“Our girl?” I ask with a grin. “Isn’t that being a little presumptuous?”
“Not at all,” Leon says as he playfully nips the side of my neck. “She’s my goddamn scent match.”
Well, that explains a hell of a lot, and it sure as fuck complicates things even more.
CHAPTER 17
DIMITRI
NUTSHELL - ALICE IN CHAINS
“D, man, I’m telling you, you’re going to want to get in on this.”
I roll my eyes as I take a drink of my beer, ignoring Alexei in favor of reading the article about the warehouse massacre.
I don’t generally give a flying fuck about the news or keeping current with literally anything outside of my orbit, but when my cousin pulled this up on his laptop, I couldn’t help but find it interesting.
About twenty men were murdered in a warehouse roughly one hundred and fifty miles from here and while that’s a pretty big fucking group, it’s the details that have me hooked.
Even to the reporters, it looked like some sort of auction or something was going on, and that’s why it caught my cousin’s attention. The layout is the only reason he agrees with speculation. It was arranged in sort of a ring with two platforms and somewhat medieval contraptions for display purposes, and I guess spectator seating was clear. They found a lot of guns and various torture devices, mainly whips and floggers, some chainsand the like but again, though interesting, none of that is why I’m reading.
Every single one of the men who were found were either torn to shreds by what the reporters are calling abearor they were literally shot, beaten and mangled into human mush.
That’s pretty goddamn fascinating if you ask me.
Especially since there’s talk of the group being somehow connected to the Bratva out here.
Alexei disagrees with that part. He doesn’t think anyone from any branch of any mafia family, Russian or otherwise, would be so stupid as to organize an auction in his territory then have it go to hell in a hand basket.
It was definitely sloppy, I’ll give him that, but I don’t think the divide is as strong out this way as he thinks it is. This is very different from how things are run in New York, there’s a different level of fear out here and it’s not strong enough for a group of idiots like those guys to know where they can and can’t do things.
My cousin has also worked very hard to keep things relatively quiet so he doesn’t draw unwanted attention and I bet those morons might not have even known this isPushkin territory.
I don’t think it was an auction, though.
Not after reading everything I have.
The only men present seemed to belong to the same group of people, whatever organization was slaughtered, and none of them strike me as buyers. Not to mention, anyone who has any idea how sex trafficking and auctions work wouldn’t have set up something in a shitty warehouse like that. Not if they actually want to make any money. Norespectablealpha is going to go somewhere like that shithole expecting to find omegas who meet their standards; branding is a huge part of running the kind of event people want to be a part of. Since what was left of them was found wearing relatively militant clothing, their vehicleswere all at least ten years old, and the layout of the location, the murdered group only supports that line of thinking.
If anything, that was strictly some fucked up torture session that got busted by someone on the opposing team, so to speak.
“Dimitri,” my cousin whines like an idiot and I look up from the screen. “You need to loosen up. Get in on this.”
I sigh, long and loud, as I watch Alexei snort a line of something off of the tits of the naked female laying on his kitchen table while the male underneath it enthusiastically sucks his dick. “No.”
“You need it.”
“I really don’t.”
Alexei grunts as he does another line, his hand shooting out to aggressively grab the female’s throat while the other shoves the male so far down on his boner the dude starts to choke.
I hate this shit.
My cousin is older than me, not by much but he is, and I’ve always looked up to him because of it. Even after he moved out here, he’d tell me about his life and the things he was doing, and I always thought he seemed so in control, so successful and focused. Don’t get me wrong, Alexei is all of those things and more, but we are in our goddamn thirties and watching him do drugs and have meaningless hookups makes me want to punch him.
More because of the drugs than anything else. He’s single, never bonded with anyone and hasn’t ever really seemed like he was interested in the idea, so random flings are to be expected I guess.
Watching them happen is another thing entirely, and you add the cocaine, pills, whatever else he decides to throw in, and how much all of it annoys me, it makes me feel like I’m a hundred and fifty years old while my cousin is still a stupid teenager.
