stay long, though.”
“Why not?”
“I have to do some stuff. But I came with your phones.”
I nodded and he kissed me softly. I followed him back downstairs and we sat down at the kitchen table, the phones between us.
“Now,” he said, “don’t use this for anything stupid. Don’t access social media or banking or something like that. Don’t message friends.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t give my mom one,” I said, frowning.
He paused. “You’re probably right.” He slipped Camille’s phone into his pocket.
I sighed. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”
“Sorry. I need to get to work. Somebody has to solve this problem.”
“How pissed is your dad?”
“Pretty mad.” He grinned. “But that’s okay. He’s a big teddy bear.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s true.”
“No, it’s not.”
We sat in silence for another minute before he stood up.
“Come back later?” I asked.
“I will as soon as I can.”
He walked around the table and hugged me again, kissing me softly.
“It’s going to be okay, right?” I asked him.
“It’s going to be okay.”
And I believed him. I had no real reason to expect anything good was going to come of our situation, but I didn’t think Lucas would lie to me. I trusted him.
“See you later,” he said as he walked out the door.
I stared for a few minutes before getting up and locking the dead bolt after him.
Life in a safe house was boring.
Camille got up an hour later, sat on the couch, and refused to talk to me. She watched trashy soap operas all day, which worked fine for me. I much preferred not talking to her; at the moment, I wasn’t sure I could remain civil, let alone be nice.
I retreated up to my room with the burner phone and idly looked around news sites. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I needed something to occupy my mind.
And then I remembered the weird notebook.
The night before, when my phone had fallen down between the seats, I had found something jammed in there. At the time I hadn’t thought much of it since everything was moving so fast, but I decided to take a look while I had a free second.
I fished the thing from my bag. It was small, the sort of small notebook that a reporter would carry. It was clearly well-used, though, as the pages were smudged and the cover was old and stained.
I opened it up and began to leaf through. At first I had no clue what I was looking at. Most things were numbers, with some English words and what looked like Russian mixed in. I recognized the Russian because it used that weird script; I think it was called Cyrillic. At any rate, I couldn’t read the vast majority of it, and the numbers just made no sense.
Still, a few words jumped out at me. Toward the back, the word “oil” was followed by some numbers, and the word “meet” was followed by what looked like a time and a date.
That instantly struck me as strange.
I pulled out my phone and turned to a page of Russian script. I took a picture and then did a Google search for a forum for Russian speakers. Once I found one that I could actually read, I made an anonymous post asking for someone to translate the page, or at least to give me an idea of what it said.
The notebook was clearly important. I wasn’t sure who’s it was or what it meant. I wanted to get in contact with Lucas, but I didn’t want to seem like a needy alarmist. I wanted to confirm that the notebook was important before I started to bug him with it.
An hour went by before someone finally made a comment on my post. Apparently, the page was a list of people’s names and addresses. That didn’t tell me much, so I posted another page and asked the same question.
The response came back much faster.
Looks like he was taking notes on a meeting, NaNaKlashnikov said. There’s something about Russians (?) and about a third group of people. This is actually really shady. Where did you find this thing?
I felt chills run down my spine.
That confirmed it for me. I was holding something important, though what exactly it said was beyond me.
I opened up the contacts list and found only one: Lucas. I tapped his name and let it dial.
Maybe this was the break we needed.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Lucas
“Where did you get this?” I asked her.
She looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry if I’m wasting your time.”
“Hey.” I grabbed her chin and tilted it up. “This is important.”
“Remember when I dropped my phone last night getting out of the car?”
“Not really.”
“Well I did, and I found this wedged down between the seats right next to it.”
I shook my head, absolutely amazed.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Not really, no.”
I paged through it, laughing to myself. Most of it was in some damn Russian writing, but there were a few names and numbers that I recognized. There was the amount of olive oil in the stolen shipment, plus the time and date of the exchange. There were also a few other names of guys in the mob, plus at least one Russian name I recognized.
“Remember Franklin?” I asked.
“How could I forget?” she mumbled.
“This is his notebook. I’m sure of it.”
“Okay. Well, how?”
“That was his car we grabbed on the way out.”
“So this is important?”
I grabbed her face and kissed her hard. “Very,” I said when I was done.
She smiled. “Good. I’m glad.”
“I think this is the proof that I need. I think Franklin was a part of a group inside both us and the Russians.”
“And they stole the shipment?”
“At least, yeah.” I laughed, paging through the book. “But there are numbers and dates in here that I vaguely recognize. They could have been stealing from us for a while without anyone noticing.”
“This doesn’t change the fact that Camille cheated on your dad.”
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t. But Camille can tell me where Franklin is. Then maybe I can convince Arturo that you two are worth keeping alive.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“At the very least he’ll be distracted and I’ll be able to get you two out of the city.”
“What happens then?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But no matter what, I won’t leave you.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
I stood up, pocketing the notebook. “Now, let’s go talk to your mother.”
Natalie followed me downstairs. With every new step I took, the plan in my mind slowly began to come together.
Somehow Franklin was at the center of this. I had been right to be suspicious, but he clearly had been careful. We hadn’t followed him to any secret stash of treasure or anything like that. From what Vince and his people c
ould tell, Franklin was a model employee.
That was, until he started fucking Camille.
Truth was, Franklin may have gotten away with everything had he not stuck his dick in Camille. If we had never gotten in that car that night, and Natalie hadn’t found his notebook, we would probably have moved on eventually.
Instead, fucking a married woman was coming back to really bite him in the ass.
We found Camille sitting on the couch, looking miserable. She glanced up at us.
“Came to yell at me some more?” she asked me.
“Not if you decide to be helpful,” I said.
She crossed her arms. “What do you want, Lucas?”
“Where is Franklin?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know.”
“You saw him last night. You warned him.”
“So? He didn’t say where he was going.”
I sighed, sitting down on the coffee table in front of her. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care,” she snapped. “I don’t answer to you.”
“Actually, Camille, you do. See, I’m keeping you safe. If my father’s people found out where you were hiding, they’d probably cut your throat and dump your body in an alley.”
I watched the color drain from her face.
“They would never. Artie would never.”
I laughed. “Artie? My father is a violent businessman. He’d cut your body to pieces without a second thought. You’re nothing to him now.”
She looked away. “You won’t let that happen. You care too much about my daughter.”
I looked over at Natalie. “Would you mind if your mother disappeared?”
“No,” she said. “I’m finished trying to protect you, Camille. You can deal with the consequences yourself from now on.”
She gaped at Natalie. “You wouldn’t let these men kill me?”
“I wouldn’t do anything,” Natalie said. “This is your choice.”
Camille looked back at me. “This is insane.”
