Manual worker, probably not Caucasian, I make a mental note in case I’ll need to identify him in a police station someday. Still optimistic, as you can see.
Half of Beat’s back is tattooed to its last inch, and the other half is completely ink-free. The tats end along his spine, making him look like half a man, half a machine. I watch his hard body flexing as he produces my Swiss knife, flips it open and uses it to rip his black shirt into long pieces.
He works the knife skillfully. Every movement is methodical, deliberate, almost like he is piecing it together into something magnificent, not tearing it apart to become a weapon against me.
Maybe he’s a butcher. Everything about him sounds dangerous.
Killed before.
Just got out of San Dimas Prison.
Got beef with the Aryan Brotherhood.
Just imagining Godfrey’s neck, instead of Beat’s shirt, being ripped into shreds makes my thighs quiver.
“You did this to him?” I point my chin to Beat’s half-tattooed back. Ink snorts smugly.
“Damn right I did.”
Ink is a tattooist. And a stupid one at that, because milking intel from him was as easy as getting a cab driver to tell you their life story.
Beat strides back bare-chested, his hoodie swung over his tattooed shoulder, with strips of black cloth clutched in his palm.
“Hands,” he orders sharply. I raise my hands forward, wrists glued together. He takes one piece of black cloth and binds my hands to one another. It doesn’t hurt, but I won’t be able to break free.
And Mr. Tied-Me-Up-and-Not-to-a-Bed took my Swiss knife.
“Turn around.”
I spin on my heel and he wraps a second black cloth over my eyes. Utterly blind and completely helpless, the realization that I’m in trouble runs deeper. Beat and Ink might not be as dangerous as Godfrey and Seb, but they’re still capable of doing very bad things to me.
“Hop in,” Ink rasps behind me. The truck door swings open by the sound of it, but I stay rooted to the ground.
“I have no idea where I’m going,” I seethe. Beat grunts again. I feel him pick me up—the bulge of his biceps hard and round—and rest my frame on the beer-scented seat. My dress rides up, and I know they can probably see my panties. I try to wiggle it downwards.
“Can you pull my dress down?” I only manage to swallow some of my humiliation, my voice soaked with raw shame. A moment of silence ticks by before I feel the tips of his fingers pulling the hem of my dress toward my knees. A shiver breaks up my spine, crawling its way to my skull. Probably just fear, I tell myself.
“Thank you.”
He shoves me by the shoulder so that I’m lying in the cab and slams the door behind me.
“Don’t lift your head unless you want me to shoot a hole straight into it.” Ink barks, and someone slams the passenger door shut. “Enjoy the ride.”
“I fully intend to,” I bite, my eyes staring at the pitch black cloth with a woodsy, masculine smell. They underestimate me. That’s exactly how I like my rivals.
They think of me as a rich bitch, a frail little toy.
Little do they know that I’m not a toy, I’m a storm.
And I’m going to rip their lives apart.
Beat and Ink spend the ride talking about Godfrey and Seb. I figured they all met in a magical kingdom not too far away called San Dimas State Prison. But I couldn’t care less if they’ve all met through a knitting club. I put the pieces of Godfrey’s operation together as I try to make sense of it all.
After I arranged for Godfrey and Sebastian to get thrown into prison, I became a small-time drug dealer, nibbling into a negligible piece of the NorCal drug cartel cake. I had three streets I worked in Oakland, Richmond and Stockton. Crack heads knew better than to mess with me especially after, early into my gig, I broke someone’s jaw with my Glock when he tried to fondle me. There’s a lot I can tolerate, but sexual harassment is a hard limit.
Cocaine. Weed. Crack. Even super-glue. If you can get high on it—I had it in my pink duffel bag. The suppliers I worked with gave me a fifty percent discount for tipping them off about the whereabouts of all the drugs Godfrey and Seb smuggled past the border before they got caught.
Yup, that’s me.
Small. Blonde. Tailored. Fearless.
Godfrey Archer and Sebastian Goddard knew I was biting at their business on the outside, and I’m not going to lie—part of me sold drugs because I needed the money, but a bigger part did it to taunt them.
I heard that they were already targeting the inmates who were about to get parole, collecting soldiers to help them reclaim their empire. Recently, I changed streets. Dropped most of my clients and always met my regulars on different pavements so I wouldn’t get caught.